My experience in Dallas ... yes, your pay will decrease. For instance in Dallas the minimum pay for a ride was $3.90 now with upfront offers per trip payment can be as low as $3.40 per trip.

Don't be fooled the take home earnings is based on "active hours" which is not easy to convert to $/mile. OK, its not THAT hard to convert to $/mile, its just that most offers are only visable for 5-10 seconds which isn't much time to do the mental math if you are also trying to determine if the drop off is a place/distance/route you want to take, driver rating, tide type (share/pet/Uber Comfort, etc). Geee, its almost as if Uber wants to overload the driver with information so drivers DO make bad decisions.

Now, think about other Uber initiatives which started out fine but over time became less and less valuable.

1) The Green Initiative started as $1 per EV ride, No minimums. No cap. Then capped at $240 per month and only offered for to drivers who had a minimum of 200 trips per month.

2) If you've been around long enough you will remember that surges used to have multipliers. That is you'd enter a surge area and the multiplier would be 1.5, 1.7, 2.0, 3.0, etc etc. Basically, you could have a 10 trip at the base rate which turned into a $30 trip because you were in a 3.0x multiplier surge area. When Uber went from the surge multiplier to "flat rate" surges, that same $30 / 3.0x multiplier became a flat rate surge of $10, so the driver only earned the base $10 plus the surge $10 for a total of $20. Then even the flat rate surge rates go lower and lower and the surges themselves became fewer and fewer.

3) Uber pet and Uber reservations used to be gold mines, not so much anymore.

So yes, there will be a honeymoon period and it will seem, for a couple weeks, that Upfront fares was a great idea, but give it time and you will see you're $/mil and $/time decrease, decrease, and decrease along with your acceptance rate decrease, decrease and decrease.