How to Make a Ridesharing App in 2024 (Steps + Cost)

Travis Kalanick, a founder of Uber, quotes, “We want transportation as reliable as running water.”

This has now become true. Nowadays, within a few taps, a user can book a ride and share the cab with their friends or colleagues to save the cost. This concept of ridesharing has helped entrepreneurs in solving the following challenges in their businesses:

• Personal rides are costlier for users
• Tackle the problems of environmental changes
• Allocation of taxis in peak hours

Being an entrepreneur, what more do you need to take your own rideshare business to the next level? In fact, according to a report by Statista, the market valuation of the global ride-sharing app is growing to reach $117 billion by 2021.

If you want to utilize this opportunity and want to understand how to make a rideshare app, then we have created this complete guide with the help of our expert ridesharing app developers, who have developed a ridesharing app for the USA. Let’s get started.

The Outstanding Growth of Ride-sharing Apps

The ride-sharing app’s concept is now very popular amongst the masses. But, before diving into this industry, it is necessary to understand or have basic information about it. Therefore, let’s look at the top players’ market valuation in the ridesharing industry.

• As mentioned in Statista and Wikipedia, the revenue of Lyft company is around USD 2.3 billion (2020).
• As per Statista, the revenue generated by the Uber app is around USD 11.1 billion in the year 2020.
• As per the report of MarketsAndMarkets, the global rideshare market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 16.6% percent. The market value of ride-sharing is projected to reach $185.1 billion by 2026.

From the above statistics, you must have noticed the outstanding growth of ride-sharing apps. This brings an opportunity for all the entrepreneurs who want to build a ride-sharing app. Now, let’s check the step-by-step process of how to build a rideshare app.

How to Make a Ride-sharing App in 7 Steps

In this section, you will learn the process of creating a rideshare app. We will take you through all the steps and explain everything in detail. Checking these steps will help you with your question about how to start a rideshare business. Let’s check the first step below.

Step 1. Conduct Market Research for Your Rideshare App

Make a list of the best ridesharing apps available in the market. After that, check the app store ratings and reviews to find out loopholes in existing applications. Generally, app users share their requirements and challenges in the feedback section. It allows you to plan for your mobile app in a better way.

Study all the applications to understand the flow and its work functions. You can check the taxi app features and UI and UX for your application. Also, look for the mistakes made by your competitors. All these things will help you to find the opportunity to make your app successful in your target markets.

Another thing is to understand your target audience. Your target audience belongs to a specific group who are likely to consume your product or avail of your services.

Let’s take a simple example, GoKid is a carpool solution made for families, schools, and teammates. It helps school children and teammates to book rides and travel along with familiar people. Whereas, it allows users to manage the day-to-day transportation schedules.

Now, from the above example, you got the idea that GoKid is for family members, school authorities and students, and office professionals.

Afterward, you need to identify your target audience’s requirements. The following points will help you to determine your target audience requirements.

• Identify the market trends to know your user’s requirements
• Conduct market surveys to make the strategic decisions
• Look at the social media platforms of your competitors to learn their strategies

This will help you to get a better understanding of rideshare apps available in the market. Besides, you get to know the competition in the market.

Step 2. Choose a Mobile Development Platform

In order to create a mobile app from scratch for your rideshare business, you need to decide on a platform. Whether to choose a native platform or a hybrid. Let’s first understand both platforms.

Native mobile apps are specifically designed to work on a particular platform either iOS or Android. Whereas, hybrid mobile apps are designed to work on both platforms regardless of any specific OS. To get an in-depth idea, you can check our complete guide on Native vs Hybrid mobile applications.

However, it is recommended to develop a native app over a hybrid app because of the following reasons.

Thus, depending on the consumer’s requirements and preference of your target audience, you also need to decide the platform for your app. In Europe, 69% percent of people prefer the Android smartphone, while in North America, 53.62% of people prefer iOS smartphones.

