What per-booking fees really cost you at 50, 200 and 500 rides a month

The math nobody runs

Take an operator with an average ride of $120 on a platform that keeps 15% of every booking. That is $18 a ride, which sounds like nothing. Now run it across a month.

• 50 rides a month: $900 in fees. Over a year, $10,800.
• 200 rides a month: $3,600 in fees. Over a year, $43,200.
• 500 rides a month: $9,000 in fees. Over a year, $108,000.

Put a flat-rate system next to it. The Full Platform is $499 a month whether you run 50 rides or 500, so at 50 rides you save about $400 a month, at 200 rides about $3,100, and at 500 rides about $8,500. Payments still cost something: Stripe's standard card rate, paid to Stripe, and that is the only per-transaction cost. The difference is that a percentage platform charges you more the better you do.

The cost that isn't on the statement

The fee is the visible cost. The invisible one is the customer. On most per-booking platforms the rider books on their page, under their brand, and the confirmation email comes from them. When that rider needs a car next month, who do they search for?

An operator who has run 2,000 rides through a marketplace often has no customer list to show for it. The platform has the list, and it shows your rider three other companies next time. You paid 15% to help build a competitor's database.

What a flat rate changes

With a flat monthly rate, the incentives flip. The software company has no reason to care how many rides you run; it only cares that you keep the subscription, which means the product has to keep working. Your busiest month costs the same as your slowest. Your prices can come down at the margin, or your driver pay can go up, because the 15% is now yours.

And the booking happens on your site, under your name. Every confirmation, reminder and receipt carries your brand, and the customer list lives in your dashboard, exportable whenever you want it.

At 200 rides a month, a 15% fee is $43,200 a year. That is a vehicle, or a second dispatcher, or a year of the kind of marketing that brings the rides in the first place.

When a percentage is still worth paying

There is a case for marketplaces: when you are brand new, have no customers and no website, a listing on someone else's page brings rides you would not otherwise get. The fee is a customer-acquisition cost, and for a few months it can be a fair one.

The mistake is staying there. Once you run more than about 40 rides a month, the fee costs more than a flat system and a website put together, and every month after that you are paying to not own your business.

Conclusion

Count last month's rides, multiply by your average fare, take 15%. That is what you paid to take bookings. If the number is bigger than $499, you are paying for the privilege of someone else owning your customers. The switch takes about three weeks, your current bookings stay where they are until they are done, and there is never a day without a way to book.

The Full Platform is that flat rate: $499 a month with your website and the leads tool included, and no per-booking fees. Every plan is side by side on the pricing page.