Newcomers Are Tinkering With New Models To Replace Uber In Nigeria
The scramble to replace Uber in Nigeria is being fought over who absorbs the cost of a trip, and the new entrants are making bets that Uber itself could not sustain.
Uber ended operations in Nigeria on September 2 after twelve years, leaving behind a market worth about USD 450 M in 2025 and projected by Ken Research to reach USD 982 M by 2032. Bolt and inDrive moved quickly to absorb riders and drivers, but a cluster of newer and local players is now testing structurally different models. Loop, FastDrive, SimpliRide and Shuttlers are shaping up as not merely cheaper versions of Uber but experiments in who pays when the fare does not cover the journey.
The most aggressive of these is Loop, which launched in Port Harcourt and Delta State in October and says drivers keep 100% of their fares, paying the platform through a subscription rather than a per-trip commission. FastDrive, founded by Okechukwu Mathew and launched publicly on October 15, takes a related route. Drivers set their own per-kilometre price within limits, pay no percentage commission, and owe a flat NGN 1 K (about 74 cents) daily fee after their first two rides.
On a strong day, the appeal is straightforward. A driver on a 25% commission who grosses NGN 40 K (~USD 30.00) hands over NGN 10 K (USD 7.43). On FastDrive, the same driver pays less than a dollar, provided the rides arrive. But the risk has not disappeared. Under a commission model, the platform earns less when the driver earns less. Under a subscription or a daily fee, the driver owes the platform whether the day is good or bad. A fuel queue, a police checkpoint, a breakdown, a slow Monday, and the fixed cost is still due. The model that looks most driver-friendly on a busy day can be the least forgiving on a quiet one.
inDrive’s recent move is the clearest admission that pure negotiation has a ceiling. The company built its Nigerian business on letting riders name a fare and drivers accept, reject or counter, charging a service fee of about 10%. It insists the bidding model is intact.
“Our model is the same. We didn’t change overnight. We just introduced the One Click option, which lets you skip bidding if you are in a hurry,” the company says. But One Click removes the negotiation and lets inDrive set the price. Fares on One Click run roughly 40% to 50% higher than the recommended fares on the basic ride category, an observation of the app reflects, though the option may be a way to help drivers earn more without leaving them to riders who bid below acceptable levels.
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Shuttlers is not competing inside that same on-demand frame. The company has run scheduled shared buses in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt since 2016, completing more than 10 million journeys and operating over 430 buses daily. In September, shortly after Uber’s exit, it launched Shuttlers Pod, a door-to-door car service that carries three to four commuters who book in advance and share the vehicle, with a fixed fare and no surge pricing or roadside negotiation.
Pod trips cost roughly 50% less than typical ride-hailing fares, enabled by advance booking and shared occupancy. “Nigeria’s cost of living is rising faster than incomes,” chief executive Damilola Olokesusi said at the launch. “With that reality, the smartest way to move people is through shared mobility”.
The challenge these entrants are trying to surmount is the one that broke Uber. A report by Obi, a California-based price and trip data aggregator, found that Uber paid drivers more than it charged passengers on trips shorter than roughly 20 kilometres, with the gap reaching 23% on journeys between 5km and 9km. Nigerian Uber drivers averaged 130 rides over the first seven months of 2026, against 1,142 for Uber drivers in South Africa, an 8.8-fold gap in per-driver volume. “Low per-driver volume plus a per-ride subsidy is a bad combination: there’s no scale to absorb the loss,” the report said.
Fuel has not helped. Petrol has risen from about NGN 830.00 a litre to roughly NGN 1.4 K, a near-70% increase in the single largest operating cost, while platform commissions on the established apps have stayed between 20% and 35%. Bolt’s Nigeria driver guide lists a 20% commission, and the Amalgamated Union of App-Based Transporters of Nigeria has demanded a 10% cap and a fare review, staging a strike in October that shut down the Bolt and inDrive apps in Lagos.
Bolt, which held the largest share of Nigeria’s market by the time Uber left, recorded a 92% week-on-week increase in Nigerian driver registrations after the exit. inDrive saw app installs surge 96%, according to local reports. But Ayoade Ibrahim, co-founder of the drivers’ union, warned that reduced competition over time could lead to less favourable terms for both riders and drivers, and that the platforms that last will be the ones that can hold a fare high enough for drivers and low enough for riders while still funding support, insurance and compliance.
That is the unresolved question at the centre of Nigeria’s ride-hailing reset. Subscriptions make drivers pay upfront while daily fees make them pay regardless. Meanwhile, One Click quietly concedes that negotiation alone underprices the work and shared scheduled rides avoid the problem by selling a different product. None of these models has yet demonstrated that it can carry the full weight of on-demand mobility at scale in a market where fuel, inflation and currency have already broken one global operator.
