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Vol. 01 Tech Jargon № 07
Tech Jargon · Project № 07

Rideshare Comp

A price scanner for rides. Pulls Uber and Waymo quotes at the same moment so you never overpay just because you opened the wrong app first. Lyft coming soon.

The Analogy

The checkout scanner for your ride.

Grocery stores figured this out decades ago. Scan the barcode, see the price, done. No sales pitch, no negotiation, no mystery. Yet every day, millions of people pay ten dollars more for a ride because they defaulted to whichever app happened to be open.

Uber and Waymo know you'll do this. Their prices diverge constantly. One is cheaper on short hops in your city, the other wins on airport runs, and both surge at the worst possible moments. This tool ends the guesswork — one screen, both quotes, side by side. Lyft joins the comparison soon.

The cheapest ride isn't always the same ride. Defaulting costs money.
How It Works

Ask both. Show both.

Input
You enter the trip.
Where you are, where you're going. That's the whole brief.
→
Transform
It queries both services.
Sends parallel price requests to Uber and Waymo at the same instant, so the comparison is fair — same minute, same surge conditions.
→
Output
You see both fares.
A clean side-by-side comparison with fare, tier, and ETA. Tap the cheaper one, book the ride, move on.
Under the Hood

What's actually running.

Front Door Web App Works in any browser. Enter origin and destination, hit go. No install, no signup.
Brain Python Backend Receives your trip request, triggers the parallel calls to the two services, and formats the answer.
Connectors Rideshare APIs Talks directly to Uber and Waymo's price estimate endpoints. Same data the apps use — just both at once.
Home Fly.io Cloud Hosted in the cloud, close to you, so the quote round-trip stays fast enough that the prices don't shift before you book.
Why it's built this way

Speed is the whole product. If the comparison takes ten seconds, the prices will have moved. The architecture is optimized for one thing: get both quotes back and rendered before the user loses patience. Everything else is secondary.

Why It Matters

Small leaks sink ships.

A three-dollar overpayment on a ride you take four times a week is six hundred dollars a year. Compounded across all the small defaults we never audit — the cheaper coffee, the cheaper flight, the cheaper delivery service — the leak gets serious.

This tool closes one of those leaks with a two-second workflow. Small fix, real money, zero friction. The best kind of utility.