It shouldn't be called a "convenience fee" unless you can opt out of it and pay some other non-convenient way. What if I don't want their version of convenience? Why should I have to pay a convenience fee? Why can't they just roll this into the main price of parking? It's gotten to the point where as soon as I see the word "fee" I assume I'm being ripped off.
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.
The common example is Mastercard and Visa. They charge a fee to the merchant but they require that that the merchant cannot offer you a lower price to pay some other way to avoid the fee. On top of that, there are 2 fees, one for "regular cards" and one for "premium cards" (gold cards, platinum cards). They charge the merchant more when a user uses a premium card but they require the merchant not to tell you.
In an ideal world (well, my ideal world), these fees would be called out so that you, the customer, could choose not to pay them. You might see, "if I pay cash this $100 product will cost $100 but if pay with my platinum card it's $105. I can save $5 by paying cash".
Mastercard and Visa forbid this for two reasons: (1) they don't want you choose the cheaper cash option (2) they don't want a competitor to be able to offer a lower fee. In the example above, they charge $5 but a competitor could charge $1. You'd might pick the cheaper option but you're unaware of it since they forbid the merchant from offering.
They can only do this because they effectively have a duopoly on the market. Don't play by their rules, lose 99% of your customers. Various governments try to fix this. The cynical reason it hasn't been fixes is they pay off politicians to make sure it doesn't get fixed.
The Reserve Bank of Australia prohibited no-surcharge rules twenty-something ago: businesses were allowed to surcharge up to whatever the transaction cost them, or a calculated average (the idea being that you weren’t allowed to make a profit out of it). They recently partly went back on this, no longer allowing card surcharges <https://www.cardsurcharge.com.au/>, but you are still allowed to offer payment method discounts <https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays#toc-...>, so I presume they’re still banning the card networks from forbidding such a thing.
The problem in Australia was bank cards used to be the standard of electronic payment using eftpos as the gateway to debit from the bank. Late mid 2010's banks started to flog a visa debit card ... which additionally allowed a person to make over the phone or internet credit type payments - if they didn't already have their own credit card from elsewhere. At some point some retail stores started to drop eftpos for processing - unsure if visa debit was cheaper, quicker or just better for them. A purchase via visa used to be the merchant got to sell something a person would otherwise leave to get at a later time ... perhaps by then put up with second hand item or find a better deal in the mean time; so they gladly absorbed the fees visa, mastercard and amex charged - however either rules changed or it was so common place they started to pass on as a fee to the purchaser, a portion 1 .. 1.5% of the 2.5 .. 4 % that the credit card companies were charging merchants.
The govt both sides really want the economy here to eventually move to electronic so it can be tracked hard - however it was obvious the banks along with the $$$$$ credit card companies were making making a killing even at 2.5 % of all retail purchases ... so it was better to encourage merchants adopting close to free services like eftpos again which is about 0.2% max of a transaction.
Caveat - Of course some big retail stores can negotiate down the transactional percentage they pay in fee to Visa, Mastercard or Amex ... though I don't think any here got anywhere near as good a deal as Stripe. [1]
In the above discussion, the merchant is free to (and does) display the fee. Usually because it's not actually a fee they encounter, but some bs way to make the price listing look lower.
Unregulated transaction fees are definitely their own painful ball of wax that should be dealt with though. Rather than just see it, my ideal world would just be that the fee is capped to some reasonable amount which keeps it related to having an efficient transaction network instead of a collusion and extortion network. I'm not sure solving transaction fees solves the original problem though.
In the USA, this has not been the case for several years now. There are a few (I think 3) states that ban passing the cc fee through, but those are state laws not Visa/MC rules.
> 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.
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.
I find it weird that it's okay for a city to pay someone to come around to collect the coins, at no additional cost to the customer, but swiping/tapping? Absolutely not, that must be passed through to the customer.
I'm sure for the city tap to pay is cheaper for them than collecting the $, even without a fee.
