How Much Does Taxi Dispatch Software Cost in the UK?

Ask five dispatch vendors what they charge and you will get a mix: a couple of published prices and three discovery calls. That makes the market genuinely hard to compare. This guide puts its actual shape in writing — the pricing models in use, what each costs in practice, and the line items that turn a £150 quote into a £600 invoice.

The three pricing models you will be quoted

Almost every platform in this market uses one of three models. Knowing which one you are being sold matters more than the headline number, because they scale completely differently as you grow.

The fees that are not in the headline price

The monthly figure is rarely the whole bill. These are the line items that appear once the contract is drafted, in rough order of how often they catch operators out.

• Setup and onboarding — anywhere from £0 to about £2,000, sometimes described as "data migration" or "configuration".
• Branded passenger apps — frequently a separate build, quoted at £1,000–£5,000 up front, occasionally with an annual maintenance fee on top.
• App store fees — Apple charges $99/year per developer account and Google a one-off $25. Ask whether the apps ship under your account or the vendor's, because that determines who owns the listing and the reviews.
• Per-SMS charges — booking confirmations and driver-arriving texts are usually billed per message, typically 3–5p each. At 4,000 texts a month that is another £120–£200.
• Card processing — separate from the software. Stripe's standard UK rate is 1.5% + 20p for UK cards at the time of writing. Ask whether the payment account is yours or the vendor's, and whether the rate you pay is the processor's rate or one set by the platform.
• Support tiers — phone support is often an upgrade. Check what the base plan actually entitles you to at 2am on a Saturday.
• Exit costs — the one nobody asks about. Find out, in writing, whether you can export your passenger and booking history, in what format, and at what price.

Published pricing versus quoted pricing

Platforms in this market split into two camps, and which camp a vendor is in changes how you have to shop.

Quoted pricing. You book a call, describe your fleet, and receive a proposal built around your requirements. At the time of writing this is how iCabbi, Autocab and Cordic sell — none of them lists a price on their own website. For a large multi-branch operation with integration requirements, a scoped quote is genuinely the more sensible format, and a published price would not tell you much.

Published pricing. The figure is on the website and it is the same figure for everyone who reads it. Cabica works this way, and so does CAB-X. The trade-off is real: published pricing is less flexible, and a plan that is close to what you need but not exactly it is your problem rather than a salesperson's.

Neither approach is dishonest. But they put a different job on you. With a published price you can compare before you talk to anyone. With a quoted price you cannot compare at all until you have collected every quote — so collect them all before you respond to any of them.

“Whichever camp a vendor is in, the question is the same: what is the total annual cost at my real fleet size, in writing?”

What the published prices are

Figures taken from each vendor's own pricing page and checked in August 2026. Prices change, so verify before you buy. Platforms that quote privately are shown as such rather than estimated — a number from someone else's comparison article is not a number you can hold anyone to.

The thing worth understanding is not the entry price but how each model behaves as you grow. A 40-driver firm pays £220 a month on Cabica, because the Professional plan covers up to 50 drivers and there is nothing to add. The same fleet at £9 per vehicle is £360 a month, and at £15 per vehicle it is £600. A flat fee stops moving while you grow into it; a per-vehicle fee charges you for succeeding.

It is only fair to note where that reverses, and it reverses further than it used to. A five-car firm pays £75 a month on a £15-per-vehicle plan against our £100, and around seven cars is the break-even against that rate — nearer eleven against a £9-per-vehicle one. Below those points, paying per vehicle is simply cheaper and a flat fee that bundles ten drivers is not doing you any favours. If you run three cars and intend to keep running three cars, buy per vehicle. Run the numbers for your own fleet rather than taking either side’s framing.

What Cabica costs

We publish ours, so here it is in full. These are the same figures as the pricing page, and they include the branded apps rather than quoting them separately.

No setup fee, no onboarding fee, and no per-booking charge on any plan. Card payments run through your own Stripe account at Stripe's rates, so we never sit between you and your money. Every feature is on every plan — dispatch console, driver app, branded passenger app, booking website, white-label branding, corporate accounts, surge pricing, promo codes and compliance alerts all included from Starter. What separates the plans is allowance: Starter covers 10 drivers, 5 office logins, 10 zones and 2 tariffs; Professional raises that to 50 drivers, 10 logins and unlimited zones and tariffs.

Worked example: a 40-driver firm on Professional pays £220 a month flat — the plan covers 50 drivers, so there is nothing to add, and that same £220 carries the firm all the way to its fiftieth driver. The same fleet on a £9-per-vehicle contract pays £360, plus whatever the app build and SMS bundle cost, and another £9 every time it takes on a driver.

How to compare two quotes properly

Vendors quote in different units on purpose, which makes side-by-side comparison hard unless you normalise first. This takes about twenty minutes and is the highest-value twenty minutes in the whole buying process.

1. Write down your real numbers: active drivers, vehicles, bookings per month, and SMS volume. Use last month's figures, not your best month.
2. Convert every quote to a total annual cost at those numbers — including setup, app build, SMS and support tier.
3. Then recalculate at 150% of your current fleet. This is where per-vehicle and per-booking deals separate from flat fees, and it is the number that matters if the plan is to grow.
4. Ask each vendor, in writing: what is the minimum contract term, what is the notice period, and what does data export cost?
5. Ask what happens to the price at renewal, and whether the quoted rate is introductory. A price fixed or capped in writing is worth more than a lower opening number.

Is cheaper software worse software?

Sometimes — but in this market price mostly tracks sales overhead rather than product quality. A platform with a field sales team, a conference stand and a nine-month enterprise sales cycle has to recover that from somewhere, and it recovers it from the monthly fee.

The genuine functional differences worth paying for are narrower than the price gap suggests: multi-branch and multi-fleet management, deep telephony integration, published APIs for custom integrations, and contractual SLAs. If you need those, pay for them. If you do not, and you are a 30-car firm that mainly needs taxi dispatch software to auto-dispatch by zone, take card payments and keep the council happy, then a platform built for 400-vehicle operations is solving a problem you do not have.

The one thing genuinely worth checking regardless of price: whether the system stays up on a Friday night, and whether a human answers when it does not.