> 26 cents per ride That's terrible.

Other non-tech businesses, hell EVERY business that I've ever worked in that used AWS did better per transaction - healthcare, digital advertising, virtual office tooling, gaming. If you can't do better than a credit card processing fee per paid customer interaction across the company on AWS, you might as well be selling retail goods...and depending on age, your company might be soon.

Even if it is terrible, is the business such than a 26 cent overhead on rides is going to make or break it?

Companies like Lyft are doing a lot more than updating a few fields for each ride. They would be processing massive amounts of location data and they are building out models to eventually use for self driving cars.

Thank you, my point exactly. Their infrastructure costs are terrible. Especially considering how easy their data is to shard etc (buyer and seller belong are in the same geo physically).