One of the most common afflictions of modern living in a metro or Tier-I city is the constant need to find a parking space for your car or bike. This is where you can choose Arka Softwares for car parking finder app development.
We are experts in designing, developing, and successfully deploying a comprehensive and on-demand car parking finder app and its control panel to help you and your customers.
We are all witnesses to and have personally experienced the hassles one has to go through to find a parking spot on time so that one can reach the office on time. The problem is accentuated by the growing number of vehicles on the roads, limited parking space, and surging prices.
One can’t imagine the horrors of going to the city, shopping mall, or market and then wasting time struggling to find a nearby parking spot.
You may often have to search for almost an hour before you get to a parking lot with an empty spot—that too, at least a few blocks or a mile away from your destination. Many other times, the parking charges are so excessive that you wish that you never took out your car and hired a taxi instead.
Car Parking Finder apps are catching up all across the world and are a rage now. They help drivers save time and money; they can pre-book their spot before reaching the parking area.
These apps help reduce inner-city traffic as cars find the nearest parking spots quickly and get off the roads.
This problem will grow in size and complexity as more people become mobile with more cars on the road. There is no way it is even slowing down, let alone seeing any reversals in the trends.
With each passing day, the number of cars per parking spot will increase, making it challenging to find one.
We are experts in designing, developing, and successfully deploying comprehensive and on-demand apps for startups and enterprises and their control panel to help you and your customers.
With our cutting-edge solution and splendid features built into the app, you can not only help your retail customers but can generate more revenues from different schemes.
The parking managers and operators can advertise their vacant spots to all drivers in the vicinity and get the real estate filled quickly. Frankly, these apps are a win-win-win for all.
The team at Arka Softwares has extensive experience in mobile app development, catering to clients operating in many business verticals.
Their track record of creating successful apps, including car parking finder apps, has allowed us to compile this brief tutorial to help you navigate the intricacies of the car parking finder app development process.
Before plunging into the features and technicalities of the car parking finder app, you must first understand that an app-enabled business works differently from a traditional one. Therefore, you must be aware of the business models and their key features to help you identify the right fit.
Below are the three major categories – Dedicated apps, Aggregator apps, and All-in-one apps – each with its pros and cons.
A dedicated car parking finder app is usually developed and deployed for one parking operator, possibly with multiple parking lots, in a city.
The details of all the geographically dispersed parking lots are fed into the app’s database and a real-time tracking system allows it to identify and allot parking spots.
This app is most suitable for small enterprises and startups who are in their growing phase and cannot afford to invest much in IT facilities. The app would have the most essential features, like an MVP, thereby its cost would be affordable.
For example, a driver would be able to find the nearest parking lot and a spot in it, in real-time, but wouldn’t be able to pre-book the spot.
Aggregator apps are fully functional mobile apps preferred by businesses that may have many parking areas across different cities. It is also useful for businesses that can aggregate data from multiple lots on a common platform and offer differential services and pricing to each. Aggregator apps come with many options to choose from.
Some key features include – search and navigation, online booking, app check-in, and online payments. The app may also assist the drivers in locating the booked or vacant parking spot using GPS navigation.
An all-in-one fully functional car parking finder app would obviously cost much more than the other two options, discussed above. But it will not only combine the features of the two but will offer many advanced features that can take your parking finder business to the next level of growth.
Many notable features include – valet parking, pick and drop service, a heat map for administrators or parking managers, surge pricing, and in-app payments.
Location, geography, and parking time, reserved or on-the-fly, are two critical criteria in defining the features and functions your car parking finder app would have.
Once you have made the decision, it would be exceedingly difficult to re-engineer the system to follow the other model based on both these criteria.
Basically, most parking apps follow one of the two models – first, becoming strong in only one metro or city covering almost all parking spaces available on hire: and second, dispersing geographically to multiple cities.
In this business model, car parking finder apps ensure maximum parking space coverage in a single large city, metro, or megalopolis. Concentration requires them to acquire as many parking spaces as their clients as possible to offer the largest set of choices.
