Whim

» see whimapp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The pitch was one sentence long and everybody in transport policy could repeat it: pay a monthly fee, use the city, do not own a car. Whim opened in Helsinki in late 2016 as the first product that actually tried it commercially, with the regional transport authority signed up, so the subscription really did include the tram and the bus rather than just linking out to them.

The tiers at launch were blunt. Sixty euros a month bought unlimited public transport with city bikes and taxis at a fixed price. Two hundred and forty-nine put a different rental car outside your door every weekend. Five hundred covered everything without a cap. A pay-as-you-go option arrived later for people who wanted to try it without signing anything.

Sampo Hietanen had founded MaaS Global in 2015 and the company became the reference implementation for a phrase, Mobility as a Service, that ended up in transport strategy documents across Europe. Toyota and BP Ventures were among the investors, and total funding reached roughly 149 million euros. Whim ran in Helsinki and Turku, then Vienna, Antwerp, Birmingham, Tokyo, and nationwide in Switzerland.

The accounts tell the rest. In 2022 the company turned over 3.8 million euros and lost 9.3 million, on about 10,000 active monthly users in Helsinki. Headcount had been 120 in early 2020 and was 38 by the end of 2022. At the start of March 2024 customers were told the app would stop working, and on 14 March MaaS Global filed for bankruptcy with the District Court of Helsinki.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the subscription actually bought ~

The hard part sat behind the app screen, in the contracts. To sell one fare that covers a municipal bus and a private taxi firm, somebody has to negotiate a wholesale rate with both of them and then carry the difference whenever a customer rides more than they paid for. Whim was buying trips at retail and selling them at a bundle price, which works beautifully for the customer and puts every bad month on the operator's books.

No city I have lived in has ever had this. In Ankara you carry a transit card for the buses and the metro, and you open a separate app when you want a taxi. Nobody here has ever suggested that one monthly charge should cover both. Reading about Whim from this distance, the technology looks ordinary enough, a routing problem sitting on top of a payments problem. The hard-won piece was political: a public transport authority let a startup resell its tickets.

~ the number that never worked ~

Over thirty million trips went through the platform across its life, which sounds like proof of demand and was not enough. Hietanen's own reading afterwards was that the emphasis on a direct consumer subscription had been the mistake. The users who buy an unlimited mobility package are exactly the users who ride the most, so the heaviest customers are the least profitable ones, and growing the subscriber base makes the hole deeper rather than shallower.

Industry people said the same thing in blunter terms once the company was gone. Bundling is a good idea that nobody has yet made pay at consumer prices, and a business model aimed at a state of the world that has not arrived will run out of money before the world does.

~ where the code went ~

The software did not die with the company. In April 2024 umob, a Dutch platform in the same business, bought MaaS Global's technology along with the Whim app out of the bankruptcy and folded it into its own brand, dropping the subscription for pay-per-ride. Hietanen also said the integrations would keep running through partners in Italy and Turkey, on a model that sells to operators instead of to passengers.

So the pieces were reused and the name was not. Whim is the one that gets cited now whenever somebody proposes a city-wide mobility subscription, usually as the reason to be careful.

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