If you want to build an online taxi app like uber and ola then, read about the cost and features of taxi booking app in this blog.

There was a time when flagging down a taxi was a tough job. However, a few entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp who are the founders of the Uber didn’t beat around the bush and launched Uber. With the advent of Uber, we get access to hail a taxi in the easiest way. It revolutionized the whole taxi booking industry by allowing people to book taxis with a mobile app and by allowing anyone to be the drivers.

Services and business model of Uber have inspired many entrepreneurs to follow the success path of the Uber. Currently, Uber is not the sole player in the market. There are so many other online taxi booking service providing companies are available which are intensifying the taxi booking industry. Despite the fact that market is already mushrooming with taxi booking companies, it is a safe bet to develop taxi app as a large percentage of the user base is still remained untouched by top taxi booking companies.

In this blog, you will get to know,

• Global taxi market
• Top online taxi service providers?
• How much does it cost to develop a taxi app?
• The business model you can implement to make quick money.
• Future of the taxi booking apps
• How Coruscate Solutions helps you to build next-gen taxi app?

Global online taxi booking market is worth in billion dollars. Following image clearly depicts how quickly online taxi booking industry is expected to boom in different continents.

Because of the urbanization and higher living standards, online taxi booking service provider companies are attracting more users than ever. These companies reduce the travel time of users and so, users can easily manage to complete all important work of their planned day.

Considering the fact that online taxi booking service is the public call, the market for taxi booking apps has exploded in recent years. These taxi apps are surpassing yellow taxi services in all major cities. Following is the image which presents the user adoption rate of yellow cab services and ride-hailing apps in New-York city.

The two main reasons which make the taxi booking app an unaltered choice of people are convenience and no time for waiting. Following image shows the result of the survey which was conducted by Q&Me market research company.

Uber

Ola

Curb

Lyft

Gett

TaxiCaller

As we have discussed, Uber isn’t the sole operator in the market. Several other companies which have launched taxi booking apps, targeting local and even global market. Journeys of these companies will inspire you if you jump out of your skin over a thought of developing a taxi app.

Uber Taxi booking app

Uber is undeniably most successful and popular taxi booking app. It is the American multinational transportation network company which was started by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick with an ambition to move people, whether across town or towards their dreams.

On New Year’s Eve, when Camp and his friends spent $800 hiring a private driver, he got an idea to offer an affordable and quick transportation solution and that idea morphed into Uber. They launched the first beta version of the app in May 2010 and later in 2011, they officially launched the mobile app of the Uber. Services of Uber were so user-friendly and cost-effective that it spread like wildfire.

Currently, Uber has 91 million monthly users. Uber has completed 10 billion rides with its 3.9 million drivers. Since its initial launch in San Francisco, Uber has expanded its business operations in 700+ cities of 63 countries.

Lyft Taxi booking app

The rivalry between Lyft and Uber is well documented in all news. It is founded in 2012 by computer programmers Logan Green and John Zimmer who have already started a long-distance car pooling ride-sharing company named Zimride in 2007. However, in 2013, they sold Zimride to Enterprise Holding.

Currently, Lyft’s ride-sharing program is available in 350 US cities and a few cities in Canada. Till January 2018, Lyft managed to acquire 23 million users and 1.4 million drivers. As of September 2018, Lyft has completed 1 billion rides. Refer the following image to understand how relatively successful Lyft is.

Gett Taxi booking app

Gett is the Israel-based on-demand taxi service providing company which connects the customers with transportation and good services. Customer can order a taxi or even courier through its mobile app. Gett was founded by Sahar Waiser and Roi More who are Israeli entrepreneurs.

In 2009, the beta version of Gett was launched in Tel Aviv. After two years, in summer 2011, they expanded their service in London.

In March 2012, Gett branched out in Moscow and opened an office in New-York to understand the market need of USA. The first funding round of Gett was led by the wealthiest person of the UK. He invested $30 million in Gett. Recently, with a fresh $200 million of funding, Gett hit the valuation of $1.5 billion.

Made your mind to be among the above taxi booking service providers? Click below to get free taxi booking app or taxi booking platform demo.

Now, in the next section of this blog, let’s answer the much-requested question which is,

How much does it cost to develop a taxi app?

