Why can't they just roll this into the main price of parking?

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.

At least in my town you can opt out by paying with coins. So the convenience fee is for not having to carry coins around. For me at least it's worth the trade.

They should just call it what it is, a booking fee.

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

The direct way to to pay at their kiosks but those often conveniently can never read your card or with lots of dollar coins and quarters.

Reminds me of the early years of ATMs, when banks would charge their customers a fee for the privilege of using a machine instead of a human teller.

The option that's fee-free to users probably costs more for the city, whereas the ones that charge a fee will probably be cheaper or even free for the city.

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.

For some stuff e.g. third party managed golf booking websites, they charge the golf course "no fees" per booking, but they get 100% of the revenue from 1 or 2 bookings per day, whatever the exact terms.

> responsibility to their residents

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.

Living in Washington and yes, there are zero fees in the cities listed (and others). Great app, thank you for making it, it makes life a lot easier for me and the city!

Up here in BC PayByPhone used to charge the same rates as meters. Now, most cities have taken out the meter and PayByPhone charges a per transaction fee.

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 is so damn annoying. Why is anyone asking for this? I can already tap to pay with card or mobile wallet at traditional meters that take coins still. But with these 'pay by app' bullshit operations they expect you to sit there and download a 600mb shitware app on your terrible mobile data connection when you are trying to make a dinner reservation.

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

I have a stash of quarters in my car for parking and they are becoming useless. I have what is essentially an AOSP phone with no Google/Apple/app store - so I guess there's just some places I can't park? It's a pre-paid plan so I can't text the shortcode to pay, and I don't pay for data so even if the web is an option it won't work unless there's free wifi in the area. Whatever happened to accepting legal tender? At least if the meter accepts a tap-to-pay card I can only be beholden to a credit card company and not additionally a cell carrier and one of the app duopoly. (Yes, I'm <1%; what's your inclusive answer?)

> A high school kid with AI coding could build a perfectly functional app in an afternoon and keep more money in local communities.

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 reason they get away with this is because of city government corruption and not any technical barrier

> A high school kid with AI coding

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)

I don’t think the price is the problem. Parking is too cheap in most places. [1] Under-pricing parking has serious negative consequences that most of us just don’t think about.

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...

> Not that long ago 25 cents paid for the parking entirely

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.

I'd like regulation requiring non-digital options. Smart phones should not be a requirement for existing in modern society.

Transit, biking, walking, ride sharing, carpooling, taxis, and other methods exist to get you places.

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

That is not a feature that exists in any system I've used. Sounds nice though.

A better solution would be to ban using phone apps to pay for parking.

there must be a law to cap these fees at 4-5% of the service. This is roughly 2x of the cost to process credit card payment

Might cost them more paying in change to be honest. Someone's earning a good city pension from taking those quarters out of the machine.

I miss the old CashKeys[1]. Some cities had a digital 'key' (basically an EEPROM in a funky key-like TRRS form factor) that you could buy and preload $10-20 at a time on. When you clicked them all the way into the meter, it acted like you inserted one quarter. You'd pull it out a click and click it back in, and it'd drop another 'quarter' in. Repeat as much as you needed, and you could mix the CashKey with actual coins being dropped in the slot.

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...

Every place I’ve been, the fee isn’t charged if you use the pay station with your credit card. It is only charged if you use the app.

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