How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Taxi Booking App

Now that you are looking to find out how much it would cost to build and launch your taxi booking app, it would be helpful if you have a bird’s-eye view of some of the layers that influence the total taxi booking app development cost.

Having a solid understanding of these factors will put you in a much stronger position to negotiate and budget effectively with a taxi booking app development company. Plus, you’ll be better equipped to identify areas where you can cut costs or find solutions to stay within budget.

Factors That Influence The Taxi Booking App’s Cost

Platforms

When deciding which platform to develop for, it’s important to consider your target audience. iOS and Android are widely used platforms, but you may find one more popular among your users. Depending on your platform choice, the software company decides on a development methodology. Here are some options in decreasing order of cost:

• iOS native development – Exclusively for the iOS platform.
• Android native development – Exclusively for the Android platform.
• Cross-platform app development – Using a single codebase for both iOS and Android platforms. This approach saves time and money without compromising on performance.
• Progressive Web App Development (PWA) – It’s another option for cross-platform development. PWAs are essentially web apps that behave like mobile apps, retaining their aesthetics and functionality. However, for a taxi booking app, this approach may not be ideal due to potential limitations on certain features, performance, and usability.

Features

Creating a feature-packed app comes with a higher price tag. From meticulous planning to coding and testing, each step adds to the cost. Some features, like surge price, are more complex than simple tasks like booking a ride. But it’s not just the nuts and bolts that drive up the price – the overall planning, design, testing, and deployment all contribute to the final cost.

Customization

Our feature list is packed with premium features that provide exceptional value to users. However, there may be some ideas or problems that you have identified that are so unique that we may need to build them from scratch. These are custom features that add more to the cost and time. However, investing in customization would ensure your app provides solutions unavailable in other apps.

Third-Party API Integration

Integrating APIs could definitely make your ride-hailing app more powerful and usable. At times, due to constraints such as infrastructure, the limitations of the development team, or budgetary concerns, the solutions to certain challenges may surpass the capacity of your app development company. For instance, consider the task of automatically extracting valuable information from documents uploaded by drivers; this is where services like Google Vision API come into play.

Other times, building a solution all by yourself is downright unfeasible. Take, for example, the need for real-time location tracking on maps. In such cases, it is not only sensible but efficient to use existing APIs that address the very issues you’ve identified. In this case, Google Maps would solve our problem easily. And why reinvent the wheel, right?

However, some APIs are open-source, while others are paid. And accordingly, impact the cost of building and maintaining the app.

Testing and Quality Assurance

An app may go down when a high volume of users use it all at once. Sensitive information may be at risk, or they have navigational issues, or some options don’t behave as intended. To ensure your travel taxi app won’t break at the show time, it must be tested holistically.

A quality app development company performs unit tests, performance tests, security tests, usability tests, and more to minimize the risks. Testing typically consumes 20-30% of the total development time, influencing how a company prices a feature.

Cloud Solution

Hosting your taxi booking app on the cloud is like renting an apartment. You only pay for the space and tools you use and get access to great security, maintenance, and scalability features. Plus, the pay-as-you-go pricing model means you never waste money on unused resources.

Support and Maintenance

An app requires continuous maintenance so as to fix bugs that surface when users actually use it and incorporate user feedback. Also, App stores may change their policies or update their infrastructure, so apps must be updated to comply, which will cost money.

Every company offers different packages for support and maintenance. So, when you are building the taxi booking app, consider upkeep costs for proper budgeting. Think of it like a gym membership for your app – it needs regular maintenance to stay healthy and functional.

Features Essential In a Taxi Booking App

The total cost varies, as indicated in the earlier section, on how much feature-rich your app would be. Features go from basic to advanced. However, we’ve restricted ourselves to the most essential features in this blog.

For Drivers and Customers

1. User Registration

• Email
• Phone number
• Google and Microsoft account

2. Ride Booking

• Setting destination
• Multiple stops option
• Vehicle and car selection
• Trip fares

3. Geolocation and GPS Integration

• Real-time location
• Match drivers with customers

4. Payment Integration

• Payment gateways (Stripe, Paypal, etc.)
• In-app wallet

5. Wallet Management

• Add money to your wallet and pay through it.
• Add new payment methods (Debit Card, Credit Card, Cash)

6. Surge Price

• For fair compensation to the drivers for extra fuel and time in cases of heavy traffic.

7. Interactive Waiting Interface

• Driver’s car live location, the animation of their car moving and turning, and the time left to reach the customer.

8. Driver’s Document Verification

• Documents upload option
• Prompt to drivers if uploaded images are blurred or not clear.

9. Accept Or Decline Rides Option For Drivers

• Notification for new rides
• Pick-up and drop location information
• Amount they would earn
• Accept or decline button

10. Communication

• Anonymous calling between drivers and customers.
• Chat option

11. Push Notifications

• Easy-to-read content and automatic triggers to convey important activities.

12. Earning Reports

• Weekly, monthly, or yearly earnings
• Simple charts and graphs to analyze earnings

13. Reviews

• Drivers and customers rate each other.
• Automatic actions for consistent low reviews

For The Back Office Team and Administrators

1. Real-Time Monitoring

• Live location of all the trips with complete information of driver and customer.

2. Customers and Drivers’ Account Management

• Document Verification
• Activate/Deactivate Accounts
• Block accounts for security and quality violation

3. Platform Revenue Reports

• Fare paid by the customers
• Platform’s commission on every ride
• Tax deduction
• Weekly, Monthly, and yearly reports.

4. Automatic Refunds

• Setting policies to allow for automatic refunds

5. Automatic Payments To Drivers

• Drivers receive payments directly into their bank account after accurate tax deductions.

6. Set Fares For The Trips

• Prices based on time, distance, and type of vehicles
• Buffer limit up to which no extra charge should be applied to the customers.

Would you mind letting us know which features you are looking for that we haven’t listed above?

Cost And Time In Terms Of Development Stages

Every digital product goes through different stages. These stages would vary across companies. But generally, design, front-end, back-end, testing, deployment, and maintenance are five development stages.

The table below shows the taxi booking app’s cost and time estimations for every development stage. These estimations are calculated assuming the features we listed in the previous sections.

A taxi booking app would cost you around $20,000 for the features we’re talking about in this blog. On top of that, add the cloud solution, third-party APIs, and maintenance costs that vary from company to company.

Test Your Ideas With a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Many a time, you’ll have better ideas for solving users’ needs in a taxi booking app. Or you wish to work on a different business model. We respect your ideas. However, ideas are hypotheses until tested. If you look at the history of digital products, most failed because someone got attached to their ideas and assumed users would love them.

With an MVP approach, rather than going for full-scale development, you, with your best wisdom, build only the core functionalities first, make them public, and check their response. The development cost and time are reduced. And only after a few months you get a real data to make decisions to move forward.

Step Forward

As you now know how much of an app’s cost depends on the features, it is advisable to take time for user story mapping. What’s User Story Mapping? It’s an exercise to create a visual map of all the features your users would like and translate them into short conversational text rather than technical jargon. These sessions bring clarity regarding users’ needs and the flow of actions. With the visual map in front of their screens, clients are more confident in making investments, knowing what they will get.

User story mapping is a powerful tool to help prioritize and refine those features, and NetMaxims Technologies provides free sessions to help clients do just that.