What it does, what it costs, how auto-dispatch actually works, and how to choose without signing something you regret. Written for UK taxi, minicab and private hire operators by people who build one of these systems.
Try our system free Compare all UK suppliersThe 30-second version. Taxi dispatch software takes the booking, prices the job, picks the driver and tracks it to completion. In the UK it costs roughly £50–£150 a month for a small fleet, plus per-driver charges and usually a setup fee. The three things that decide whether you are happy with it two years later are the contract length, what is charged separately, and who answers the phone when it breaks.
A dispatch system replaces the whiteboard, the radio and the spreadsheet with one screen. A booking arrives — by phone, app, website or WhatsApp — and the system handles the chain from there:
Everything else in a feature list is a variation on those five things.
This is the part operators are most sceptical about, usually because they have seen a system allocate a job badly and conclude the whole idea is unreliable.
Auto-dispatch scores every available vehicle against the job. The scoring normally combines distance to the pickup, how long each driver has been waiting, vehicle type against what the job needs, zone position, and driver rating. The job is offered to the highest-scoring driver for a set number of seconds; if they do not accept, it passes to the next.
Two things make the difference between auto-dispatch that works and auto-dispatch that gets switched off in week two:
Below about three vehicles, a phone and a notebook genuinely still work, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. The threshold is somewhere around three to five vehicles, and it is usually crossed not because of vehicle count but because of one of these:
The arithmetic is straightforward: at typical UK fares, recovering roughly one lost job a week covers an entry-level system. That is the reason our own entry price sits at £30 a month rather than higher.
Every supplier's feature list looks identical at bullet-point level. Judge a demo on these five and ignore the rest until they are settled:
Not just that it exists — that the weighting can be set to match how your firm allocates work, and that controllers keep a manual override.
The phone rings, the customer's record and saved addresses are already on screen. This is the difference between a ten-second booking and a ninety-second one on a Friday night.
Real road distance against your own tariffs, with rules for waiting time, airports, night rates and vehicle class. Wrong quotes cost you money and arguments.
PO references at booking, jobs accumulating against the account, automatic month-end invoices. This is what unlocks corporate work, which is the most reliable revenue there is.
Job offer with pickup, destination and fare visible before accepting. Driver resistance is the most common reason a rollout fails, and it is always about earnings visibility.
Every on-duty driver on one map, updating every few seconds, with last-known position retained if a driver drops offline. See our full feature list.
UK taxi dispatch software typically runs £50–£150 per month for a small fleet, with per-driver charges of £5–£20 per driver per month on top, and setup fees between £250 and £1,500. Some platforms take a commission of 5–15% per trip instead of, or as well as, a licence fee.
Commission is the number that dwarfs everything else. On a fleet turning over £20,000 a month, 10% is £2,000 — more than any licence fee in this market. If a quote involves commission, work that out first.
For reference, ours is £30 a month for the first five active drivers, £2 per active driver after that, and a flat £120 for unlimited drivers — whichever of the two is cheaper for your fleet. Own-brand app packages are £180 and £250 a month. No setup fee, no commission, no minimum term. The full breakdown of every cost in this market, with worked examples at 5, 10, 20 and 40 drivers, is on our real cost of dispatch software page.
Cloud has won this argument for most independent operators, for four reasons: no server to buy, no server to fail, controllers can work from home, and backups happen without you thinking about it.
On-premise retains one genuine advantage — it keeps working when your broadband drops. That is real, and most operators solve it with a 4G failover router costing a fraction of a server. On-premise still makes sense if you hold contracts that specify where data lives. Our cloud versus on-premise comparison goes through the trade-off row by row.
The fear of switching keeps more operators on the wrong system than price does. It is manageable if you sequence it: check your notice period first, export your data while you are still a customer, load tariffs and account customers first, run both systems in parallel for a week, and switch mid-week rather than before a bank holiday. Budget three days for controllers to stop hesitating — that is the real cost, and it is smaller than most people expect.
We import customer records, saved addresses, account details and booking history from every major UK system free of charge. The full sequence, and supplier-by- supplier notes, are on the UK dispatch software comparison.
If you want to see the market laid out side by side, start with the 2026 comparison. If you want to know what we charge, it is on the pricing page rather than behind a form. If you would rather just try it against your own jobs, that is free and takes 24 hours to set up.
Straight answers, no sales script. Still stuck? Ask us directly — we answer the same working day.
Auto-dispatch scores every available vehicle against the job and offers it to the best match. Scoring normally combines distance to pickup, how long the driver has been waiting, vehicle type, zone position and driver rating. The job is offered to the top driver for a set number of seconds, then passes to the next. Controllers can always override it manually.
The five that determine whether the system works day to day are: reliable auto-dispatch, CLI caller recognition so the phone shows who is ringing, accurate fixed-fare quoting, account customer invoicing, and a driver app drivers will actually use. Everything else is useful but not decisive. Judge a demo on those five before anything else.
CLI, or Calling Line Identification, shows your controller who is ringing before they answer, along with that customer's saved addresses and booking history. A regular customer's booking can be taken in under ten seconds because the pickup address is already on screen. On a busy Friday night this is the difference between answering every call and losing them.
Per-driver pricing suits fleets with a stable driver count; flat-rate suits fleets that swell at weekends. The trap is per-driver systems that charge for inactive accounts, so a fleet of 20 active drivers pays for 35 registered ones. Always ask whether you are billed on registered drivers or drivers who actually logged in that month.
Ask five things: what is the total monthly cost at my real driver count, what is the minimum contract term, what happens to my data if I leave, is support answered by a human in the UK and at what hours, and can I speak to two existing customers of my size. Vague answers on any of these are the warning sign.
Start with your tariffs and your regular account customers, because those carry the most revenue risk. Load them first, run the new system alongside your existing method for a week, then move the phones across. Most operators find the first three days are the hard part and the team stops referring to the whiteboard by day five.
Driver resistance is the most common reason a rollout stalls, and it is nearly always about earnings rather than technology. Drivers accept a new app quickly when they can see the job offer, the fare and the pickup distance before accepting, and when allocation is visibly fair. Show them the job-offer screen at the start, not the admin features.
Yes. Taxi Dispatch stores driver badge numbers, licence expiry dates, insurance and MOT dates, and vehicle plate details, and warns you before any of them expire. Every completed job keeps a timestamped record of driver, vehicle, route and fare, which is what councils ask for during a compliance audit.
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