A taxi app development company has to burn the candle from both sides in order to develop a robust mobile app. They need to develop an app for the riders, an app for drivers and most importantly, a dashboard for admin. Considering the fact that there are lots of taxi app development companies are claiming to develop a robust taxi mobile app at the tolerable price tag, it becomes earth shaking requirement to find out whether they are charging you right or not? Will you get all the important features for which you are paying? Let’s find out in a very comprehensive way.

Following are the all essential features for rider app, driver app and admin panel and how much you need to pay for each of them. Please note that this is the average development cost for both IOS and Android app.

Rider app lets riders to communicate with drivers and admin. Using rider app, they can book the taxi, track the driver and pay the fare. Thus, the rider app should be as feature-packed as possible. Let’s quickly hit on top features, how many hours a developer has to invest to develop each of them and how much does it cost?

• User sign up

For a non-technical person, a sign-up is just a token to access the app. But for a developer and app owner, it is the property of access control. With a single ID and password, a user gains access to several features of the app.

Writing code for sign up module generally takes 12 hours as developers have to take care of both security and privacy. Moreover, they also need to write business logic to allow users to sign up with their social media accounts.

In case, you want to integrate other features like biometric authentication, it may increase the hours to write business logic for sign up process.

• User profile

A user profile contains the information like contact details, name, image and payment method. Developers can use the details which users add while signing up as contact details. As far as the name, image, and payment method are concerned, they write business logic to ask these details from the users and to create payment profile of the users which is very useful in payment module. For this formation, the developer requires at least 24 hours.

• Taxi request and allocation

Taxi request is one of the modules where almost app developers struggle as they need to implement a complex algorithm which allocates the nearest driver to the rider. They also need to synchronize the driver app and rider app to eliminate the disordered taxi request and taxi allocation procedure.

We, at Coruscate, have already written and implemented a few innovative matching algorithms which allocate drivers to the riders after calculating several factors like traffic, demand and rider’s expectation.

Developing a taxi request and allocation module easily impels developers to invest 60+ hours.

• Fare estimation

To win the trust of riders, your taxi app should have a feature which shows the estimated fare to the riders as soon as they add the address of the destination. The module of fare estimation also works on the algorithm which calculates the fare by considering the distance, taxi type and other several factors like demand, weather, and user’s type. What makes it even more challenging is the fact that some locations like airports and toll roads urge a different fare calculation algorithm to write and implement.

Fare estimation module of the rider app takes up to 20 hours.

• Payment

Payment module of the rider app should be as error-free as possible. For that, developers use the payment gateway and payment processor which circulate the money between the rider’s bank account and app owner’s bank account. Integration of payment processor and gateway in the app insists 50 hours of app development life cycle.

• Rating

A rating module which lets riders to rate the drivers and riding experience requires 20 hours to develop.

By summing up the last few paragraphs, we can conclude that it requires total 186 hours and around $3700 to develop a rider app with all essential features as an average per hour cost of a developer is $20.

Now, let’s talk about the features of the driver app and how much does it cost to develop the driver app. Please note this is the average cost for both IOS and Android apps.

Click below to get Free Rider app demo :

Most of the taxi booking app development companies and taxi app owners misprize the importance of drivers and end up developing a basic app for them. But, looking at the way how online taxi booking business operates, you have to ask a taxi booking app development company to integrate all essential features in the driver app same as rider app.

• Registration

Like rider, drivers also need to register themselves. However, as soon as they register, they will not land on a home screen of the app. Firstly, they need to satisfy a few basic requirements of the taxi booking service provider companies like history, police and character check to get full access to the app. To make the process of authentication quicker and efficient, driver app should have a feature which allows them to add their details including any document from the app itself. It is also necessary that drivers can track the status of their application.

Since registration or sign up module of the driver app is slightly more complex than rider app, developers require 36 hours to write the business logic of registration module for the driver app.

• Order monitoring engine

An order monitoring engine handles the following tasks.

Upon a riding request, it notifies the driver if matching algorithm finds he will pick up the rider in minimum time than any other available drivers.

Drivers can mark themselves open to accept riding requests or mark themselves offline.

As soon as, a driver accepts the riding request, he can see all details of the rider including the pick-up location.

Once the rider gets into the taxi, the driver can start the trip and when they reach the destination, the driver can end the trip to be available for another ride.

To accommodate all these features into one module, developers require at least 80 hours.

• Payment

Drivers are paid based on the distance they travel to complete one ride and for which service they are registered.

