Complete Guide For Cost To Build a Taxi Fare Comparison App
When you set out to develop such an app, there are factors affecting app development cost and also your development team. You can add more features which will lead to a higher development cost, but if that increases your user base, then it will be worth the value.
1. Understanding Today’s Scenario
Today, if you want to go from one location to another in your city, you have a plethora of options for choosing your means of transportation. Now, which one you will select, will depend on some parameters, namely, the time you can give to the travel, the location of your destination, comfort in the journey. Taxis, or their new avatars, the cabs, provide a right combination of all these requirements on a single platter. A great Ride Booking App can seal the deal for you. Today, we can book cabs from within the confines of our mobile phones and travel swiftly from one place to another. But a lot of times, we find ourselves hopping between tabs to get the lowest fares for our ride. Different apps offer different prices for the same trip. Thanks to the taxi fare comparison apps, we can now compare the different options on a single platform. Let’s have a look at how these app function and what would you need to take care of if you were to build such an app.
2. Features Access To Taxi Aggregators Via APIs This feature is the heart and soul of the Taxi App Development. To showcase the amount that the different aggregators charge, your app must be able to access this information from those aggregators. It’s where the APIs come into the picture. While companies are reluctant in giving access to external parties into their functionalities, which is reasonably justified, they may release specific packages, called APIs, using which the third parties can implement certain features of their app. This way, via the APIs, the aggregators won’t have to reveal their implementation details, and you also can make use of their data in your app. Successful App Developers make efficient use of these APIs. If you are still in doubt, maybe this can help. Have you ever booked flight tickets online? If yes, then a similar thing happens to you where you have to jump from one website to another to compare the different prices and get the best price for your requirements. For this comparison purpose, you might have used makemytrip.com or yatra.com. These websites make use of the APIs provided by all those different airlines. You have to build a similar model for the taxi fare comparison.
Fare Estimation When users are booking a cab, it’s better if they can first have an idea of the base fare for their trip. Of course, the app will provide them the fare estimates from the different aggregators, but giving them a view beforehand, outside of those cab service providers, will be an excellent feature to include in your app. It can be helpful in specific ways. A lot of times what happens is that the users use these apps to get some vague idea of the costs while making some outing plans. For this, they usually rely on apps like Uber & Ola, whatever they have in their phones. The displayed prices may be varying depending on the demand of the cabs at the point of checking the costs. In scenarios like these, giving an unbiased, genuine estimate of the cost can be helpful for the users. Another typical example of the benefits of this feature is that the chances of users paying unrealistic fares decrease to quite a reasonable extent. You might have read about specific instances in the news articles where riders were charged insane amounts for their trips.
Surge Pricing Information In Real-Time
It is one aspect of the cab pricing model that has always been a mystery to the commuters. Well, when there is a mismatch between the demand and supply of cabs, with cab drivers of course, in a particular area, there is a surge in the prices. What happens is the number of users that want cabs from a circle is unusually higher than the number of cabs plying in that neighborhood.
In such a scenario, the estimated prices shown to the users is a multiple of the usual fare. Sometimes, this can be seven or eight times the usual fare. The users that agree to commute with the surged prices get to ride in the cabs. This surge in pricing usually occurs during office hours. It can also take place on some festival days on which users might want to travel to their relatives. This surge pricing model has always been under the radar and banned in some places. If your app can give the user a helping hand in this regard, it will surely enhance the value of your product.
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