Most people have never thought about the commission on a rideshare trip. You open an app, you see a price, you pay it, you get where you’re going. What happens to the money after that isn’t visible from the back seat.
Here’s what happens on the national platforms: somewhere between 25% and 30% of what you paid is taken out of the fare before it ever reaches the person who drove you. It goes to the platform. Rydezi is built differently — we don’t take a cut of the driver’s fare at all.
The observation this started from
Rydezi didn’t start with a business model. It started with noticing two things that didn’t fit together. Drivers weren’t keeping enough of the fare to make the work sustainable. And riders weren’t paying less because of it — fares kept going up while driver earnings didn’t follow. The money was going somewhere, and it wasn’t going to either end of the trip.
You can build a rideshare platform that doesn’t survive by taking a slice of every driver’s pay. It requires being small, being local, and not carrying the overhead of a company operating in hundreds of cities at once. Those are real constraints. They’re also the whole point.
What it means if you’re a driver
You keep 100% of the metered fare. Not 70%, not 90% — the whole fare. Rydezi doesn’t deduct a commission from what you earn. Instead, the platform charges the rider a small, clearly-labeled convenience fee that’s shown up front and never comes out of your pocket. That’s not a sign-up bonus or a promotional rate that expires after your first fifty trips. It’s the standing model.
What it means if you’re a rider
Not much changes in what you pay — and that’s deliberate. Rydezi’s rates are in line with what you already pay for rideshare in Cleveland. We’re not undercutting the market, and we’re not asking you to pay more to support local drivers. What changes is where the money goes: the driver who picked you up keeps the full fare, and the money stays in Cuyahoga County rather than leaving it.
There’s one other difference you’ll notice: the fare you see before you book is the fare you pay. The convenience fee is already included in your upfront quote — no multipliers that kick in because of traffic, no gap between the quote and the receipt.
Why local matters here
Rydezi serves all of Cuyahoga County — Cleveland and the surrounding communities, including Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. That’s the whole service area, on purpose. Covering one county well is a different problem than covering the country. It means we can actually know the airport run, the neighborhoods, the routes that get backed up. It also means when a rider or a driver needs help, they’re reaching people in the same county they’re riding or driving through.
Being honest about where we are
Rydezi is new. Availability depends on how many drivers are online in your area, and at launch that number is smaller than it will be in six months. We’d rather say that than have you open the app expecting a car in three minutes and find nothing. The network grows one driver and one rider at a time. If you’re reading this in Cleveland, you’re early.
Who runs Rydezi
Rydezi is operated by Dasfair LLC, a veteran-owned business based in Northeast Ohio. Rydezi launches in Cuyahoga County soon. If you drive, or you ride, this is the county we are building it for.