One way or another someone is going to pay for the booking platform.
They charge a fixed fee per booking.
They charge a percent fee per booking.
They charge a fixed fee per time window.
They charge a combination of the above.
Depending on jurisdiction, they are required to include the fee in the total price vs burying it on the checkout page. As a consumer, you'll see that total price - some businesses might disclose that a portion of the total cost is a fee, others will not.
My point was just that they are trying to be a little cute by calling it a convenience fee, just call it a booking fee - nothing wrong with that.
I have been out of this industry annd without stake in it for years. But I co-founded PayByPhone, the original pay-for-parking app. TFA suggests that it’s charging $0 in fees. Is this true?
Then aside from theories of corrupt decision making, why wouldn’t every city or parking provider choose the $0 option? (Particularly city governments with a responsibility to their residents.)
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.
PayByPhone also shows ads in the parking experience (thankfully, not too obtrusively, and not until the parking is confirmed). So, they could be covering some of the cost that way.
> 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
Sounds like a pretty solid definition of corruption to me. Siphon private individuals' money into a corporation instead of using public money to offer public services.
The problem with using an expansive definition like this is that doing so desensitizes people to the kind of corruption where politicians literally just accept money or valuables in exchange for misusing their power. E.g. "All politicians are corrupt, so who cares if he takes bribes? At least he agrees with me on X/Y/Z."
The key difference is that the politician is not being personally enriched by saving money in the city budget this way.
I agree, this is just politicians making a decision that non-drivers are not subsidizing the cost of something that mostly impacts drivers. Once that decision is made by politicians, collecting fee directly by private entity is more economical than passing the fee to government and paid out to the private entity.
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.
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.
There is no transaction fee (or "convenience fee") in Vancouver. "Like PayByPhone, there are no added fees for using HotSpot to pay for parking."[1] (2026)
It definitely happens in some cities and with private operators. It shouldn't and there used to be a strong reason why. When we were still rolling PayByPhone out to as many cities as we could, the argument was strong (and often accepted by the city) that by having no additional app usage fees the city would see more rapid adoption of the service by users. That was everyone's goal because a reduced need for meter coverage in busy areas, for new meters in new areas, and reduced physical wear and tear and vandalism and theft, the cheaper the city's operating and capital costs are. Those costs are real.
As the radius of paid parking expands in a metro area, and it always does, it's an enormous cost saving for cities (read: taxpayers) to see it happen with apps and not hardware on streets. The maintenance contracts of meter manufacturers is truly a racket. The city will pay millions up front for a neighbourhood of meters and then pay hundreds of thousands per year for the maintenance contract. Forever. That sort of nonsense is buried in parking rates.
So yeah, IMO, transaction fees are mostly bullshit. Apps help keep capital and operating costs low. They're ahead of the game by ditching street hardware and eating the very small transaction costs (their merchant accounts are typically low cost because of the sheer volume they push through).
I'm looking at three receipts from the past few months with fees added on top of parking fees. You are correct that they are not called convenience fees. They are called SMS reminder fee, and SMS confirmation fee totalling $.26 on every single transaction.
By digging through google and reddit (can't find this anywhere in the PayByPhone app) I can see that it is possible to avoid these fees by digging into user settings, although the app NEVER told me that I was being opted in to this optional fee, and nowhere in the receipt, the checkout screen, or the settings screen does it note that the setting is connected to a fee and optional or vice versa.
I maintain that charging a 500% upcharge on SMS sending (making an assumption that they are paying the highest possible rate for sms send at twilio, which would be excpetionally stupid. EDIT: I just checked, Twilio charges are less than I remember. The real markup is 1,400% per text) that users do not know they can disable is abusive.
So you are correct that there is no convenience fee. There is just an "optional" fee that you are default opted into, and opt-out is buried 3 layers deep in the settings of the app, that charges 1400% markup on cost to send a text message for an app that has notifications. Is there a single setting to disable all SMS? nope. You have to opt out for each message type. Honestly, I think this sort of dark pattern is far more abusive than convenience fees when the city has already negotiated to eat that, and PayByPhone opts you into paying for something without notification. I would be pretty embarrassed to ship this. Its either incredibly bad UX design, or intentional dark patterns.
