A German private hire firm with three vehicles pays €79 a month for its dispatch software. Buy a fourth car and it becomes €179.
One extra vehicle, 127% more software cost. That is not a trick — it falls straight out of how the German market prices, and it is the effect operators most often miss.
This is a companion to our guide to UK dispatch pricing, and the two markets work so differently that the comparison is worth making. All prices were taken from suppliers’ published pricing pages in August 2026; where a supplier publishes nothing, that is stated rather than estimated.
Germany prices capacity, not units
British suppliers charge per vehicle or per driver — a fixed rate multiplied by how many you run.
The German market, where it publishes at all, sells capacity tiers: a package covering up to a certain number of vehicles and users. Inside the tier it makes no difference whether you run one vehicle or the maximum.
That cuts both ways. Fill a tier and your effective rate is excellent. Exceed it by one vehicle — or one login — and the bill steps up sharply for no change in the software.
The published numbers
Fahrdienstsoftware publishes its full tariff, in euros per month:
- Starter — €79: up to 3 vehicles, up to 5 users
- Professional — €179: up to 10 vehicles, up to 20 users
- Business — €349: up to 20 vehicles, unlimited users
- Enterprise — price on request: unlimited
The notable part: every tier contains the same features. Differentiation is purely capacity. In Germany you are not buying functionality, you are buying headroom — unlike the UK, where higher tiers typically unlock modules such as a passenger app or in-app card payments.
You can trial it first: the first 30 trips are free, with no time limit and no credit card.
MPC-Software (TARIS) and SuE-Software, two of the most established names in the German taxi and private hire market, publish no prices at all. Both route you to contact and a presentation. That is normal in mid-market business software, but it has a practical consequence — you cannot benchmark a quote against a market that stays silent. If you go that way, insist on a quote broken out into licence, setup, training, support and any transaction fees, and get the renewal uplift in writing.
The cliffs
Reduce those tiers to a cost per vehicle and the effect of where you sit becomes obvious:
- 3 vehicles on Starter: about €26 per vehicle
- 4 vehicles on Professional: about €45 per vehicle — the worst rate available
- 10 vehicles on Professional: about €18 per vehicle — the best
- 11 vehicles on Business: about €32 per vehicle
- 20 vehicles on Business: about €17 per vehicle
The per-vehicle cost swings between roughly €17 and €45 with no change to the product. Position relative to the tier boundary is the whole story.
The practical read: at four vehicles you are paying the worst rate in the model. Either stay deliberately at three, or grow towards ten and claw the advantage back. Sitting at four indefinitely is the most expensive way to run this pricing.
And count your users, not just your cars. Starter covers 5 users, Professional 20. A three-vehicle firm with an owner, two dispatchers, a bookkeeper and four drivers holding logins is pushed up a tier by headcount, not fleet. Ask specifically whether drivers count as users — that is where these calculations usually break.
The hardware cost with no UK equivalent
Since 1 January 2026, a certified technical security device (TSE) has been mandatory for taximeters and distance recorders in Germany; the transition period has ended and INSIKA-based systems were only permitted until the end of 2025.
This is not a software cost — it is hardware in the vehicle, and a budget line British operators simply do not have. Market reporting puts hardware-based solutions from around €500 per vehicle, with cloud-based alternatives carrying a monthly fee instead. On a five-car fleet the one-off outlay can exceed a full year of dispatch software.
Two things worth money here:
- Check the specific system’s BSI certification before buying. Not certified means not compliant, whatever the brochure says.
- The cost of retrofitting or first implementing a TSE can, per the German tax authorities’ position, be deducted immediately as a business expense rather than depreciated over years. Worth raising with your Steuerberater — it changes the cash impact materially.
To be clear, because the market muddles this: dispatch or booking software is not a TSE and does not replace one. What software covers is the separate record-keeping duty under § 49 (4) PBefG — the Auftragseingangsbuch, which may expressly be kept electronically.
Cost per booking, again
The monthly figure tells you little; cost per booking tells you almost everything. A ten-vehicle firm doing 1,200 jobs a month on the €179 tier is paying about 15 cents a booking. Against an average fare of €40, that is noise.
Which is why arguing for weeks over €40 a month is usually the wrong fight. Operators lose far more to bookings that were never recorded properly, invoices nobody chased, and booking forms that quietly drop a third of their traffic. If the €179 tier wins two extra jobs a week over the €79 one, it has paid for itself many times over.
What I would buy at each size
One to three vehicles. The cheapest tier that captures every enquiry and sends a confirmation. Your constraint at this size is winning work, not dispatching it — put the money into the website and visibility instead of headroom you will not use.
Four to ten vehicles. You are paying for the larger tier regardless, so use it. What actually earns its keep here is automation: a reminder before pickup, a nudge on unpaid invoices, a review request after a completed job. Those run without you and recover the gap between tiers several times over.
Eleven vehicles and up. The questions shift from price to exit — can you pull a complete export yourself, does the price hold at renewal, and whose merchant account is it. A poor contract costs more at this size than a thin feature set.
Any size, if you run chauffeur, limousine or airport-transfer work. Cost per vehicle is the wrong lens. Pre-booked corporate work fails on flight changes, agreed rates and the message where a client asked for a child seat — not on dispatch latency. That is the subject of why generic dispatch tools break executive work.
RideDesk, which we build — so read this as an interested party’s line — is built for that second case rather than competing on price per vehicle with radio-circuit software. Its pricing has been published since August 2026, on a third kind of meter: flat monthly bands by booking volume rather than per driver or per vehicle — free up to 10 transfers a month, then $99 and $199 monthly, with no per-booking fee and no commission (current comparison). One caveat no German supplier on this page carries: it bills in US dollars, so your cost moves with the exchange rate. Invoicing runs through your own Stripe, PayPal or SumUp account, the driver portal needs no installation, and partner hand-offs are tracked as a real action with the margin recorded.
Whatever you choose, run the numbers with your own vehicle count, your own user count and your real monthly bookings — then check how close you are to the next tier boundary. In Germany that single number drives your software cost more than any feature comparison will.
General market information as of August 2026; not legal or tax advice. Prices and obligations change — verify current supplier figures and discuss tax treatment with your Steuerberater.
