Zero Commission Different Relationship
Zero Commission Is Not a Discount. It Is a Different Relationship.
Yes. AtoZ Dispatch takes no commission on any booking. It charges a flat monthly subscription for the software and nothing per trip. The practical difference is direction of interest: a commission platform earns more as your revenue grows, so its incentives point at your fares. A subscription vendor's income does not change when you have a good month.
Key Points
- Zero commission is not a discount. It is a different commercial relationship.
- A commission platform's income grows with your revenue. A subscription vendor's does not.
- That changes what the software is built to do, and who it is built to serve.
- Your fares are yours in full — on your own jobs, your team's jobs and your partners' jobs.
- It also means we can recommend you build supply that does not run through us.
- Compare vendors on a busy month, where commission models cost the most.
A percentage model means your software company earns more when you do. Put that way it sounds aligned, even generous — we only do well if you do well.
Look at it from the other end and it reads differently. The better your year, the more you pay for the same product. Nothing about the software changed. Your volume did.
Payout Day, Described Honestly
You already do this arithmetic, probably weekly.
The gross figure comes in. Off it comes fuel. Off it comes the driver's cut, or your own time if you drove it. Insurance, spread across the month. The finance payment on the vehicle. Cleaning. The card processing fee. And somewhere in that column, the platform's percentage.
What is different about that last line is that it is the only one which grows purely because you were busy. Fuel scales with distance, because you burned it. The driver's cut scales with work, because they did it. The commission scales with your success, because the software was running.
For one busy month that is tolerable. Over a year of growth it becomes the second or third largest line on the page, and it buys you nothing you did not already have in January.
What a Percentage Actually Buys the Vendor
It is worth being precise about what is being exchanged, because "aligned incentives" is doing a lot of work in most sales conversations.
A percentage buys the vendor a share of your growth. Not a share of the risk — they do not carry your vehicle finance or your insurance or your bad debt. Not a share of the work — the driving, the service and the customer relationship are still yours. A share of the upside, for delivering the same product they delivered at half your volume.
There are businesses where that trade makes sense. A marketplace that finds you customers you would not otherwise have has a real claim on the value of those customers. A dispatch system that processes bookings you brought in yourself has a weaker one.
The question to hold onto is: what did the percentage do to earn the increase?
Run It on Real Numbers
Here is a worked example. These figures are an illustration to show the mechanism, not a claim about your business. Substitute your own and the point either holds or it does not.
Assume an operator taking $10,000 a month in bookings on a platform charging 15% commission.
- Monthly commission: $1,500
- Annual commission: $18,000
Now assume that operator grows to $15,000 a month. The commission becomes $2,250 a month, or $27,000 a year. The software is identical. The bill went up by $9,000 because the operator got better at their job.
Under a flat plan at Team 25, the same operator pays $299 a month at $10,000 of bookings and $299 a month at $15,000 of bookings. The first year adds a one-time $699 setup fee.
The gap in this illustration is large, but the number that matters is the one you calculate with your own volume and your own rate. Two figures: what you take in bookings each month, and what percentage your platform charges. Multiply, then annualise.
What Fixed Pricing Means Here
The plan price does not move with your volume. One hundred trips or one thousand, the monthly figure is the same. Adding a chauffeur inside your capacity band costs nothing extra. There is no per-vehicle charge and no percentage of any fare.
Plans are priced by capacity: Team 5 at $149 a month for up to five chauffeurs, Team 25 at $299 for up to twenty-five, Team 50 at $399 for up to fifty. Above that, pricing is arranged directly.
What this means practically is that a good month is entirely yours. That is the whole difference and it is not a discount — it is a different answer to the question of who the software company is to you.
The Honest Other Side
There is a setup fee, and it is not small.
$499 on Team 5, $699 on Team 25, $799 on Team 50, charged once. It covers configuration, onboarding, migrating your client list and driver records off your existing system, and training.
We publish it because a competitor would otherwise name it for us, and because a fee you find out about at signing costs more trust than it is worth. If you are comparing a commission platform with no upfront cost against this, the setup fee is a genuine point in their favour in month one. It stops being one somewhere in the first year, and where exactly depends on your volume — which is a sum you can do yourself with the two figures above.
Five Questions for Your Current Provider
If you are on a percentage model now, these surface the real total. Ask them by email so you have the answers in writing.
- What percentage do you take, and of what? Gross fare, or net of taxes and fees?
- What was your total commission from my account last year? They have this number.
- Does the percentage change with volume, and in which direction?
- Are there transaction or processing fees on top of the commission?
- If I move to a flat plan with you, what would it cost? Many vendors have one and do not lead with it.
Question two is the one worth doing first. Most operators have never seen the annual figure in a single number, because it arrives in small deductions fifty-two times a year. Seeing it once, totalled, tends to settle the question either way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is there dispatch software that takes no commission?
A: Yes. AtoZ Dispatch charges a flat monthly subscription and takes no commission on any booking, ever.
Q: Why does a commission model matter if the percentage is small?
A: Because it compounds with your success. On a busy month the commission model costs most exactly when you are earning most, and the vendor's incentives point at your fares rather than at your efficiency.
Q: Does zero commission mean the software is more basic?
A: No. It means the revenue comes from the subscription rather than from your trips. The plan prices are published so you can judge the total yourself.
Q: Is commission charged on work I pass to my own team or partners?
A: Not by us. There is no commission on any booking, including handovers to team drivers or partner operators.