They cover all parking areas – indoor, multi-level, and on-road – to offer the parking service in them. These players are limited within a set perimeter.
Multi-city parking finder app operators tie up with a few parking owners in multiple cities, and often with multi-city parking chains. The app users may not find parking at all parking spaces in a single city, but they will certainly find parking in multiple cities.
This is a good option if you travel too much by car, like a salesperson or an on-call repair worker. Sometimes, their apps may also offer services across state and national boundaries – like ParkRight offers in Europe.
There are broadly two categories – parking reservation and on-the-spot/on-the-fly parking. Again, both business models have their pros and cons. As the parking finder app owner, you may choose to offer anyone or both of these services to your users.
The car parking finder app allows the user to pre-book a parking spot long ahead of their actual arrival. If the app has a valet (pick and drop service), you can order for the valet to wait for you to pick up your car at a designated time.
Institutions, organizations, and companies can also use reserved parking to reserve a part of the building or mall’s parking to use their executives, customers, and other guests.
We often do not plan to go to a place but visit there with friends, for work, or during emergencies. In such cases, car parking finder apps can offer available parking slots on the go.
You can use the GPS-enabled location service on your phone, and the app will notify you of all the available parking spots with their distance from your current location, their facilities, and charges. It is like regular parking, minus the hassle of searching for one.
On the face of it, car parking apps have an amazingly simple interface and process to find, book, and park your car in a vacant spot. But the amount of business acumen and technical ingenuity required shows that with the proper technology and an experienced team, nothing is impossible.
We always strive to make our apps more user-friendly so that more users use them daily and drive more business for you, our clients.
From a user’s POV, the car parking finder app would have the following steps:
The car parking finder apps are an elegant solution to a long-standing problem, and that is why they are gaining popularity. There is never sufficient a good thing because we can offer our specialized services to help you market the new parking finder app.
The app owners get to fill most of their vacant spots and make more money. These apps also reduce the number of attendants required to operate the parking post. The success of apps like these is clear as more users and parking businesses are using them each passing day.
Some reasons why you must invest in developing a great car parking finder app are:
With an app managing all your parking spaces, you will get real-time data on which parking lots are giving higher returns and which ones are not.
Parking management can track each spot in each lot on a real-time basis and, over time, strategize to attract more drivers to lots that are unused.
Once there are some plans to improve the occupancy of parking lots, real-time data analysis can help managers find correlations between them and lot occupancies.
An innovative car parking finder app helps managers monitor every inch of their parking area with a smart camera controlled remotely. With monitoring possible from a single room and no need for parking assistants to guide drivers, you save substantially in labor costs on an annual basis.
One of the biggest pain points of its inability to generate reports in the desired format and on time. The admin panel, accessible from your desktop, allows you to view the data from multiple perspectives and take reports for each of them.
It gives you the flexibility to add ad-hoc elements or fields to the reports and save them as templates for future reference.
If someone wants to create a brilliant car parking finder mobile app, it is essential to know what competitors are doing. We have created information about the top 5 car parking apps for a better review.
Best parking helps drivers to find parking at the most appropriate rate. It can be used for finding nearby establishments in well-known cities and airports across North America.It comes with an incredible set of features allowing people to reserve parking in advance by making payments.
SpotHero is an incredible off-street parking marketplace covering over 7,500 locations across the United States and Canada. It is a solid web-based parking solution for finding nearby parking options.
This software allows users to manage spot tickets and reservations with ease. They ensure secure payments using a number of methods, like credit cards, online banking, etc.
ParkWhiz is a simple-to-use car parking finder app having a search bar to assist users in finding nearby parking spots. It is a perfect example of utilizing the available solutions for creating a flawless mobile app to find parking spaces.
They have excellent data to find the available parking space using the real-time model without wasting time. Finding more than 20+ parking spaces at the airport won’t be an issue with this app.
Parkopedia Parking is an excellent solution covering over 70 million spaces worldwide. It is an must-have app for finding parking garages using various filters.
With a presence in nearly 90 countries, it shows many statistics for the users. It ranges from parking cost to the number of available spaces and nearby parking spots.
