Rideshare companies Lyft This week, it said it would give customers a “crazy” way to bypass a common feature of ride-sharing apps that can deter many drivers: raising prices.

Lyft CEO John David Risher announced a monthly subscription service called “Price Lock” that will limit prices for certain routes at certain times. This effectively allows customers to avoid having to pay excessive prices during peak demand periods, which many riders complain about. The new service is aimed at commuters who drive from home to the office at roughly the same time every day.

“Many of you have probably experienced this before, and I’m sure you didn’t like it at all,” Risher said of the price increases during Lyft’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. “This is probably the most hated feature of rideshare,” he added, noting that “thanks to the tremendous effort of our team, building on the great momentum we’ve seen with drivers, the number of rides impacted by Primetime has dropped dramatically.”

Ridershare’s most hated feature

In other words: trips subject to price increaseshas already fallen. And in the second quarter, surcharges for each ride fell 25% compared to the first quarter. Risher said this led to more passengers actually ordering rides from the company. Encouraged by these so-called conversations, the CEO said, “We’re going to do something a little crazy.”

Price locking gives regular customers more reliable prices, but it doesn’t completely eliminate price spikes. According to Risher, price locking remains “an important way to match supply and demand when demand is increasing rapidly.”

“But with innovations like Price Lock, we can reduce the frequency of this occurrence and hopefully turn what I would wager is rideshare’s least popular and most hated feature into a reason to choose Lyft,” Risher said.

How much will it cost?

He gave the example of a Lyft Customer in Sausalito, California, who complained that she never knew how much her regular commute to San Francisco would cost her.

“And she said she gets up early every morning and looks to see if her commute from Sausalito and San Francisco is $25, $30, $35 or even more. And if it’s $20 to $25, she definitely takes Lyft. If it’s more, sometimes she takes it, sometimes she doesn’t, if it’s too much, she drives, and so on. So people really don’t care,” he said.

He added that the company is still working out the “exact economics” of the Price Lock feature, which requires a subscription fee. He said the fee will “definitely” be less than $5 per month.

The Lyft app currently shows that a rider can save up to $40 with a price lock fee of $2.99 ​​per month.

The company said the service aims not only to save riders money, but also to give them some certainty about how much their rides will cost. Lyft has been testing the feature for about a month, and it’s currently available to all riders.

It also gives Lyft an advantage over its competitors, who have not yet announced ways for their customers to avoid the annoying price spikes.