Moreover, you can also conduct market surveys in your targeted region to know the choice of your customers. Overall, through data, you will be able to make better decisions for your app.

Step 3. Decide the Key Features

While creating your own ride-sharing application, one of the important aspects to consider is the features. It allows you to offer better conveniences to your users when they use your mobile application.

Generally, a product like Grab or Lyft is divided into three sections, driver, customer, and admin side. Therefore, we have bifurcated features into different categories to make it easier for you.

Step 4. Hire a Ride-sharing App Development Company

To develop the product, you need to hire an experienced ridesharing app development company like Space-O Canada. Because we at Space-O Canada have experience in developing an on-demand rideshare app for one of our clients.

Hiring an app development company helps you to execute your idea into reality by developing a full-fledged product. An Android and iOS app development agency knows the competitive market and has experience in handling the problems more rapidly as per your needs.

The benefit of hiring a rideshare app development company is that you get all the required resources under one roof. Moreover, developers have the expertise to develop a carpooling app with the latest technologies and give you suggestions to improve the overall product development.

So, if you are looking for dedicated app developers in Canada, connect with us to leverage our expertise in ride-sharing app development.

Step 5. Create Wireframe and UI/UX of the App

The purpose of developing a wireframe is to know the workflow of the app. Making a wireframe helps to have an idea of the design of the final product. Also helps you to build the basic foundation of your app. Here is the image to understand how the wireframe helps.

You get clarity on whether your application screen layout meets the objective, usability, and flow according to your expectations or not. Moreover, it allows you to create a visual understanding of the app.

Before designing the UI/UX of your product, wireframing helps to build the initial level design of the product. Rectifying the issues in the wireframing saves your time during the development phase. Once your wireframe is ready, the designing process gets started.

UI/UX design is the essential factor. You will be required to choose the perfect design for an app that is attractive and makes you stand out from the competitors.

The importance of creating an attractive, seamless and user-friendly interface helps your users in navigation. Creating a smooth UX for your users requires different mobile app design tools which are mentioned in the following image.

Here, making an effortless UI won’t let your users struggle using your app. Thus, it will likely create an impact on users to download the application for personal benefits. Furthermore, you can read our complete guide on the UI/UX trends.

Step 6. Development of Ride Sharing App

If you are looking to develop an application with minimum features or a limited budget, you can create a ride-sharing MVP version of your application.

MVP refers to a minimum viable product that intends to make a product with maximum research on customers’ needs that includes minimum efforts. Here are the purposes of MVP that you need to know before you start your ride-share app development.

How Does MVP Help You in Executing a Business Idea?

The purpose of developing the MVP of the product is to create an app with a small budget and essential features. Once you launch the MVP of your app in the ridesharing market, it allows you to gain valuable feedback from the customers and improve your car sharing app further in the long run. If you want to know more about developing the MVP of the app, then you can surely read our guide on the minimum viable product.

Step 7. Testing and Deployment of Your Ridesharing App

After the development of ridesharing applications with basic features, the QA team of a mobile application development agency performs testing. The purpose of testing is to check whether the application performs according to your requirements or not.

Once the QA team performs all the test cases and errors get resolved by developers, the application is released in app stores like Google Play Store and Apple App Store. These app stores may review your mobile application and take 48 hours to release your mobile application into its store.

Also, you might need to maintain your app once it is launched, or you will need to integrate essential features. It enhances your app and helps you to get success in the long run. This helps to keep the application quality top-notch for your users.

As we have learned the step-by-step process of how to create a rideshare app for your taxi services business, now we’re going to know the estimated cost of creating a ride-hailing app like Lyft or BlaBlaCar.

How Much Does It Cost to Create Your Own Ridesharing App?

To give you an exact idea of the ridesharing app development cost, we have listed down the table of features with its hours and cost.

You can use the formula to get the cost estimation to build a rideshare app. Multiple hourly rates of the mobile app developer to the time required for the development of a mobile application. The answer you get is the final cost of mobile app development.

