An App That Helps Drivers Earn the Most from Their Trips

Yesterday, we were featured in the NYTimes, as “An App That Helps Drivers Earn the Most from Their Trips” and today we’re announce our iPhone app*. Here’s an excerpt from the NYTimes article, printed on A1 of the Sunday Business Section on May 10, 2015. *Update: Our Android app is also available.

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By NATASHA SINGER and MIKE ISAAC MAY 9, 2015

Carlos Silva, a driver for ride-hailing services in the San Francisco area, said, “Since I started using Sherpa, with a tap I can see detailed information on how I am doing, how much I’m making.” Credit: Carlos Chavarra for The New York Times

When Steve Smith began driving for Uber and Lyft several months ago, he concentrated on picking up passengers near his Walnut Creek neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“At first I thought I was earning money,” says Mr. Smith, who also works in the oil industry.

But then he signed up for SherpaShare, a free analytics site that helps ride-hailing drivers calculate their real incomes. He discovered that his net pay was much lower than the $20 an hour he had estimated.

“I was probably making $10 an hour in Walnut Creek, if I took into account my total travel time,” Mr. Smith says.

Lyft and Uber market themselves as frictionless routes to high-paying work. Lyft’s application page entices would-be drivers with the promise “Make up to $35/hr driving with Lyft.” Uber has asserted that the median yearly income for drivers with UberX, the company’s lowest-priced service, is “more than $90,000” in New York and “more than $74,000” in San Francisco.

But those rosy outlooks tend to refer to the higher end of their driver pay scales and elide details like the cost of gas, car payments, insurance, depreciation and self-employment taxes. With SherpaShare, drivers can input their daily incomes, number of fares, working hours, expenses and mileage to obtain not only more concrete information on their net pay, but also insights into the driving patterns that are most profitable for them.

The SherpaShare app, left, tracks income from ride companies. Credit Carlos Chavarra for The New York Times

In Mr. Smith’s case, he understood after examining his SherpaShare charts that Walnut Creek, though convenient, was his least profitable terrain.

“I realized I was spending a lot of time waiting, and I could earn a lot more by going to another area,” he says. “As soon as I was working in Oakland and Berkeley, I was making $20 to $25 an hour — and San Francisco added another $10 an hour.”

Irregular Work

Over the last five years, with the advent of the sharing economy, hundreds of thousands of people have rented out their homes, their cars, their parking spaces or themselves for short-term contract work through virtual marketplaces. The sites and apps act as brokers, taking commissions on the transactions. The companies typically treat the people who find gigs through their platforms as independent contractors who are not entitled to standard employee benefits and may be fired at will. (Some drivers in California are suing Lyft and Uber contending that their drivers should be classified as employees.)

Venture capitalists see big opportunities in the business model. Uber has raised about $6 billion in venture financing and is valued at more than $40 billion; Lyft is valued at $3 billion. Investors see the potential for these kinds of companies to take on sectors like mail and courier services and grocery and meal delivery services now dominated by Amazon and GrubHub.

The novice freelancers attracted to this work often overestimate their potential income, employment researchers say. Contingent workers may also be unprepared for virtual labor marketplaces that frequently change their compensation rates and vary the incentives they use to encourage people to work certain schedules.

“One of the things that I think that workers, young and old, value is having some certainty and control over both hours and earnings,” says Thomas Kochan, a professor of work and employment research and engineering systems at the MIT Sloan School of Management who is teaching an online course this semester on the future of work. “When you take that away,” he says, “you create enormous uncertainty and stress.”

Over the last year, start-ups like Peers, an organization for independent contractors; Even, an app intended to help create a steady income flow from workers’ irregular paychecks; and SherpaShare have sprung up to help people navigate the financial complexities of so-called gig work.

“We realized the biggest challenge was that drivers didn’t understand how much they needed to pay for fuel, car maintenance, depreciation and tax,” Ryder Pearce, a co-founder of SherpaShare, said recently at the company’s San Francisco office.

Although ride-hailing apps compensate drivers for “trip hours,” the distance and time they drive with passengers in their cars, SherpaShare has found that its users typically spend around half their on-call time waiting for the next fare or driving to a fare, uncompensated minutes that substantially lower their net hourly pay.
“So if you earned $20 to $25 an hour, you might actually be making $10,” Mr. Pearce says.

He and his co-founder, Jianming Zhou, met at an event for start-up entrepreneurs in early 2014. They each had experience in travel and transit — Mr. Pearce as an urban planner who had developed bicycle paths and street zones for pedestrians in New York City and Mr. Zhou as a software engineer at location-based start-ups and the founder of a travel-planning site.

SherpaShare’s founders say their service now has more than 10,000 active users including drivers who work for Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, and for food delivery services including Postmates, Fluc and DoorDash. About two-thirds of those users work for more than one service, Mr. Zhou says.

“We want to become a financial layer for those services,” he says. “We are giving the picks and shovels to these drivers who haven’t had any support.”

Read the Rest on the NYTimes.com