Careem, Uber, or Carpooling? What's Actually Cheaper in Pakistan Now

Uber's exit came first and in stages. Uber scaled back its Pakistan operations starting in 2022, pulling the Uber app from Karachi, Multan, Faisalabad, and Peshawar while continuing under its Careem subsidiary, then ceased the Uber-branded app in Pakistan entirely by 2024, shifting all remaining operations to Careem.

Careem followed just over a year later. In June 2025, Careem announced it would suspend all Pakistan operations on July 18, 2025, ending nearly a decade in the market. Careem's CEO cited "the challenging macroeconomic reality, intensifying competition, and global capital allocation" as the reasons the investment required to keep the service running safely and reliably was no longer justifiable — a combination of high inflation, a startup funding downturn since 2022, and weakened consumer spending on discretionary services like ride-hailing.

Yango (Russian-backed) and inDrive (Latin American) expanded aggressively into Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad with low, flexible pricing that undercut Careem well before its exit — one of the competitive pressures Careem itself cited. Bykea, a Pakistan-focused app for bike and rickshaw trips, has also picked up demand. None of these apps functions quite like Careem or Uber did: inDrive in particular runs on a bidding model, where you propose a fare and a driver accepts, declines, or counters, rather than an algorithm setting one fixed price.

This is the part that doesn't change no matter which brand is currently operating: ride-hailing and carpooling are priced on fundamentally different logic.

A ride-hailing fare covers a driver's full commercial time, vehicle costs, and the platform's margin for a single paid trip. A carpool fare is a proportional share of one trip's actual running cost — fuel, tolls, wear — split among people already travelling that route.

That structural difference is why carpooling has consistently worked out cheaper than commercial ride-hailing per trip, historically true for Careem and Uber, and still true for whatever bidding-model app currently has the lowest advertised rate. The commercial service is optimized to cover a driver working full-time; the cost-share is optimized to cover a trip that's already happening.

At the current national petrol price of Rs 331.95 per litre, a 20 km one-way commute in a car averaging 10 km/litre costs about Rs 664 in fuel. Split three ways on a carpool, that's roughly Rs 220 per rider — a fixed, transparent cost calculated before the trip starts. A bidding-model ride-hailing app on the same route will typically land above that per-rider figure, because the fare has to cover the driver's full commercial trip, not a shared portion of one.

For a one-off trip or an unpredictable route, a ride-hailing app still has a clear advantage: on-demand availability with no need to match a schedule. But for a repeatable daily commute — the same route, similar timing, day after day — carpooling is structurally the cheaper option, and it's the gap PassengerPool is built to close: verified drivers and riders matched on shared routes, with the fare split shown upfront instead of a bid or a metered fare.