Guy Henderson: Building ride-hailing the slow way
- Guy Henderson
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
The current ride hailing climate feels increasingly uncertain.
Drivers talk about fluctuating pay, changing incentives, and decisions explained only as “algorithm updates”. Passengers experience prices that rise and fall aggressively, often without a clear connection to distance, effort, or time. What should be a straightforward service can instead feel tense and unpredictable.
Much of this has come from the way large platforms, particularly companies like Uber, have evolved.
When growth and optimisation take priority, people quietly stop being people. Passengers become demand curves. Drivers become supply units. Pricing shifts from reflecting work to testing tolerance. It may look efficient on spreadsheets, but on the road it creates frustration, mistrust, and fatigue.
A growing part of the problem can be seen in how some platforms now run day to day. With flexible pricing models such as those used by Bolt, drivers are increasingly placed in competition with one another, effectively racing to the lowest fare. In practice, this means drivers accepting work for as little as £1 a mile, not because it is sustainable, but because the system quietly encourages it.
At the same time, platforms like Uber continue to surge prices for passengers during busy periods, while increasing the commission, or “Service Fee” as it is now described, taken from the driver. The customer pays more. The driver doesn’t necessarily earn more. The platform, unsurprisingly, comes out ahead.
What makes this more concerning is that it is still presented as a service. In reality, it can feel more like something quietly extracting value in the background, taking a little more each time, hoping it goes unnoticed. Passengers pay increasingly high fares. Drivers see commissions and administration fees rise. Trust slowly erodes on both sides.
This behaviour is increasingly typical of large multinational corporations today. As platforms grow, strategic decisions are often made without direct contact with the people affected by them, leaving real world consequences to be absorbed quietly by drivers and passengers.
Every age tells itself the same comforting lie, that progress requires sacrifice, that harm is unfortunate but necessary, that the people bearing the cost are simply standing in the way of something greater. The pyramids taught us to glorify monuments while erasing the labourers who died building them. The Industrial Revolution taught us to burn human lives for efficiency. Early railroads taught us to accept death as collateral damage. The assembly line taught us that, productivity matters more than meaning, and the Luddites taught us how quickly society mocks those who ask whether innovation should serve humanity at all. Each time, the same wrong turn is taken, progress is measured in scale, speed, and output, while dignity is treated as negotiable, each time, history eventually delivers the same verdict, that the harm was not inevitable, the suffering was not required, and the true failure was not technological, but moral.
At idle™, we chose not to build that way, we started with one fundamental core, Ethics.
Contrary to what has become the norm, and what is now widely accepted by those in positions of power, Idle takes nothing from the fare, as it should be. We built the app, so we charge a simple pay as you go daily subscription of £7.
To begin with, however, we are completely free for the driver, offering this as an initial opportunity for the driver to get used to the platform because it flows differently to the other Ride-Hailing apps out there, and we acknowledge this. When we switch on the subscription, we will charge a nominal 30p per day (minimum charge through Stripe), purely to assess and validate all payment systems, before moving the subscription to £3.50 a day. We understand that along the way there will be glitches and so our £7 subscription is a few months away yet, idle, however, will always operate on a 0% commission model.
We use Stripe as our payment gateway, which does carry a small standard
processing fee, as it does for any online transaction. That fee is charged by the payment provider, not by idle, and it does not alter our principle or our model. The driver always earns 100% of the fare.
From the outset we have resisted the familiar startup narrative of rapid expansion and “world domination” before the foundations were ready. We haven’t taken on investors, and we are not going to rush scale. Instead, we are keeping idle deliberately locked down and self-funded, so we can properly understand how the app works, and how the environment around it behaves.
Doing it this way, there are no distractions to pay anyone back. No pressure to grow for growth’s sake. Just a clear focus on getting the product right.
We started by concentrating on one place, Leicester. This was a deliberate
decision, not because it was small or simple, but because it is the second largest city in the Midlands and the largest in the East Midlands. It is also a complex, high demand environment, with real pressure on the system and nowhere to hide if the platform doesn’t work, and at times, it didn’t. The app crashed, often. Those moments became part of the learning, and the reason the platform is stronger today.
Just as importantly however, Leicester has a strong community of engaged,
proactive, and generous drivers who understand that, by supporting idle at this early stage, they are helping shape a model that could benefit not just them, but many drivers, and it is our belief, that if idle can be perfected in this environment, then it can work anywhere in the UK, and our plans are national.
For this to work, it has meant spending time with drivers, understanding how work actually flows through the city, listening to passengers, and identifying where technology genuinely helps, and where it gets in the way. From there we have fixed glitches rather than mask over them, we have rebuilt parts of the platform when they didn’t perform as we thought they should. We made large, sometimes costly changes because they improved reliability, fairness, and trust.
Progress has been slow, but learning has been deep.
While many startups and ideas have come and gone, idle has remained largely under the radar, investing our own time and money into the app itself. Because we are not optimising for investors or headlines, we optimise for trust and performance.
Drivers have spoken openly to us about what doesn’t feel right in the industry. Passengers have described where pricing and behaviour have crossed a line. We listened, and we have shaped idle accordingly:
idle does not use surge pricing to manufacture urgency.
idle does not rely on behavioural incentives to push drivers into chasing the system like a slot machine.
idle does not use pricing logic that treats passengers as moments to be maximised.
Instead, we focus on predictability, transparency, and respect. All values that the taxi and private hire trade have always understood, we believe in this industry being supported by modern technology, rather than overridden and undermined by it.
In an industry that often feels loud, aggressive, and uncertain, durability matters more than speed. Drivers stay when work feels honest, Passengers return when prices feel calm and reasonable. Trust builds slowly, but it lasts.
New technology does not require new values. It works best when it reinforces old ones.
Building the slow way isn’t a weakness. It’s how Idle is building something that actually works for the people, but as with all these things, it takes people to make the difference, Have you taken an idle yet? If not, Why not?
Byline article by Guy Henderson - CVO at idle
