Comet vs GigU: what’s actually different

Offer filters have gone from a niche hack to something you’ll find argued about in any big driver forum. Business Insider covered the category in July 2025, naming GigU, Maxymo and Mystro, and quoted Sergio Avedian of The Rideshare Guy on why drivers use them: “The cherry-pickers always make more money.”

We built Comet, so read this with that in mind. We’ll try to be fair about where the others are good, and specific about where we made different choices.

What every offer filter does

On Android, an app can ask for permission to read what’s on your screen. Offer filters use it to see the fare, pickup and trip on the offer card the moment it appears, then draw a verdict over the driver app before the timer runs out. GigU shows deny, study or accept. Comet shows green, amber or red.

The differences come from three decisions each app makes: what it counts, what it does when the card is unclear, and whether it acts on its own.

What the grade counts

The simplest filter looks at one number, usually dollars per mile. A driver posting about GigU on Reddit described exactly that kind of setup, with red under $1 a mile and green over $1.25. One number is easy to reason about, but it can miss a lot.

Comet weighs several things at once, using the whole job rather than the trip alone:

Here’s why that matters. Take a Lyft offer for $10.40: a 2.6 mile pickup, then a 5.4 mile trip, 22 minutes in all, with a 4.95 rider.

Over the 8 engaged miles it pays $1.30 a mile, which a per-mile-only filter set like the one above would land in the middle. Over 22 minutes it’s $28.36 an hour, above Comet’s $25 line, with a short pickup and a good rider. Comet grades it Accept, green, with $9.43 left after $0.97 to drive it. A filter that only looked at the trip miles would have seen $1.93 a mile and called it great for the wrong reason.

Neither approach is wrong. They answer different questions. If per mile is the only thing you care about, a one-number filter is honest about that. If your evening is measured in hours, you want the hours counted.

What happens when the card is unclear

This is the difference you feel most, and the one reviews talk about most. Offer cards change layout between apps, markets, ride types and app updates. Sometimes the screen shows a half-drawn card, a promotion, a trip summary or the map with no offer at all. A filter that guesses on those screens shows a confident verdict on the wrong numbers.

Drivers notice. Among the generally positive GigU threads on Reddit, one commenter’s complaint was simply that it misread the screen and got the math wrong. When we read through 76 GigU reviews on Google Play, reliability problems like misreads, missing or late pop-ups and absurd values made up roughly two-thirds of the negative ones.

Comet’s rule is to fail closed. It only treats a screen as an offer when it sees an accept, reserve or match button, a fare above zero, one or two real legs and none of the phrases that appear after a trip ends. If any of that is missing, you get no grade at all instead of a wrong one. Our parser handles a new layout only after we’ve checked it against real offer screenshots and against screens that look like offers but aren’t.

The trade-off is real: on an unfamiliar card, Comet stays quiet where another app might show something. We think a missing grade beats a confident wrong one, because a wrong one teaches you to ignore the app.

Whether it ever taps for you

Some apps in this category can accept or reject offers automatically based on your rules, according to the same Business Insider piece. Comet never does. It reads and grades, and you decide. That’s partly a safety choice, because nothing should be tapping your screen while you drive. It’s also because an automatic decline is only as good as the read behind it, and we just covered how often reads go wrong.

The small things that add up over a shift

A few details matter more after the tenth hour than the first:

• The floating icon. A couple of GigU reviewers asked for a way to hide its always-on bubble. Comet has a setting that removes the bubble while keeping the grade popping up when an offer arrives.
• History. GigU keeps screenshots of offers, which drivers like for checking a trip that paid less than offered. Comet logs every graded offer to its own history too, including the ones you skipped.
• Your costs. Comet’s grades use your own cost per mile, in miles or kilometers and in your currency, so the money left over means something. If you haven’t worked yours out, Uber cost per mile shows how.

The risk nobody likes to mention

Uber and Lyft don’t love any of this. In the same report, Business Insider said Lyft had emailed drivers saying third-party apps like GigU weren’t secure or allowed and that their accounts could be at risk, and that Uber had sued GigU in Brazil.

Comet reads your screen the same way the others do, so that pushback applies to the whole category, us included. We can’t promise how any platform will treat it. What we can say is what Comet does: it reads the card, grades it on your phone, and never taps, accepts or declines anything. Read your driver apps’ terms and decide for yourself.

How to choose

Run any offer filter for a week on the offers you actually get, and keep score. Count the times it showed a grade on something that wasn’t an offer, the times it missed one, and the times its numbers didn’t match the card. The app that gets those right on your phone, in your market, is the right one. If that’s GigU, use GigU.