I used Rapido every day for a month. Here’s what I’d fix.

I started paying closer attention to how I actually use Rapido around three weeks in. Not just booking rides, watching myself make micro-decisions, noticing the moments where I almost switched to Uber, and asking why I didn’t. What I found was a product that has genuinely differentiated economics but has barely told anyone about it.

1. Your biggest differentiator is invisible

Rapido doesn’t take a commission from your fare. Drivers pay a flat subscription fee; your entire ₹52 goes to the captain. This is a genuinely radical model, it’s why fares are lower and driver acceptance rates are higher than competitors.

Almost nobody knows this. I didn’t fully internalize it until I started digging.

When a rider sees “Rapido’s cut: ₹0.00” after every ride, two things happen over time: retention goes up because they now have a concrete, rational reason to stay and referrals go up because they have something worth telling a friend.

2. Surge pricing is being framed all wrong

Last Tuesday I opened Rapido at 6pm. The fare showed ₹89. Twenty minutes earlier it was ₹55. I knew exactly why office hours, everyone leaving at once but it still felt like getting caught in a speed trap. I closed the app and walked to the auto stand.

That’s the problem. Not the price. The feeling.

Surge pricing is economically rational. But nobody experiences economics in the moment they experience emotion. And the emotion Rapido’s current UI creates is “I got unlucky and now I’m being charged for it.” That’s not a great feeling to associate with an app you open every day.

The fix isn’t about discounting. It’s about reframing the choice. Right now the screen says ₹89 and your brain fills in the rest it anchors to the ₹55 you expected and reads the difference as a loss. But what if instead it said: pay ₹34 more and leave in 3 minutes, or wait 19 minutes and pay the base fare. Same information. Completely different feeling. Now you’re in control of a trade-off, not on the receiving end of a penalty.

3. The waiting screen is 3 minutes of wasted brand real estate

Once you book, there’s a 2–5 minute window where the captain is en route. Right now, users stare at a dot moving on a map. They feel every second of the wait. Some open Ola in another tab.

The mechanic that would fix this isn’t a distraction, it’s a variable reward loop, same as what makes Instagram Reels addictive. You don’t know what you’re going to get next, so you keep looking.

4. The app reacts. It should anticipate.

Rapido knows my pickup location. It knows what time I open the app every morning. It knows I’ve booked the same route 23 times. And yet, every single morning it greets me like we’ve never met.

This is what I’d call a contextual intelligence gap — the app has all the ingredients for personalisation, but treats every session as day one.

5. The luggage problem nobody talks about

Most platform cabs in India run CNG kits. The gas cylinder eats the entire boot. You find out at pickup when the driver opens the trunk and there’s no space for your checked luggage. That moment of surprise is a Peak-End Rule failure: a bad shock at the very start poisons the entire ride memory, regardless of how smooth the rest of the journey is.

Ola and Uber show nothing upfront. This is a gap anyone can fill first.

What ties all of this together

None of these are engineering-heavy. They’re all communication and framing problems. Rapido already has the better product in most of the dimensions that matter to its core user. The work is in making that visible, and in respecting the user’s time and intelligence enough to show them how the system actually works.

The companies that win in Indian mobility over the next five years won’t necessarily be the ones with the best algorithms. They’ll be the ones that made the rider feel like the app was built specifically for them.

Rapido is closer to that than it realises.

Product Strategy UX Design Behavioural Economics India Mobility Consumer Behaviour