It shouldn't take a highly technical user having a random interaction with a founder to discover that they have been paying fees they didn't need to after being opted-in without notification (no mention of costs or opting in in the TOS).
EDIT: I dug into the help page. The fees listing is paginated, so at first glance it appears that SMS fees do not apply in Vancouver until you paginate through. Fees have now been increased to $.15. The upside is that I can now say that I literally got nickel and dimed by PayByPhone
It’s getting out of control. Not that long ago 25 cents paid for the parking entirely.
This is an area where I’m hoping AI will cause total disruption. 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. These parking app companies need to just go away.
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 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.
Or, like I've had to deal with twice this month — the parking space is underground, so the app doesn't work until you get to the surface.
Also annoying: I had to stop using the iPhone Lockdown mode because the parking apps I have to use break when it's enabled.
There is an app commonly used in Italy that can be convenient. No need to find a pay machine or whether it's even working. You have your rego already entered so just confirm location and choose duration. If you return earlier, you can check in and refund the unused portion so there's no real fretting about duration either.
Having a consistent app throughout a solid amount of the country means you don't need to learn a new payment system interface in every new town, find out whether you can change language, is it tap or insert to pay, are there skimmers, etc.
This happened to me, right after I was finished I asked them to delete my data, they said they did, years later they mailed me to tell me my data was leaked.
Don't even need to be in a town, I parked in SF a garage. They had a sign saying the machine to avoid the app was on the lobby floor. The machine was nowhere to be found.
The city of Portland, OR's Parking Kitty app works pretty well. It's 67MB and lets me extend parking as needed without having to go back to the car. Transaction fees are minimal too, I think $0.20.
Where I live in the Bay Area it seems like every city has been using the same ParkMobile app for a good decade, so it was set up once and use everywhere. Not sure if that was coordinated but it’s nice.
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?)
More and more, governments are failing to provide a satisfying answer to "What if the person doesn't have a smartphone?" You should not need to buy a mandatory device in order to exist in society.
Yes, there's just some places you can't park. There are places everywhere you can't park if you don't belong to specific groups or meet certain requirements. You can't park in the perfectly good loading zone or fire lane, you can't park in front of a fire hydrant, you can't park in the City Vehicles Only spot, you can't park in the Employees Only spot, you can't park in the Patrons of X Business Only spot. You can't park in the places where a permit is required if you don't have the permit. And you can't park in the places where a temporary pass needs to be purchased if you're not able to purchase the pass.
I constantly go back and forth mentally between "you should be able to handle everything in public without a phone or computer" vs "people should not need to design systems to cater to every single edge case." For what it's worth, I also hate the parking apps and I'm grateful that all the parking in my area is tap to pay without involving my phone.
There are some battles worth fighting. One of them is a society that functionally forces you to be a customer of Apple, Google, and/or VISA/MC in order to be able to perform essential functions like buy a croissant or park your car.
> 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.
>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.
The difference between a highschool kid and an adult is that the highschool kid thinks you need to handle all that and the adult knows that having all the exception paths be broken and require a call to a customer support rep that can't actually fix the problem is actually a revenue increasing feature, not a bug.
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).
> 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.
Here on the east coast I have parknyc, parkwhiz, pango, passport, best parking, and God knows what else. All these towns use different apps and they're all less than 5 miles away from each other. Most have sealed up the coin slot or taken the meter away, forcing you to use the app.
I miss when parking meters would still have time left on them. Those 35c transactions probably don't add up to the amount I've had to pay extra for not getting the last 10-15 minutes of someone else's time.
