This is an area where I’m hoping AI will cause total disruption. There’s no reason for all these apps to exist. A high school kid with AI coding could build a perfectly functional app in an afternoon and keep more money in local communities. These parking app companies need to just go away.

You have to figure city council who approved this are either idiots or getting bribes.

Or, like I've had to deal with twice this month — the parking space is underground, so the app doesn't work until you get to the surface.

Also annoying: I had to stop using the iPhone Lockdown mode because the parking apps I have to use break when it's enabled.

I prefer it to meters.

Having a consistent app throughout a solid amount of the country means you don't need to learn a new payment system interface in every new town, find out whether you can change language, is it tap or insert to pay, are there skimmers, etc.

I constantly go back and forth mentally between "you should be able to handle everything in public without a phone or computer" vs "people should not need to design systems to cater to every single edge case." For what it's worth, I also hate the parking apps and I'm grateful that all the parking in my area is tap to pay without involving my phone.

The funniest part about this is that this page is a vibecoded sales pitch for a parking app. It has fees, too, but they're charged to the operator. I'm sure the first operator to ask for a convenience fee will have it added after a few AI prompts.

The problem here is that cities outsource everything to predatory contractors or even sell off parking management entirely (e.g. Chicago).

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-06-30/paying-for-par...

If you're correct, and i suspect you are, I think projects like code for America become more important. PayByPhone wants 35c times 50M transactions? Fuck 'em . We'll write an opensource implementation that any city can run, for the cost of their AWS usage.

I think the same is going to pop up in OSes, Car software, phones etc. A whole lot of public benefit through FOSS because it costs almost nothing to create now. (whereas it used to take incredibly expensive, already overworked, resources/humans)

If I were still a high school kid, I hope I would be wise enough not to vibe-code an app that handles money. Because any time your app handles money, all kinds of laws and regulations may end up applying to you. How do you handle refunds? How do you handle claims (true or not) of fraud? How do you handle actual fraud? If your app has a bug that means someone's payment didn't get sent to the city / parking lot owner correctly, and the customer's car gets towed, you're going to have an angry customer calling you and demanding that you reimburse their towing fees, or threatening to sue you for negligence, or something.

There are just all kinds of minefields when you start coding up an app that handles money. And they can vary wildly from one jurisdiction to the next. What city is this in? What state/province? What country? What are their laws about all of the above (refunds, fraud, etc.)?

So in this particular case, I'm not sure AI is nearly as like to disrupt the market as it would be in use cases that don't involve handling money. Because the risks you undertake when you set up to be a payment middleman are quite a bit higher than they are in other fields.

The difference between a highschool kid and an adult is that the highschool kid thinks you need to handle all that and the adult knows that having all the exception paths be broken and require a call to a customer support rep that can't actually fix the problem is actually a revenue increasing feature, not a bug.

where, when and for what duration?

> There’s no reason for all these apps to exist. A high school kid with AI coding could build a perfectly functional app in an afternoon and keep more money in local communities

- Is there a reason for DoorDash as a company to exist?

- Let's assume for a minute that every mom and pop takeout place had their own app to place takeout orders - how would your or anyone else's experience be? I for one am really annoyed at installing a dozen apps for every smart bulb or fan I get. I wish there was just one app (and unfortunately, now I have to decide to stick to one brand)

I have no horse in this race, nor am I saying these various apps should even exist, but apparently they do and apparently they make a pretty penny so they are of some value, even so much the OP started their own company around it and this is one of their marketing posts.

If a high school kid with AI coding could build a perfectly functional app in an afternoon, they certainly have no moat, so it shouldn't be a problem running them out of business.

Then aside from theories of corrupt decision making, why wouldn’t every city or parking provider choose the $0 option? (Particularly city governments with a responsibility to their residents.)

A city council member trying to balance a budget isn't engaging in corruption by choosing the option that reduces an expense in the city budget, even if it just places the cost on the people paying for parking instead. Constituents would be more likely to complain about higher property taxes or cuts to city services than to complain about a fee like this.

Maybe they just got bribed, but that seems less likely.

Sounds like a pretty solid definition of corruption to me. Siphon private individuals' money into a corporation instead of using public money to offer public services.

The key difference is that the politician is not being personally enriched by saving money in the city budget this way.

I've lived in a lot of places.

In most places electeds usually have some conception of a sort of broadly construed responsibility is to residents.

But in larger cities it's a responsibility to voters and voting blocs, not residents per se. And this is particularly true in older east coast cities.

Dinner running long and you need 10 more minutes? That’s .25 for parking and .35 for the app.

I think Vancouver used to batch at the end of the day (I would only see one transaction for all sessions in a day) eat the transaction fee, and paid a flat yearly rate to PayByPhone for managing it. The new contract - signed after meters disappeared- added the fees.

It pisses me off to no end that if I try to do the right thing and pay for a quick few minutes to run in somewhere I get whacked with a transaction fee that costs more than parking.

It definitely happens in some cities and with private operators. It shouldn't and there used to be a strong reason why. When we were still rolling PayByPhone out to as many cities as we could, the argument was strong (and often accepted by the city) that by having no additional app usage fees the city would see more rapid adoption of the service by users. That was everyone's goal because a reduced need for meter coverage in busy areas, for new meters in new areas, and reduced physical wear and tear and vandalism and theft, the cheaper the city's operating and capital costs are. Those costs are real.

