Waymo's $29.99 monthly subscription lands invite only in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, with a stated goal of twenty cities by year end and no food delivery bundle to soften the price.
Waymo is asking its most frequent riders to pay $29.99 a month for a velvet-rope robotaxi experience, then asking them to be patient while the velvet rope stretches across ten cities and, if the plan holds, twenty by the end of 2026.
The new tier, called Waymo Premier, went live on June 11 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, according to The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins. Membership is invite-only for now, aimed at riders who already use the service often. The price tag is the headline: $29.99 per month buys priority pickups, ten percent cash back on every trip, early robotaxi access when Waymo enters a new city, and up to five free cancellations per month.
The structure is a direct lift from Uber One, and the comparison is the reporter's, not Waymo's. Uber bundles food delivery and ride discounts into a single subscription. Waymo's bundle is smaller and more focused. There is no adjacent revenue stream to soften the price the way a meal delivery side business can for a ride-hail incumbent. What Premier is buying is a better version of an already expensive service, in a footprint that is still narrow by ride-hail standards.
That gap is the story. Waymo currently operates in ten cities. The stated goal is twenty by the end of 2026, a doubling that depends on regulatory clearances, fleet supply, and the kind of operational scaling that has tripped the company up before. Invite-only means there is no public performance data on how many of the frequent-rider cohort actually convert, or whether priority pickup materially shortens wait times. The Verge's reporting describes the perks, not the service-level differences. Readers should treat "priority pickup" as a company-stated perk until wait-time data shows up somewhere.
If the tier holds, it is a leading indicator for how robotaxi companies price when the novelty wears off. If it does not hold, the experiment will still leave a mark, because the question of how to monetize a fleet that is still finding its map is now officially on the table. Watch the next two city launches, any disclosed retention numbers, and whether Uber, Zoox, or any other operator responds with a rival subscription of its own.