I love that bit.

But in this case, waiting an hour and a half for a middle man to do what it would have taken me 2 minutes to do wasn't worth the extra $9 they were asking for.

Why'd you rely on a very beta web service being offered to the public for the very first time to do what you could have done in 2 minutes?

I didn't make an order, but I fail to see how you could have been surprised by this. They have no idea how much demand they were going to have at launch, and it's not a service that can scale easily.

I didn't rely on it. I tried it out to see how well it would work.

When I first signed up, they wait-listed me. Then, a few hours later they let me (and apparently everyone else) in. They didn't need to do that, but they did.

Your objection is probably more powerfully expressed as "waiting for a middleman to hire another middleman".

Of course, if you're intimately familiar with all the various services available to you in SF then this is not going to be a useful service. I mean that perfectly straight, not sarcastically; they basically tried to charge you $9 to "know Postmates existed". But there will be a lot of people who may still be willing to pay for not knowing all those various services. I'm personally skeptical but it's at least worth a try.

(I can't speak to the complexity of keeping track of the SF services, since I don't live there, but my impression is that it's challenging.)

I bet a major cause of the traffic surge are just curious people like you that aren't even interested in this service, or jealous people that are intentionally pushing the limits and trying to make them fail. In fact, the fact that you're slandering them with an HN post might suggest you are more the latter. I am not in the market at all for this so I obviously haven't used it, but hopefully for them they can identify and keep their legitimate customers (not you) happy.