As the radius of paid parking expands in a metro area, and it always does, it's an enormous cost saving for cities (read: taxpayers) to see it happen with apps and not hardware on streets. The maintenance contracts of meter manufacturers is truly a racket. The city will pay millions up front for a neighbourhood of meters and then pay hundreds of thousands per year for the maintenance contract. Forever. That sort of nonsense is buried in parking rates.

So yeah, IMO, transaction fees are mostly bullshit. Apps help keep capital and operating costs low. They're ahead of the game by ditching street hardware and eating the very small transaction costs (their merchant accounts are typically low cost because of the sheer volume they push through).

[1] https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/mobile-option-pay-for-str...

But what would be nice is being able to preload a balance and get hit with the fee only once.

They lasted to the mid-2010s, when Duncan stopped selling keys and software and eventually, support.

[1] https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/1/0816/08/duncan-...

https://ggwash.org/view/35377/its-a-little-harder-to-pay-for...

Here in Chicago it's extremely annoying because you can pay physically at the meter with a credit card and not get hit with these junk fees, but if you use their app, you have to pay the fee, and extending the time hits you with the fee again. The app is a piece of garbage that hasn't been meaningfully updated in years and it's not like maintaining the physical meter is free either. Plus when you use the app they require you to load a minimum $20 balance into it so all the Abu Dhabi princes who own our public infrastructure get to make interest on that hostage money. When I street park I make it a point to pay at the meter with my most expensive Amex.

I'm sure for the city tap to pay is cheaper for them than collecting the $, even without a fee.

The main purpose for taking cash is tax evasion, which outweighs the increased cost of cash handling.

Be careful what you ask for. A common ploy for dominating marketplaces (Amazon, Doordash, etc) is to prohibit merchants from offering lower direct prices than what's offered on their platforms. They always say this is to guarantee that you'll get the best prices with them. But that's a twisted way of saying all prices must be at least as high as theirs, and the point, of course, is to remove any incentive for merchants not to use the middleman.

Assuming there’s a data-sharing agreement between the city and the app, it also allows for faster targeted fine enforcement.

This isn’t something city governments should do to its citizens.

In an ideal world (well, my ideal world), these fees would be called out so that you, the customer, could choose not to pay them. You might see, "if I pay cash this $100 product will cost $100 but if pay with my platinum card it's $105. I can save $5 by paying cash".

Mastercard and Visa forbid this for two reasons: (1) they don't want you choose the cheaper cash option (2) they don't want a competitor to be able to offer a lower fee. In the example above, they charge $5 but a competitor could charge $1. You'd might pick the cheaper option but you're unaware of it since they forbid the merchant from offering.

They can only do this because they effectively have a duopoly on the market. Don't play by their rules, lose 99% of your customers. Various governments try to fix this. The cynical reason it hasn't been fixes is they pay off politicians to make sure it doesn't get fixed.

The govt both sides really want the economy here to eventually move to electronic so it can be tracked hard - however it was obvious the banks along with the $$$$$ credit card companies were making making a killing even at 2.5 % of all retail purchases ... so it was better to encourage merchants adopting close to free services like eftpos again which is about 0.2% max of a transaction.

Caveat - Of course some big retail stores can negotiate down the transactional percentage they pay in fee to Visa, Mastercard or Amex ... though I don't think any here got anywhere near as good a deal as Stripe. [1]

[1] https://stripe.com/au/resources/more/eftpos-fees-and-charges...

> where Visa and Mastercard debit is about 0.5%, and many credit cards are an average of 0.9% or more.

Sounds pretty illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson-Patman_Act so I guess somebody should start pressing charges against a lot of companies.

Nothing inherently wrong with a booking fee if it is transparent.

Booking fees are unethical and should be included in the price

If you read about ParkGraph, it's an app for managing private parking lots. The comparison to street parking fees (which everyone appears to be talking about) is therefore rather weird.

The AI agent they had compile this page was also rather lazy. It collected 98% of the entries from ParkMobile, a couple from a few other providers, and then entered a few other major cities with $0 fees as "not published" even though it's easy to find that the fees are zero.

Ironically, the app charges fees higher than the posted convenience fees, but they're charged to the lot operator.

I don't know why they thought this page was going to promote their app.

Often times these are faster than driving, when you consider the time it takes to find a spot park and pay for parking.

If I put a parkgrapph (sic) sticker over this and send drivers to my site, odds are few will notice. The owner might once he / she sees payment go to zero on a lot, but would that one was clever, they would just skim a few transactions and redirect…

Am I missing something here?

new: park, visit kiosk, scan qr code, struggle with internet, walk around the block , download app, create userid, select password, add credit card, complete address information, wait for confirmation code, walk back to kiosk, record kiosk ID number, walk to car, record license plate, enter information , pay $7.50

Having said that I got a parking ticket last month even though I paid by app, without a later extension, because the parking warden’s “system was down”. Still waiting for the result of the appeal. Have paid by card since.