Am I the only one that find it incredibly annoying to input a license plate number, full credit card number, expiration, etc into some random third party site you’ll never use again to give a city a few bucks to park for half an hour? It is so obnoxious. This isn’t even considering the major privacy issue. I absolutely refuse to use the ones that require a phone number that requires you to receive a text for 2FA. Not going to happen. I’ll risk the ticket.
I often end up using the app and paying the fee because I can stop my parking when I leave and be reimbursed unused time. Where I may have paid for 3 hours previously and lost $1.50 when I got back an hour early, the 45 cent fee lets me get that $1.50 back.
I've seen a city that uses Passport Parking refund the unused time. They also use PayByPhone with the same location code, and using that method did not refund the unused time.
This is how parking works with applications in Finland and I want to assume everywhere else in Europe. This is the main reason a lot of people switched to apps if I had to guess (I almost never see people use the coin operated machines on the parking lots used anymore except by tourists)
Yeah, if I remember correctly the initial business model of paybyphone was precisely that they were pocketing the overlap between parking sessions and using that to deploy at no cost for the city and invisible cost for the drivers
The “convenience” to me is that you can extend the duration of your parking remotely, so you don’t have to guess and pay for the worst case.
Having said that I got a parking ticket last month even though I paid by app, without a later extension, because the parking warden’s “system was down”. Still waiting for the result of the appeal. Have paid by card since.
I am genuinely perplexed how parkgraph solves the problem here?
If I put a parkgrapph (sic) sticker over this and send drivers to my site, odds are few will notice. The owner might once he / she sees payment go to zero on a lot, but would that one was clever, they would just skim a few transactions and redirect…
An extremely easy popular piece of legislation would be to ban these sort of junk fees.
Here in Chicago it's extremely annoying because you can pay physically at the meter with a credit card and not get hit with these junk fees, but if you use their app, you have to pay the fee, and extending the time hits you with the fee again. The app is a piece of garbage that hasn't been meaningfully updated in years and it's not like maintaining the physical meter is free either. Plus when you use the app they require you to load a minimum $20 balance into it so all the Abu Dhabi princes who own our public infrastructure get to make interest on that hostage money. When I street park I make it a point to pay at the meter with my most expensive Amex.
Yeah you get charged $0.35 to use the app or spend two minutes trying to get the meter to let you pay for parking for no fee. I think the fee will get a lawsuit in the future.
old: find a few nickels in your passenger seat, pay for parking
new: park, visit kiosk, scan qr code, struggle with internet, walk around the block , download app, create userid, select password, add credit card, complete address information, wait for confirmation code, walk back to kiosk, record kiosk ID number, walk to car, record license plate, enter information , pay $7.50
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.
Is it? If it's just on your key, you get out, park, shove the dongle into the parking meter a couple times, and walk off. Every few days you stop by one of the various shops that could reload it, shove the key in, give the clerk some more money, then not have to think about a pocket full of change.
Literally all the same steps as quarters, except you can’t use it to buy anything else, and need to refill it only at a special place - instead of anywhere that handles cash and can make change.
It shouldn't be called a "convenience fee" unless you can opt out of it and pay some other non-convenient way. What if I don't want their version of convenience? Why should I have to pay a convenience fee? Why can't they just roll this into the main price of parking? It's gotten to the point where as soon as I see the word "fee" I assume I'm being ripped off.
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.
Then wouldn't it make more sense to roll this into the main price so the main price seems higher rather than lower?
The common example is Mastercard and Visa. They charge a fee to the merchant but they require that that the merchant cannot offer you a lower price to pay some other way to avoid the fee. On top of that, there are 2 fees, one for "regular cards" and one for "premium cards" (gold cards, platinum cards). They charge the merchant more when a user uses a premium card but they require the merchant not to tell you.
In an ideal world (well, my ideal world), these fees would be called out so that you, the customer, could choose not to pay them. You might see, "if I pay cash this $100 product will cost $100 but if pay with my platinum card it's $105. I can save $5 by paying cash".
