What Limo Anywhere Actually Costs You

I've had this conversation maybe forty times in the last year. An operator calls. They're running 8 cars in Brooklyn or Jersey City or somewhere in that orbit. They've been on Limo Anywhere for three or four years. They tell me what their monthly bill is. I do the math out loud. There's a long pause on their end.Then they say something like "wait, that can't be right." It usually is right. They just hadn't added it all up. So I figured I'd write this down. Because if you're running a small limo or chauffeur operation and you're paying Limo Anywhere, there's a good chance you don't actually know what you're paying. Not because you're bad at math. Because the bill is split across so many different line items that nobody really tracks the total. Let me walk through it.

What Limo Anywhere actually charges

Their public pricing page lists a few plan tiers. The cheapest one is around $99 a month. That's the number most people remember when they sign up. Here's what they don't remember. The $99 plan doesn't include the passenger app. That's an add-on. Last I checked it was somewhere around $50-$75 more per month, depending on how they tier it. You also need the mobile dispatch module, which is another $50-$100 unless they've bundled it differently this quarter The reservation widget for your website. Extra. Driver app licenses. Most plans count this per driver, somewhere around $5-$15 a head. So if you have 8 drivers, add $40-$120. Per-booking transaction fees. This is the big one most people forget. Depending on which plan you're on and how the payment runs, you're looking at somewhere between $0.50 and $1.50 per completed reservation. Run 600 bookings in a month? That's $300-$900 in transaction fees on top of everything else.

Now add credit card processing on top of that, which is separate from the booking fee. Stripe or whatever you're using is taking 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. That's not Limo Anywhere's fault, but it's part of the real cost.I've seen 8-car fleet bills run from $500 to $900 a month once everything is totaled. Larger fleets can hit $1,500. And the bills get bigger when business is good, because more bookings means more transaction fees.

Read that last sentence again. The busier you get, the more your software charges you.

The math that finally got me

A few years ago I sat down with an operator I'd known for a long time. He was running 14 cars out of Queens. We totaled up what he'd paid Limo Anywhere over the previous year. It came to about $11,400. For comparison, his actual revenue that year was about $480,000. So Limo Anywhere had taken roughly 2.4% of his gross revenue just for software. That sounds reasonable until you realize what 2.4% means in his business. His net margin was something like 12-15% after fuel, vehicle costs, insurance, payroll, and everything else. So Limo Anywhere had taken 16-20% of his actual profit. Just for the software. That was the moment I realized this pricing model is broken for small operators. Software shouldn't cost 20% of profit. It should cost like, 1-2% of profit. So I did some math going the other direction. What would a fair price look like for a small operator? Something like $25 a month. Three hundred a year. About 0.06% of that operator's revenue. About 0.5% of his profit. Reasonable software cost. That's how AtoZ Dispatch ended up at $25 a month flat. The math is the answer to a real question that's been bothering me for years.

What you actually get on Limo Anywhere vs what you need

I want to be fair here. Limo Anywhere has been around longer than us. They have more features. If you need 47 specific integrations and a dedicated account manager, they're probably the right product. But for most small operators, here's what you actually use: Dispatch console. Real-time vehicle map. Driver app. Passenger app. Web booking widget. Payment processing. Reports. That's it. That's the core. Everything else is rarely-used features you're paying for whether you use them or not. And every one of those features is in our $25 plan. Not as an upgrade. As the only plan.

The contract thing

The other piece I should mention. Limo Anywhere typically signs you to annual contracts. Some operators have told me they signed up not realizing it was a yearly commitment. Others knew, and felt fine about it at the time, until they wanted to leave and discovered there was no easy way out. We don't do contracts. Month to month. Cancel anytime. If you leave, we help you export your data. I'm not saying this to bash Limo Anywhere. They have their pricing model and it works for them. It just doesn't work for small operators trying to keep a business profitable.

What to do if you want to figure out what you're actually paying

This is going to take you about an hour. Pull your last 12 months of statements or invoices from Limo Anywhere. Add up every line item. Include the per-booking fees on every report. Include the modules and add-ons. Include credit card processing if it goes through them. Divide by 12 to get your real monthly cost. Compare that number to $25. If you've been telling yourself "I'm paying $199 a month," but the real number is $700, that's worth knowing. Maybe you decide to keep paying it because Limo Anywhere works for you and you don't want to switch. Fine. But at least you know. A lot of operators I talk to didn't know.

If you want to switch

I'll be honest about what switching looks like. We do free data migration. We've moved a lot of operators off Limo Anywhere. The process takes us about a weekend. Friday afternoon you send us your data export. Takes you about 20 minutes. Saturday and Sunday we set up your account, configure your rate cards and zones, import your customers and corporate accounts. Sunday afternoon we do a one-hour Zoom training with your dispatcher. Monday morning they log in and book a real ride.

Total downtime: zero. Total cost: zero. If you want to look at it, the easiest thing is the 14-day free trial. No card required. You can sign up at atozdispatch.com/try-for-free and test it before deciding anything.

Or if you want to talk first, call (866) 428-0245 or book a demo at atozdispatch.com/book-demo.

I'm not trying to sell you anything in this post. I'm trying to tell you what I wish someone had told me when I was watching that 14-car operator stare at his $11,400 software bill.

Don't pay 20% of your profit for software. That's all