An app launching in the US on Wednesday has drawn ire from Uber in the past after helping gig workers answer a key question: Which rides and deliveries make the most financial sense to take?
GigU uses information that independent contractors see on-screen when they are offered a gig to calculate an estimate of how much the worker will earn per mile and at an hourly rate.
The feature, which GigU calls the “cherry picker,” is designed to help drivers and delivery workers accept or reject a job within the seconds-long window that most apps give them, its founders say. The app works with only Android phones for now.
“They tend to accept it all,” Luiz Gustavo Neves, GigU’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview with Business Insider.
Factors like the rising cost of car maintenance mean that gig workers “need to be more alert to which rides are profitable and which ones are not,” he added.
GigU is one of multiple third-party apps that say they give gig workers more information — and potentially help them earn more. Many gig workers saw their earnings on apps like Uber and Instacart fall in 2024 despite spending a similar or greater amount of time on the platforms, a study by data analytics company Gridwise earlier this year found.
In GigU, users can set specific ranges for pay and, for ride-hailing gigs, passenger ratings. Based on those settings, GigU assigns a color to orders or rides as they pop up on screen: Green for a job that would be the most lucrative for the driver, yellow for options with earnings that mostly fall between the ranges that users set, and red for a job that doesn’t meet their goals.
The concern of declining pay was one reason that Neves and Pedro Inada, GigU’s other co-founder, started creating businesses catered to gig workers.
Inada and Neves founded StopClub in Brazil as a pit-stop where gig workers in Brazil could get a bite to eat and have their car cleaned, they said in an interview with BI. When the pandemic started, they launched an app for workers who couldn’t gather in person.
In 2023, they added a forerunner of the cherry picker function that GigU offers. The idea came from one of the app’s users, Inada said.
“He said, look, we really have to select the rides,” Inada said. “Driver pay hasn’t gone up. Inflation is up. Could you guys build something that would help us choose the best offers?”
GigU said it has raised about $5 million in seed funding, part of which will bankroll its US expansion.
GigU says that its app can analyze information from multiple gig-work apps, including Uber, Uber Eats, Lyft, and DoorDash.
However, GigU doesn’t have relationships with those companies, and the cofounders ended up in a legal battle with Uber in 2023 over the similar feature in StopClub’s app in Brazil.
Uber Brazil said that the app violated local copyright and competition laws and illegally obtained and stored confidential data from the Uber app, tech news site Rest of World reported at the time. A court in Brazil decided in favor of GigU and allowed the app to stand.
An Uber spokesperson said that “using automation tools, apps, or bots to manipulate the Uber app or access Uber data in any way isn’t allowed” per its community guidelines and terms of service. Uber is still “engaged on the legal front in Brazil” with GigU and StopClub, the spokesperson added.
DoorDash and Lyft did not respond to requests for comment from BI.
GigU’s founders say that their app merely takes information that the gig worker already sees and presents it in a more analytical context. From there, it’s up to the gig worker to make a choice, they said.
The app doesn’t accept jobs on behalf of the workers or spoof their GPS location, Neves added. Other third-party apps, known among gig workers as “bots,” are capable of those kinds of tasks.
“We had users asking us to do that kind of stuff as well,” Neves said. “We said, no, we’re not going to do that, because that is wrong.”
“We just give them transparency,” he added.
Having that transparency can make a difference for gig workers served a trip or order while in the middle of completing one, said Len Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.
For the gig worker, “it’s system overload,” Sherman told BI in an interview.
“He’s still got a passenger, he’s trying to figure out how to finish the trip, something pings up, it’s a distraction,” he said. “By and large, they’re accepting these trips, which is why Uber can keep the price down.”
Do you have a story to share about gig work? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or 808-854-4501.
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