Mastercard and Visa forbid this for two reasons: (1) they don't want you choose the cheaper cash option (2) they don't want a competitor to be able to offer a lower fee. In the example above, they charge $5 but a competitor could charge $1. You'd might pick the cheaper option but you're unaware of it since they forbid the merchant from offering.
They can only do this because they effectively have a duopoly on the market. Don't play by their rules, lose 99% of your customers. Various governments try to fix this. The cynical reason it hasn't been fixes is they pay off politicians to make sure it doesn't get fixed.
The Reserve Bank of Australia prohibited no-surcharge rules twenty-something ago: businesses were allowed to surcharge up to whatever the transaction cost them, or a calculated average (the idea being that you weren’t allowed to make a profit out of it). They recently partly went back on this, no longer allowing card surcharges <https://www.cardsurcharge.com.au/>, but you are still allowed to offer payment method discounts <https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays#toc-...>, so I presume they’re still banning the card networks from forbidding such a thing.
The problem in Australia was bank cards used to be the standard of electronic payment using eftpos as the gateway to debit from the bank. Late mid 2010's banks started to flog a visa debit card ... which additionally allowed a person to make over the phone or internet credit type payments - if they didn't already have their own credit card from elsewhere. At some point some retail stores started to drop eftpos for processing - unsure if visa debit was cheaper, quicker or just better for them. A purchase via visa used to be the merchant got to sell something a person would otherwise leave to get at a later time ... perhaps by then put up with second hand item or find a better deal in the mean time; so they gladly absorbed the fees visa, mastercard and amex charged - however either rules changed or it was so common place they started to pass on as a fee to the purchaser, a portion 1 .. 1.5% of the 2.5 .. 4 % that the credit card companies were charging merchants.
The govt both sides really want the economy here to eventually move to electronic so it can be tracked hard - however it was obvious the banks along with the $$$$$ credit card companies were making making a killing even at 2.5 % of all retail purchases ... so it was better to encourage merchants adopting close to free services like eftpos again which is about 0.2% max of a transaction.
Caveat - Of course some big retail stores can negotiate down the transactional percentage they pay in fee to Visa, Mastercard or Amex ... though I don't think any here got anywhere near as good a deal as Stripe. [1]
[1] https://stripe.com/au/resources/more/eftpos-fees-and-charges...
> where Visa and Mastercard debit is about 0.5%, and many credit cards are an average of 0.9% or more.
In the above discussion, the merchant is free to (and does) display the fee. Usually because it's not actually a fee they encounter, but some bs way to make the price listing look lower.
Unregulated transaction fees are definitely their own painful ball of wax that should be dealt with though. Rather than just see it, my ideal world would just be that the fee is capped to some reasonable amount which keeps it related to having an efficient transaction network instead of a collusion and extortion network. I'm not sure solving transaction fees solves the original problem though.
In the USA, this has not been the case for several years now. There are a few (I think 3) states that ban passing the cc fee through, but those are state laws not Visa/MC rules.
In Germany, some e-shops offer 1-2% discount when paying using bank transfer (vs card)
It would be good if governments forced a disclosure of these fees at checkout.
> 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.
Sounds pretty illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson-Patman_Act so I guess somebody should start pressing charges against a lot of companies.
That act seems to prohibit offering different prices?
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.
I find it weird that it's okay for a city to pay someone to come around to collect the coins, at no additional cost to the customer, but swiping/tapping? Absolutely not, that must be passed through to the customer.
I'm sure for the city tap to pay is cheaper for them than collecting the $, even without a fee.
In most countries debit/credit fees are far less than the fees to deposit cash in a bank.
The main purpose for taking cash is tax evasion, which outweighs the increased cost of cash handling.
Cities have plenty of employees without much to do.
Coins, being cash, are simple, require no apps, smartphones, batteries, tracking, ads, or privacy violations.
They should just call it what it is, a booking fee.
Nothing inherently wrong with a booking fee if it is transparent.
One way or another someone is going to pay for the booking platform.