Developers have to write business logic for showing the earning as soon as a driver completes a trip. They also prefer to write business logic for letting drivers know their weekly or monthly earning and how many hours they work in a week. For this, developers assert themselves for 40 hours.

In the nutshell, the total hour developers require to develop a driver app is 156 hours which means, the cost to develop a driver app is around $3100.

• Admin panel

An admin panel is the nerve center for online taxi service business. It avails app owner to monitor the real-time and historical data of his business. A feature-packed admin panel is the product of precisely integrated features like a heat map, fleet management, business analytics tools and earning report. To understand the cost of developing an admin panel in a more rational way, we will distribute the module of admin panel in two parts, which are a module for managing fleet and module for business growth.

• Fleet management

In the fleet management module, developers have to meld the following features.

• A heap map which shows those locations where the demand is high.
• How many drivers are online and in which areas.
• A number of riding requests and the status of each request.
• Personal details of all drivers including their car details, their rating, their denied and accepted riding requests.

To add all these features in the fleet management module, developers need 35 hours.

• Tools for business analytics

Tools of BI calculate various data and offer an elaborated report of business performance. BI tools store the data, filter the data, analyze data and present the result of analysis in the graphical way which helps app owner to take strategic business decision. Developers call next-gen techniques like AI and machine learning into play to make BI tools clever enough. This execution requires 45 hours.

Calculating the cost to develop admin panel of taxi app, since developers spend 80 hours to develop admin panel and per hour fee of a developer is $20, the overall cost to develop an admin panel is $1600.

Click below to get Free Driver app demo :

In the next section of the blog, we will discuss the business model of Uber and other taxi booking companies and what is the future of the taxi apps.

You just have reached halfway!

In order to satisfy financial goals, you need to run your taxi booking business based on a very profitable business model.

The first and perhaps most profitable strategy to earn a good profit is to follow the gig economy model where you allow anyone to be a driver but with his/her car. By doing so, you can able to run taxi booking business with very fewer resources as you now don’t have to bother with the maintenance of the taxis and fuel price. Whatever the rider pays for the trip, take a small percentage of commission from it and keep running a taxi booking business without acquiring a single taxi!

Another profitable way to earn more money is surge pricing. It is a very popular concept in the taxi booking industry. An algorithm estimates the number of riders and drivers will open the app in the next 5 to 10 minutes and if the demand is higher, riders need to pay more. This algorithm considers factors like timing, weather, and traffic to decide the degree of surge and fare which justifies the demand.

Additionally, you can manage to earn a few bucks extra by selling your online space to other companies for advertisement purpose.

As we have stated, taxi booking companies are currently earning really well despite cut-throat competition. But when it comes to the future, factors like how you manage to integrate multiple services in an app, how you deal with legal issues, how you make your app well-equipped with groundbreaking features and how you ensure the safety of passengers will define the success of you taxi app. In fact, a lot of taxi app provider companies have started working on their apps to make it future-ready. Following are a few examples of how taxi app provider companies are preparing themselves to satisfy future needs.

A Bangladesh-based Pathao company provides a multi-service platform and allow users to book or order taxi, courier, and food from a single app.

A London-based taxi app provider company named XOOOX has recently launched its app which lets the driver fix their own fare.

A few Israel-based taxi companies have fitted sensors in the rear seats of taxis which determine the seat occupancy and ensure the safety of riders.

According to many official sources, Uber will soon publish a feature to select the preferable driver while booking a ride.

So, it is safe to say that only a feature-packed taxi app and the way you ensure the safety of your riders will make you the monarch of the taxi industry in the future.

Coruscate Solutions is the top taxi app development company which is driven by young and goal-oriented professionals. We never believe to settle less than best. Our current way of designing and developing is inspired by our ambition to eliminate real business challenges by applying the latest technologies.

To develop a highly reliable, scalable and future-ready taxi app, we utilize robust technologies such as Node.js, React, Redux, PHP, MongoDB, and Mysql.

We work in 5 simple steps. These are requirement check, designing, front end development, back end development, testing, and implementation. With our rapid agile development method, we usually deliver the taxi app in 45 to 55 business days.

We know the other things than a mobile app which are required to start a successful taxi service provider company. Hence, we assist you to craft a profitable business model.

It is as easy as clicking on the ‘get free taxi app demo’ button. And the best part of it is, you will be nominated all the time!