“Free taxi dispatch software” is one of the most searched phrases in this market, and the honest answer is that free exists in four different shapes, each of which moves the cost somewhere else. This page sets them out plainly. TaxiDex does not offer a free plan — it offers a 14-day trial — so you are reading a vendor's view; the arguments below hold regardless of which system you end up on.
The four kinds of free
- Free tiers: a paid product with a capped free level — a handful of drivers, a limited number of bookings, or the core features without the apps. The cap is the product; you are expected to outgrow it.
- Open-source dispatch: software you can download and run yourself at no licence cost. The code is free; the server, the maps, the messaging, the payment processing, the backups and the person who keeps it running are not.
- Free trials: a paid product for a limited time, usually two to four weeks. Free for the trial, then the published price — useful precisely because nothing about it is hidden.
- Commission-funded platforms: no monthly fee, but a share of every fare or every card payment. Free on a quiet week, and the most expensive option you can choose on a busy one.
What a free system still bills you for
A dispatch system touches six paid services whoever provides the software: hosting, map and geocoding calls, text messages and push notifications, card processing, telephony if you take calls through it, and the time of whoever configures and maintains it. A commercial subscription bundles most of these into the rate; a free or self-hosted system hands you each bill separately, and the maps and messaging bills in particular grow with every booking. Add the cost of your own time when something breaks on a Friday night and nobody is contractually obliged to answer.
When free is genuinely the right answer
- You run one or two cars, mainly on street or rank work, and bookings are an occasional extra.
- You, or someone close to the business, is comfortable running a server, applying updates and restoring a backup.
- You are testing whether the business exists at all before spending anything on it.
When it stops being free
The moment is usually one of these: a third driver joins and the cap bites; a hotel or office asks for a monthly invoice with a reference on each job; the licensing authority asks for booking records; a payment dispute needs a receipt trail; or the system is down during the Saturday rush and the cost of the outage is a week's revenue. At that point a published monthly price with support behind it is cheaper than free.
Questions to ask any free tool
- What exactly is capped — drivers, bookings, features, support — and what does the first paid level cost?
- Who pays for maps, messaging and payment processing, and at what rates?
- Where does the data live, and can I export my bookings, customers and drivers at any time?
- What happens when it breaks: who do I call, and how fast?
- If it is commission-funded, what is the share, and what would it have cost on last month's fares?
What TaxiDex offers instead
No free plan, and we would rather say so than dress one up. TaxiDex is billed per active driver — £11/$14 on Starter for up to 20 drivers — with a published minimum of £79/$100 a month, no per-trip fee and no share of your fares. The 14-day trial runs real jobs end to end: book on your own branded page, accept on the driver app, complete, settle, invoice and export. If free is still the right answer for you after that, you will know exactly what you are comparing it against.
Free software is paid for in time, in fees you did not see coming, or in the one outage you will remember.