They charge a fixed fee per booking. They charge a percent fee per booking. They charge a fixed fee per time window. They charge a combination of the above.
Depending on jurisdiction, they are required to include the fee in the total price vs burying it on the checkout page. As a consumer, you'll see that total price - some businesses might disclose that a portion of the total cost is a fee, others will not.
My point was just that they are trying to be a little cute by calling it a convenience fee, just call it a booking fee - nothing wrong with that.
How is that any different? It's still a fee you can't opt out of by using a different method
> Nothing inherently wrong with a booking fee if it is transparent.
Booking fees are unethical and should be included in the price
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.
I have been out of this industry annd without stake in it for years. But I co-founded PayByPhone, the original pay-for-parking app. TFA suggests that it’s charging $0 in fees. Is this true?
Then aside from theories of corrupt decision making, why wouldn’t every city or parking provider choose the $0 option? (Particularly city governments with a responsibility to their residents.)
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.
PayByPhone also shows ads in the parking experience (thankfully, not too obtrusively, and not until the parking is confirmed). So, they could be covering some of the cost that way.
That looks like an opportunity for an "ad-free" pro subscription.
> 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
Sounds like a pretty solid definition of corruption to me. Siphon private individuals' money into a corporation instead of using public money to offer public services.
The problem with using an expansive definition like this is that doing so desensitizes people to the kind of corruption where politicians literally just accept money or valuables in exchange for misusing their power. E.g. "All politicians are corrupt, so who cares if he takes bribes? At least he agrees with me on X/Y/Z."
The key difference is that the politician is not being personally enriched by saving money in the city budget this way.
I agree, this is just politicians making a decision that non-drivers are not subsidizing the cost of something that mostly impacts drivers. Once that decision is made by politicians, collecting fee directly by private entity is more economical than passing the fee to government and paid out to the private entity.
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.
There is no transaction fee (or "convenience fee") in Vancouver. "Like PayByPhone, there are no added fees for using HotSpot to pay for parking."[1] (2026)
It definitely happens in some cities and with private operators. It shouldn't and there used to be a strong reason why. When we were still rolling PayByPhone out to as many cities as we could, the argument was strong (and often accepted by the city) that by having no additional app usage fees the city would see more rapid adoption of the service by users. That was everyone's goal because a reduced need for meter coverage in busy areas, for new meters in new areas, and reduced physical wear and tear and vandalism and theft, the cheaper the city's operating and capital costs are. Those costs are real.
As the radius of paid parking expands in a metro area, and it always does, it's an enormous cost saving for cities (read: taxpayers) to see it happen with apps and not hardware on streets. The maintenance contracts of meter manufacturers is truly a racket. The city will pay millions up front for a neighbourhood of meters and then pay hundreds of thousands per year for the maintenance contract. Forever. That sort of nonsense is buried in parking rates.
So yeah, IMO, transaction fees are mostly bullshit. Apps help keep capital and operating costs low. They're ahead of the game by ditching street hardware and eating the very small transaction costs (their merchant accounts are typically low cost because of the sheer volume they push through).
[1] https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/mobile-option-pay-for-str...
I'm looking at three receipts from the past few months with fees added on top of parking fees. You are correct that they are not called convenience fees. They are called SMS reminder fee, and SMS confirmation fee totalling $.26 on every single transaction.
By digging through google and reddit (can't find this anywhere in the PayByPhone app) I can see that it is possible to avoid these fees by digging into user settings, although the app NEVER told me that I was being opted in to this optional fee, and nowhere in the receipt, the checkout screen, or the settings screen does it note that the setting is connected to a fee and optional or vice versa.
I maintain that charging a 500% upcharge on SMS sending (making an assumption that they are paying the highest possible rate for sms send at twilio, which would be excpetionally stupid. EDIT: I just checked, Twilio charges are less than I remember. The real markup is 1,400% per text) that users do not know they can disable is abusive.
