How Much I Made Charging Scooters For Lime

Lately I’ve put out a few videos and articles about the new electric scooter companies that seem to be popping up all over the US. My videos have mainly focused on Bird, but Lime is another big player in the scooter market that you may have heard of. Both companies offer charging jobs, paying up to $12 for every scooter you recharge at your home.

Youtuber Kon over at RideShare Tips gave Lime a try and recorded a great video about the experience. Check out Kon’s video, then scroll to the video transcript to see all the points he covers.

Charging Lime scooters – $292 in 5 days

Kon here with RideShare Tips. I recently signed up to charge scooters for a company called Lime. Now let’s go straight to the chase, I made $292 in the past five days, and I only worked about 10 hours total. Now real quick for the people that don’t know what Lime Scooters are yet, they’re basically like Uber and Lyft, but for scooter rentals. It’s an app you download, you could find scooters near you, it’s only $1 to start, and 15 cents per minute, at least here in Los Angeles, so they’re pretty fun to ride around, and really convenient for those short trips.

Signing up for Lime

Now, when you first sign up to become a charger for Lime, they’ll send you a pack of four chargers to begin with, if you want any additional chargers you gonna have to order them yourself. I actually just did that, now I have a total of eight chargers. It’s really convenient, because you can bring home more scooters, aka, make more money. And it’s really convenient to have more chargers, because the first two nights that I did this I only had four chargers, so I had to wake up in the middle of the night to go sop out the scooters.

One trick is to charge scooters that are already close to full charge

In the five days that I’ve been doing this so far, I charged a total of 37 scooters, which equals out to $292. And if you break that down, that’s equivalent to $30 an hour, and that’s pretty damn good. So to fully charge one of these scooters it’s gonna take about four hours. If you bring home a scooter that’s like 15%, 10%, it’s gonna take you about four hours to charge it. What I like to do is only pick up the ones that are like 80%, that way you use up less electricity, and they charge up quicker, so you could sop them out and do more scooters.

So 9PM hits here in Los Angeles, and that’s when all the scooters become available for charges for pick up. You can also pick them up during the day if you find them on your app, but really it’s hard to do during the day, because there’s still a lot of scooters out there that are charged, they’re not coming up on your app. So 9PM hits, I go out, I collect scooters, it takes me about 45 minutes to about an hour to get eight.

How much Lime pays for each scooter you charge

I come home, charge them up overnight, and I’ll wake up 6AM, drop them off. They key thing here is you have to drop them off before 7AM, or else you’re not gonna get paid fully. Now here in Los Angeles I get an average of $8 per scooter. They go as low as $7, but really most of them are $8 ones. Some of them are $12, some of them are $15, but those are the really hard ones to find, chances are people took them inside of an apartment building, and they’re locked up. They’re hard to find and pretty much impossible to access.

The more people report on the app that the scooter is missing, the higher the price goes, and the harder it is to find. So I’ll probably stay away from those, I would go for the $8 and $9 ones. Now another competitor Bird pays out an average of $5 per scooter, and I was actually talking to a Lime charger during one of my drop offs in the morning. And he compared Uber to Bird, and Lyft is like the Lime in the scooter world. Lyft is a little more high end, they pay better, and the app works way better than Birds actually.

Charging scooters is a good complement to Uber and Lyft

I drive a Toyota Prius, which is a hatchback, and the backseats fold down, so I can easily comfortably fit eight scooters in the back seat. If I really wanted to I could probably squeeze 10, but like I said, I only have eight chargers, so I’d rather get a few extra hours of sleep. Being an Uber and a Lyft driver myself, and chances are if you’re watching this video you’re probably a driver yourself. We all know how many miles Uber and Lyft can put on our vehicle. And that definitely depreciates the value of your car. But with charging scooters such as Lime and Bird, you put on a lot less miles.

For the five days that I’ve been doing this, I only put on about 25 miles on my car, believe it or not. Imagine how many hours you’re gonna have to drive with Lyft and Uber, and how many mile you’re gonna put on your car to make $292. Now we’d not recommend quitting your full-time job to do this full-time. It’s definitely only good as a side hustle. And you never know with these things. They could lower their fares to $3 to $4 per scooter, and then it’s like, “Is it really gonna be worth it.” Probably not.

Tips for new scooter chargers

So a few tips I have to someone that’s interested in doing this is probably buy a pair of gloves. These scooters can be pretty dirty and filthy, and sometimes they actually even stink. So if you’re doing this in your car, probably put down a few towels or a tarp to put the scooters on top of, and probably buys a pair of those gloves that have those touchscreen things so you could still use your phone while doing it.

Another thing that I would suggest, actually another fellow charger of mine told me this little tip the other day is cover up the lights on the scooters. A lot of the time when you unlock these scooters and put them in your car, the lights will come on, the neon lights and the headlights on them. And they’ll stay on for quite some time, and if you’re driving past the police officer, you could probably get a ticket for something like that. I would recommend putting a towel over the lights so they’re not visible. And for your sake as well, because they’ll be lighting up in your rear view mirror, and they’re kind of distracting.

One of the biggest things I could recommend for you is zoom in on the scooter in the app before you go to pick it up. I noticed that a lot of people like to take these scooters inside to their apartment buildings, so they can easily find them in the morning the next day. And that’s pretty stressful as a driver, if you’re gonna pick up a scooter you get to the destination and you realize you can’t find the scooter anywhere it’s obviously behind the wall right there, it’s annoying. Don’t waste your time, zoom in on the app and make sure it’s on a sidewalk or on a street corner. Just make sure it’s not in the middle of a building. It’s not worth your time.

And those are the ones that are probably gonna pay a little bit better, but I would not recommend knocking on someone’s door and asking if they have a scooter inside.

I signed up for Bird too – I like this job

That’s been my experience with Lime scooters so far. I actually signed up to become a Bird charger as well. I’m waiting for those chargers to come in the mail. I gotta say, “I kind of love it.” It’s great side money, I make easily $60 a night for literally working an hour and a half. It’s great money. If you’re in a busy city and there’s a lot of scooters it might even be worth it to do it on foot. I see a lot of people doing it on foot actually. But it obviously if you have a truck or a van or a car, you’re gonna make more money. Yeah, that’s been my experience with this so far. I love it. I’m gonna keep doing it, and if you guys wanna sign up and try it yourselfs, give it a shot.

That’s it for today’s video guys. If you have any questions, feel free to comment on the video and I’ll try to help you out as much as possible. And that’s it guys, now you can go back to doing whatever it was that you were doing, which is watching YouTube videos. In which case, check out my channel.