Let’s take an example to understand this better:

Suppose a developer charges $30 per hour, then multiply it by the hours of each app.

• Driver App: $30 X 200 = $6000
• User App: $30 X $240 = $7200
• Admin Panel: $ 30 X 160 = $4800
• Webservices API: $30 X 200 = $6000

Additionally, you need to know the cost to develop an application like Lyft depends on the following factors:

Cost to Hire App Developers

Generally, the cost of rideshare app development solution or any mobile app development depends on the developers you hire. The charges of rideshare app developers can be different according to their locations. Here’s the table to give you a brief idea about mobile app developers’ per hour cost of four different locations.

The following image will help you to understand the app development cost by different geographical locations.

Now, if you are looking for the best ways to make money using ridesharing apps, then check the next section.

How to Make Money Using Ride-sharing Apps?

Choosing a monetization model is essential to grow your mobile app business and generate profits out of it. Deciding on a business model helps you to cut future costs of the ridesharing business. Here are the three business models.

1. Commission Model

   
   A commission-based module is a well-known module amongst ridesharing apps. In this module, service fees are charged from each payment transaction. For example, Lyft charges 20% from the drivers for each ride.

2. Partnering Model

   Making partnerships with more vehicles opens the opportunity for more earnings and offers a variety of vehicles to customers. Thus, Grab partnered with the Hyundai Motor Group to accelerate the EV adoption models in Southeast Asia.

3. Advertising Model

   Advertising refers to running third-party apps ads in your app to earn nominal revenue. Generally, most carsharing apps are not using this type of model because of the fear of losing customers. Showing a frequent number of advertisements can lead to losing customers.

Once you select the monetization strategy, it helps you to generate more revenue from your app. Now, the next part that comes is to market your carpooling app development solution. It will help you to build awareness among users to know about your application.

Market Your Own Ride-sharing App

When you launch your mobile application, you should think of strategies to market your application. To help you out, we have listed a few ways to market the application below. Following these three marketing ways will help you when you create your own rideshare app.

1. Referrals

   You can offer referrals to first-time users to attract your target audience to use your own rideshare app. For example, Uber started a referral marketing program, in which users give the benefits of free rides to friends and get credit themselves.

2. Partnerships

   Implement partnerships with different vehicle companies to attract customers to your app. For example, Lyft has partnered with Waymo to bring self-driving cars to roads. It allows you to build loyal customers as well as helps you to increase your brand presence in the market.

3. A Loyalty Program

   You can develop a customer loyalty program to offer many benefits to your users. For example, Uber among the top ridesharing companies offers an “Uber VIP” program to its users who are actually their loyal customers and took 100 uber rides.
   Through this program, users can take leverage of giveaways, special discounts, and high-quality vehicles. Building such loyalty programs will lead your brand to word-of-mouth marketing. Here, you need to focus on what value you can give to your users with your mobile app.

Now, we will move further to check the 3 best ridesharing mobile apps that are primarily famous for their services.

3 Best Ridesharing Apps

Now, we have listed the top ride-sharing apps based on popularity from which you can learn and make an app with unique features in your mind. Let’s check them out.

Still, do you have any doubts car sharing apps? You can check out our frequently asked questions for car sharing app development.

Take Your Ride Sharing Business Online

Ridesharing apps have made transportation easier for people and also become beneficial for the environment. Moreover, it brings benefits to the users and car owners by reducing the tip cost and saving fuel. In addition, it is widely used amongst users.

As you have learned about the process and understood the steps, now you have an idea about how you can build your own rideshare app. Uber, Lyft, and BlaBlaCar are the leading ridesharing and carpooling apps in the market to compete with.

Have an idea for creating a rideshare app? We have an expert team of developers and designers who have years of experience in developing applications. Approach us today. We are a leading software development company in Canada and have completed 100 projects successfully. Fill out the query form below and get in touch with us to convert your idea into reality.