I tried Lyft for 45 days in Boston and I found most of their marketing promises of bonuses, referral payouts to be misleading and buried in a mountain of fine prints. Getting 8 to 10 dollars for rides is not worth doing. There is low demand in the service is the suburbs and even in the Boston Downtown area you will find yourself driving in circles and riders canceling last minute.
I did not like driving for Lyft for couple of reasons:
1- They refused to deliver the sign up bonus they promised when I signed up, even though I met all the requirements and their pretext was I did not use a referral code from another driver which was easy for me to do but did not want to reward a random driver who did not referral me to Lyft. There are plenty of people who list their codes online. Lyft failed to make that clear during the sign-up.
2- While I loved the application, Lyft has a low demand in the area and you will be driving for hours fishing for riders, they won't give you an exact location of the demand. Instead, a whole city may go red but you won't know where the riders are until you are within a small distance of them. While the application has the option for tips, your riders won't tip no matter how nice you are to them. So to drive in Boston area and deal with traffic, stop and go and riders not tipping, you will be driving for gas money and nothing else.
This ride-sharing idea will not make you a lot of money if you live in Boston MA, because of the cost of living. It will be nice if Lyft delivered on their bonuses but often this is the case of the horse and the carrot. They lure you in with these bonuses just to find out that they are impossible to get or have a ton of fine prints behind them. I am hanging up the Lyft line, because they are liars and don't deliver what they promise to their partners.