So you are correct that there is no convenience fee. There is just an "optional" fee that you are default opted into, and opt-out is buried 3 layers deep in the settings of the app, that charges 1400% markup on cost to send a text message for an app that has notifications. Is there a single setting to disable all SMS? nope. You have to opt out for each message type. Honestly, I think this sort of dark pattern is far more abusive than convenience fees when the city has already negotiated to eat that, and PayByPhone opts you into paying for something without notification. I would be pretty embarrassed to ship this. Its either incredibly bad UX design, or intentional dark patterns.
It shouldn't take a highly technical user having a random interaction with a founder to discover that they have been paying fees they didn't need to after being opted-in without notification (no mention of costs or opting in in the TOS).
EDIT: I dug into the help page. The fees listing is paginated, so at first glance it appears that SMS fees do not apply in Vancouver until you paginate through. Fees have now been increased to $.15. The upside is that I can now say that I literally got nickel and dimed by PayByPhone
It’s getting out of control. Not that long ago 25 cents paid for the parking entirely.
This is an area where I’m hoping AI will cause total disruption. 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. These parking app companies need to just go away.
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 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.
Or, like I've had to deal with twice this month — the parking space is underground, so the app doesn't work until you get to the surface.
Also annoying: I had to stop using the iPhone Lockdown mode because the parking apps I have to use break when it's enabled.
There is an app commonly used in Italy that can be convenient. No need to find a pay machine or whether it's even working. You have your rego already entered so just confirm location and choose duration. If you return earlier, you can check in and refund the unused portion so there's no real fretting about duration either.
Having a consistent app throughout a solid amount of the country means you don't need to learn a new payment system interface in every new town, find out whether you can change language, is it tap or insert to pay, are there skimmers, etc.
i recently encountered a town where the only option to pay was via some app that forced me to hand over my phone number and email address
This happened to me, right after I was finished I asked them to delete my data, they said they did, years later they mailed me to tell me my data was leaked.
Don't even need to be in a town, I parked in SF a garage. They had a sign saying the machine to avoid the app was on the lobby floor. The machine was nowhere to be found.
The city of Portland, OR's Parking Kitty app works pretty well. It's 67MB and lets me extend parking as needed without having to go back to the car. Transaction fees are minimal too, I think $0.20.
I prefer it to meters.
That still sounds like about 62MB more than necessary.
Where I live in the Bay Area it seems like every city has been using the same ParkMobile app for a good decade, so it was set up once and use everywhere. Not sure if that was coordinated but it’s nice.
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?)
More and more, governments are failing to provide a satisfying answer to "What if the person doesn't have a smartphone?" You should not need to buy a mandatory device in order to exist in society.
Even having one is of course no guarantee that yours will be functional at the present moment.
Yes, there's just some places you can't park. There are places everywhere you can't park if you don't belong to specific groups or meet certain requirements. You can't park in the perfectly good loading zone or fire lane, you can't park in front of a fire hydrant, you can't park in the City Vehicles Only spot, you can't park in the Employees Only spot, you can't park in the Patrons of X Business Only spot. You can't park in the places where a permit is required if you don't have the permit. And you can't park in the places where a temporary pass needs to be purchased if you're not able to purchase the pass.
I constantly go back and forth mentally between "you should be able to handle everything in public without a phone or computer" vs "people should not need to design systems to cater to every single edge case." For what it's worth, I also hate the parking apps and I'm grateful that all the parking in my area is tap to pay without involving my phone.
There are some battles worth fighting. One of them is a society that functionally forces you to be a customer of Apple, Google, and/or VISA/MC in order to be able to perform essential functions like buy a croissant or park your car.
> 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.
>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.
The difference between a highschool kid and an adult is that the highschool kid thinks you need to handle all that and the adult knows that having all the exception paths be broken and require a call to a customer support rep that can't actually fix the problem is actually a revenue increasing feature, not a bug.
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.
Here on the east coast I have parknyc, parkwhiz, pango, passport, best parking, and God knows what else. All these towns use different apps and they're all less than 5 miles away from each other. Most have sealed up the coin slot or taken the meter away, forcing you to use the app.
