Get that Auto Fare Right with FarePlus App!

Wednesday August 15, 2012 , 4 min Read

Have you been cheated by the autowallah over correct fare? FarePlus is an app intended towards everyone who travels by cabs or auto rickshaws or tuk tuks etc. anywhere across the globe. A simple piece of technology put to intelligent use. An app that gives real-time fare summary using GPS.

To give you an idea, here are some of the features of FarePlus:

Real-time fare calculation.
Enables fare estimation even before once actually travels.
Over the air fare updates
2 travel modes and 2 time modes
Intuitive design

The app produces nearly accurate results as compared to the electronic meters installed in autos and cabs in Mumbai with an +10% rounding error. The technology used to calculate distance is GPS coupled with web services for location.

Launched by Kartik Thakkar and Roshan Sethia, engineers from University of Mumbai are the brains behind this app. Roshan is the founder of another startup called Ganniti.

1) The moment you start the app, it detects your location through GPS and connects to our server to load the most recent local fares. These settings would remain active unless the app detects a change in your location in subsequent use. In this case it would automatically load new settings for your current location.

2) If the app cannot detect your location (maybe because of poor GPS reception or internet connectivity), go to FarePlus Settings>Configure. This time, the location should be detected and settings loaded. Use this also if your location since your last configuration has changed. Say, you have moved from Mumbai to Thane.

3) If the location is detected, but no settings were found for your location, you could either enter the fares manually and start using the app, or drop us an email with the location detected by the app. If you manually enter settings for your location, the same set will be spread across users who also belong to the same location (the power of sharing and communicating).

4) Once configured, the app is ready to use.

5) The first screen is the real-time meter. Just tap on start when you board a auto/cab during day/night, and end it once you have reached your destination. It shows the exact distance you travel and all the information related to your current journey - where did you start, where did you end, estimated waiting time, overall time, and the fare value with waiting charges.

6) Use to second screen to estimate travel fares between two different places even before you travel. Just type in the source and destination and tap on *Get fare*.

7) To get the latest fare updates for your location, you need to simply go to FarePlus Settings>Fare Updates.

“As of today we have nearly 400 users. The overall response has been pretty optimistic and motivating. They have liked the feature set and the UI is being admired,” says Roshan with pride.

They intend to sell the ad space and build things around location-specific content. So if a user were travelling from place A to place B, he would see content specific to that route. Some discount at a nearby mall, or a wine tasting festival. To appreciate honesty, they have launched a campaign called the amazing Auto-Man for Mumbai, where we would post about honest auto-men.

They are planning to optimize the calculation formula to yield more accurate results in terms of denominations that exist in real world. So a 1.30 should be rounded off to 1.50. This would further reduce the rounding off error. An update release has also been planned to the existing app, version 1.2. With this version a user will simply be able to punch in how much does a meter read after a journey (distance covered in miles) and get an approximate fare value for it.

Make sure you're not cheated the next time you travel in an auto, get the FarePlus App!

Advertise with us