image: Lime

Lime has announced the launch of a weekly subscription service for frequent riders of its e-scooters and bikes, first in cities across the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, followed by a roll-out in additional global markets by early January. The new service, dubbed LimePass, offers weekly unlimited scooter unlocks for a flat fee of $5. The idea behind such is to let frequent riders cut down on costs by out-rightly purchasing seven-day unlocks to Lime’s shared scooters and bikes for a flat fee, as opposed to paying separately for several rides that would be taken over a week. For context, unlocks for Lime scooters and bikes costs $1 to its customers, who still have to pay per-minute rates to keep riding.

One might wonder, and reasonably so, that paying Lime separately for unlocks taken over a week would amount to more revenue for the company than paying a flat free of $5 for unlimited unlocks for a weekly period. However there’s quite a catch, being that several persons who pay for the weekly package may end up not taking up to five Lime rides during the period, five being a break-even figure obtained by a simple calculation of $5/$1. Hypothetically, fees from the aforementioned set of customers could offset that from the other set, being the ones that would pay the weekly fee and take more than five rides over a weekly period.

With heavy competition in the micro-mobility sector, LimePass could be a core point-of-interest for attracting and retaining Lime customers. Lime isn’t even the first of its kind to offer bundled packages for its customers. Bird, one of its main competitors, pulled a similar move by offering its scooters for rent for an entire month for a flat fee, beginning April.

Uber, which operates Jump, another Lime competitor, also has a similar package whereby customers pay a monthly fee to ensure discounts and locked-in prices over a monthly period.