What a transport app costs
One single item separates the cheap transport app from the expensive one, and it almost never comes up in the first conversation: live tracking.
Without it, a transport app costs what a booking app costs. With it, you are in another bracket.
Why tracking is expensive
The car moving on a map looks like a visual detail and is an entire chain:
- background location permission, which both stores review separately and refuse when the justification is thin;
- battery drain, which is why that permission is policed;
- infrastructure receiving positions continuously from every active device, whose cost grows with drivers on the road rather than with rides;
- handling bad signal, tunnels, and the app being killed in the background.
It is what puts an agency quote for transport among the highest on the menu.
What almost every real case needs
School runs, corporate shuttles, neighbourhood vans, small-town taxis and airport transfers share one thing: the relationship is already known. Nobody is hailing a random car in the street.
That changes the requirement. What solves it is a request, an assigned driver, a fixed route, pickup and drop-off confirmation, recurring billing and a receipt. None of that needs a live map, and all of it comes out of a description.
A guardian does not want to watch the van move on a map. They want to know their child got on. Those are different requirements and they cost orders of magnitude apart.
The three routes
An agency. High bracket, higher still if the scope includes tracking. It is also the route where that item tends to get sold without anyone asking whether it was needed.
A freelancer. Cheaper, and tracking is still the part that blows the deadline, because the hard bit is not writing the screen.
A platform. Fixed price. On Fabapp, Free to build and publish on the web, and plans from R$ 99 to R$ 1,099 a month, with maps, addresses, roles and recurring billing included, and no continuous tracking.
What else goes into the sum
- recurring billing, which is the right shape for school runs and shuttles and saves chasing the monthly fee;
- a developer account, if you go to the stores: US$ 25 once with Google, US$ 99 a year with Apple;
- regulation, which is not software: passenger and school transport carry local requirements, with or without an app.
The short version
- the expensive item is live tracking, and almost no real case needs it;
- transport with a known relationship is solved by request, assignment, confirmation and receipt;
- maps, addresses and geocoding are included; continuous tracking is not offered;
- a recurring monthly fee usually beats per-ride pricing for school runs and shuttles;
- the service's regulation exists regardless of the app.
What can and cannot be built is set out in how to build an app like Uber.