I'd like regulation requiring non-digital options. Smart phones should not be a requirement for existing in modern society.
I miss when parking meters would still have time left on them. Those 35c transactions probably don't add up to the amount I've had to pay extra for not getting the last 10-15 minutes of someone else's time.
Am I the only one that find it incredibly annoying to input a license plate number, full credit card number, expiration, etc into some random third party site you’ll never use again to give a city a few bucks to park for half an hour? It is so obnoxious. This isn’t even considering the major privacy issue. I absolutely refuse to use the ones that require a phone number that requires you to receive a text for 2FA. Not going to happen. I’ll risk the ticket.
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.
I often end up using the app and paying the fee because I can stop my parking when I leave and be reimbursed unused time. Where I may have paid for 3 hours previously and lost $1.50 when I got back an hour early, the 45 cent fee lets me get that $1.50 back.
That is not a feature that exists in any system I've used. Sounds nice though.
I've seen a city that uses Passport Parking refund the unused time. They also use PayByPhone with the same location code, and using that method did not refund the unused time.
The banality of evil
This is how parking works with applications in Finland and I want to assume everywhere else in Europe. This is the main reason a lot of people switched to apps if I had to guess (I almost never see people use the coin operated machines on the parking lots used anymore except by tourists)
Yeah, if I remember correctly the initial business model of paybyphone was precisely that they were pocketing the overlap between parking sessions and using that to deploy at no cost for the city and invisible cost for the drivers
The “convenience” to me is that you can extend the duration of your parking remotely, so you don’t have to guess and pay for the worst case.
Having said that I got a parking ticket last month even though I paid by app, without a later extension, because the parking warden’s “system was down”. Still waiting for the result of the appeal. Have paid by card since.
I am genuinely perplexed how parkgraph solves the problem here?
If I put a parkgrapph (sic) sticker over this and send drivers to my site, odds are few will notice. The owner might once he / she sees payment go to zero on a lot, but would that one was clever, they would just skim a few transactions and redirect…
Am I missing something here?
An extremely easy popular piece of legislation would be to ban these sort of junk fees.
Here in Chicago it's extremely annoying because you can pay physically at the meter with a credit card and not get hit with these junk fees, but if you use their app, you have to pay the fee, and extending the time hits you with the fee again. The app is a piece of garbage that hasn't been meaningfully updated in years and it's not like maintaining the physical meter is free either. Plus when you use the app they require you to load a minimum $20 balance into it so all the Abu Dhabi princes who own our public infrastructure get to make interest on that hostage money. When I street park I make it a point to pay at the meter with my most expensive Amex.
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.
Yeah you get charged $0.35 to use the app or spend two minutes trying to get the meter to let you pay for parking for no fee. I think the fee will get a lawsuit in the future.
old: find a few nickels in your passenger seat, pay for parking
new: park, visit kiosk, scan qr code, struggle with internet, walk around the block , download app, create userid, select password, add credit card, complete address information, wait for confirmation code, walk back to kiosk, record kiosk ID number, walk to car, record license plate, enter information , pay $7.50
I would not be surprised if this per-session is to cover credit card processing fees.
But what would be nice is being able to preload a balance and get hit with the fee only once.
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...
I didn’t think I’d run across something even less convenient and slower than using quarters - but here we are.
Is it? If it's just on your key, you get out, park, shove the dongle into the parking meter a couple times, and walk off. Every few days you stop by one of the various shops that could reload it, shove the key in, give the clerk some more money, then not have to think about a pocket full of change.
Literally all the same steps as quarters, except you can’t use it to buy anything else, and need to refill it only at a special place - instead of anywhere that handles cash and can make change.
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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Interesting that the blog post's app charges + 10% per transaction (min $0.75). So their floor is about 2x the median.
Most “public” parking is private, of course, but predictably most of these comments on HN grousing about the public sector.
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