Article · 8 min read

Per-vehicle pricing is fine — until it isn't. Here's the crossover point.

Choosing a dispatch pricing model by fleet size, not by sales pitch.

By the Limozoft team · Last reviewed 2026-10-19

He signed a per-vehicle plan at 6 cars. By 40, the software line cost more than a chauffeur. Nothing dishonest happened — he just picked the right model for the fleet he had and never revisited it for the fleet he built.

The three models, plainly

Per vehicle: a monthly rate per active car or driver. Predictable, scales linearly, punishes growth mildly.
Per trip / per booking: a percentage or fixed fee per completed job. Cheap when quiet, brutal at volume, and it directly taxes your marketing.
Flat fee / capped: one price for the platform, often with a vehicle band. Boring, and boring is what you want at scale.

At 5 vehicles

Per-vehicle wins outright. You want your software bill to shrink in January and grow in June. Avoid anything with a floor above ten seats, and avoid setup fees that exceed a quarter of annual spend.

At 20 vehicles

This is the crossover band. Per-vehicle at $30/car is $7,200 a year; a capped plan in the same range starts to look identical. Decide on the second variable instead: which model includes the passenger app, SMS, corporate billing and API without add-ons?

At 50 vehicles

Per-trip pricing is now the most expensive option by a wide margin, and per-vehicle without a cap is not far behind. At 50 cars you should be negotiating a banded or flat contract with a written price lock — and asking what happens at 75.

The hidden line items that break the comparison

Setup and onboarding fees
SMS pass-through, marked up per message
Payment processing above standard processor rates
Per-seat dispatcher licences
API or webhook access as a paid tier
Annual uplift clauses of 5–10%
Data export fees on termination

How to compare like for like

Build one number: total annual cost at your current fleet size, and again at 2× that size. Ask every vendor to fill it in writing. Our dispatch pricing guide has the full model breakdown and a plan comparison table, and Limozoft pricing shows exactly where we land at each band.

Frequently asked questions

Is per-vehicle or flat-fee dispatch pricing better?+

Per-vehicle is cheaper below roughly 15–20 vehicles because you only pay for what you run. Above that, a flat or capped plan usually wins, because per-vehicle pricing scales linearly with fleet size while your software cost should not.

What is wrong with per-trip pricing?+

It taxes growth. A 2% per-booking fee on a fleet doing 4,000 trips a month at an $85 average fare is $6,800 a year in pure margin, rising every time you get better at marketing.

What should dispatch software cost per vehicle per month?+

Between $10 and $40 per vehicle per month for a modern cloud platform, plus a one-off setup fee. Anything materially above that should come with an explanation you find convincing.