A Price Before They Commit
The fare is quoted from your zone tariffs, time bands and surge rules before the booking is confirmed — so the number on screen is the number they pay, and nobody rings the office to check.
Passenger App
A Taxi Booking App With Your Name on the Icon
Passengers book, pay and watch the car arrive in an app that carries your brand from the first quote to the receipt — and every fare stays yours.
- Published under your firm, not ours
- Instant quotes from your own tariffs
- Zero commission — the fare is yours
Passengers who would rather tap than ring are not going to start ringing again. They will book with whoever has an app, and if that is not you it is a national platform taking a slice of a fare that used to be entirely yours.
Cabica publishes a passenger booking app under your firm’s name and colours in the App Store and Google Play. It quotes from your tariffs, takes card payment into your own Stripe account, shows the passenger the assigned car moving on a map, and drops the job straight onto your dispatch board. Cabica’s name appears nowhere in it.
Passenger App at a Glance
- Platforms
- iOS and Android
- Store listing
- Your developer account, your firm’s name
- Quoting
- Your zones, tariffs, time bands and surge rules
- Payments
- Stripe card into your account, cash or account billing
- Tracking
- Live vehicle position, on-the-way and arrival push
- Commission
- None — no per-booking fee
- Time to live
- Days, plus app store review
What the Passenger Gets
The four things that decide whether somebody books a second time: a price they trust, a car they can see, a payment that works, and a receipt that arrives.
Live Tracking and Arrival Alerts
The assigned driver and vehicle move on the map, with a push notification when the car sets off and another on arrival. That is most of what removes “where is my taxi” from a Friday night.
Card, Cash or Account
Card in-app through Stripe into your account, cash on the day, or charged to a corporate account for business travellers. The passenger picks; the office does not have to chase.
Saved Addresses and Repeat Bookings
Home, work and the usual airport saved after the first trip, and a previous journey rebooked in two taps. Repeat-booking friction is the difference between an app used once and an app used weekly.
Book Now or Book for Thursday
Immediate pickups and scheduled journeys in the same flow — the airport run three weeks out is booked the same way as the car needed in ten minutes, and both land on the same board.
Your Brand, End to End
Icon, splash screen, colours, notification sender and the emailed receipt all carry your firm. The store listing sits under your developer account, so the downloads and the reviews belong to you rather than to us.
The Commission Arithmetic, Written Out
This is the calculation that decides whether a branded app is worth having, and it is usually done on the back of an envelope and got wrong.
What a Percentage Actually Costs at Your Volume
Take the number of jobs a week you currently hand to a commission-charging platform, multiply by your average fare, and take the platform’s percentage of it. A firm doing 300 platform jobs a week at an £11 average, on a 15% rate, is paying roughly £495 a week — about £25,700 a year — for work it then does itself.
A flat subscription does not move when that number moves. That is the whole structural difference, and it is why the two models diverge sharply in exactly the situation you want to be in: growth. Commission is a tax on succeeding.
Run your own figures rather than ours. If the answer comes out smaller than a subscription, the honest conclusion is that you do not have the volume for this yet — and that is a real answer, not a reason to buy.
The Part That Is Not About Money
A booking taken on somebody else’s platform gives you a job. A booking taken in your own app gives you a customer: a phone number, an address history, a payment method on file and a push channel you can use to say the Christmas rota is open.
That difference compounds. After a year on a national platform you have completed a great many jobs and have no list. After a year on your own app you have a passenger base you can tell about a new service, remind about an airport run, or offer an account to.
Why Store Ownership Is the Question to Press
A branded app published under a vendor’s developer account is a rented brand. The listing URL, the accumulated reviews, the download count and the ability to ship an update all sit with the vendor. Leaving means a new listing at zero, and asking every existing passenger to delete one app and install another.
Ask any vendor, in writing, whose developer account the app will be published under and who holds the signing keys. It is a one-line question, it is answered in a sentence, and the answer tells you most of what you need to know about the relationship.
This Page Is For You If
- You are handing bookings to a national app that charges per fare
- Customers ask whether you have an app and you do not
- Phone lines are engaged at exactly the hours you most want bookings
- You want the passenger relationship, not a listing on someone else’s platform
- You have an app already, but it is published under a vendor’s developer account
FAQ
Common Questions
Is the taxi booking app really under our own brand?
Yes. The icon, name, colours, splash screen, push notifications and receipts are all yours, and the listing sits under your firm in the App Store and Google Play. A passenger using it has no way of knowing Cabica exists.
Whose Apple and Google developer account is the app published under?
Yours. This is worth insisting on with any vendor, because the account holder owns the listing, its URL, its reviews and its download history. If the app is published under the vendor’s account, leaving them means starting again from zero downloads — and personally asking every existing passenger to install something new.
Do you take a commission on bookings made through the app?
No. There is no per-booking fee and no percentage of the fare. You pay the monthly plan and keep the whole fare, which is the entire argument against routing your own work through a national platform.
Where does the card money go?
Into your own Stripe account, directly. We are not in the payment path and we do not hold your money before passing it on — which also means Stripe’s payout schedule is yours to set rather than ours.
How long does it take to get the app live?
Branding and configuration happen during onboarding and take days. The variable is app store review, typically a few days for a first submission and occasionally longer if Apple asks a question. We handle the submission and the replies.
What about passengers who will not install an app?
They book on your booking website, which quotes from the same tariffs and lands on the same dispatch board, or they ring and a controller types it in. The app is one channel of three and is not meant to replace the phone — most firms find the phone stays busy and the app is additive.
What is the difference between this and a private hire booking system?
The app is one part of the booking system. The passenger app is the phone in your customer’s pocket; the booking system is that plus the booking website, the account-customer portal and the quoting rules behind all of them. If you are weighing up leaving a commission-charging platform, the booking system page is the fuller comparison.