Parclick is a useful mobile app for making the parking experience reliable and pleasant for users. It is a famous solution in Europe that helps people find parking spaces in over 250 cities. This application’s installation in mobile phones ensures that users won’t have to spend hours finding a place to park their vehicle.
The main plan of this app is to optimize the European parking market which generates revenue of 65 million euros. They even help the users to rent a parking place in the nearby area.
A car parking finder app has many channels to make money – most of them depend on what business model you have opted for and whether you also own the parking business or a pure-play parking app player.
When you put power in the hands of people and enable them, you will always see that they will make you successful and rich.
Our car parking finder app offer you features that you can exploit to help drivers, parking owners, and parking staff, thereby making you the app of their choice. In due course of time, this strategy pays off big time, and you earn more money.
The car parking finder app can charge either the drivers, or the parking owners, or usually both. Whenever a user makes a payment using your app, a small fee is charged to you, and a commission is charged from the parking business.
These fees are against providing occupant for the parking spot, reserving parking spot, and guiding the driver to the designated parking spot.
To allow users to access the app free of charge, you can instead show them advertisements within the app. With in-app advertisements, the advertisers pay to show their ads, and the users may watch the ads – banners, placements, video ads, etc.– to earn more credits.
To earn more credits, users may be asked to watch more videos, making their app usage completely free. Many automobiles, spare, car wash mobile apps, and car repair service providers would love to place their ads on your app.
You may wish to offer your users and parking owner clients some premium features, for which they will pay you a premium over and above your commissions and fee.
What kind of premium services you can offer depends on the market research as your market will be very specific and targeted. We advise you to conduct a market survey; we can help with that to identify services to offer for a premium.
Making the app chargeable for use by users is one of the sure-shot ways to earn revenues. But if you want users to pay you for using your app, you better offer services and offers that no one else can think of, and users have a great demand for them.
This is a specialized service for parking owners, where an aggregator shows their parking areas as featured parking spaces over others. The parking owners will need to pay extra for featured listings on the app, thereby increasing their chances of getting more occupants.
Subscription plans are a way of continuing your relationship with the app users, with them making a monthly commitment to renew their subscription for better and ad-free services from you.
You can combine the premium and paid app models to create an ecosystem where free users get to see ads or pay every time they use the app, while subscribers get direct access to app features. Subscribers can also be given priority in booking premium or closer parking spots as compared to free users.
You can partner with many stores and businesses in the city where you operate to participate in your promotions. Users will earn extra points, like frequent flyer miles, and redeem them against your fee or at your partner businesses. This way you advertise, and yet offer exclusive benefits to your users.
You can allow users to make in-app purchases of various goods and services offered by your partner businesses. You will earn commissions for every sale and possibly on listing too.
Many great app ideas can turn into annoying apps due to poor execution, faulty design, or simply improper functionality. These trivial things can sometimes annoy users so much that they will uninstall your app and start using it from your competition.
Therefore, you must always work closely with app designers and developers to look out for any signs of trouble. Any module or functionality must be thoroughly tested for user acceptance before integrating them with the live app.
Here we list some common mistakes to avoid during the development of car parking finder apps:
If the users have to input details again and again, then they will easily get annoyed. Therefore, ask your users if you can save their details for future use.
Give them the option to save their addresses with appropriate tags and pre-fill the data as much as possible. Similarly, when a user applies a filter to a search, those should still be applicable when the user returns.
The one thing that any user will never let pass is she thinks that you are trying to fleece them by showing incorrect rates. If there are any discrepancies in the offers available on the app, then users will be quick to leave you for some other option.
There shouldn’t be any hidden charges; all rates, discounts, coupons, points, and fees must be mentioned before they choose.
If in a busy city center, out of four available parking lots, you list only two of them, then you are doing your users and your business a disservice. Limiting the choices for the users is never a good idea, and you must bring on board as many parking owners as possible.
Your car parking finder app must always show correct information regarding parking spot availability, rates, conditions, and any other relevant parameter.
If you are listing local businesses as your preferred partners, then that information must also be verified to ensure no sub-standard businesses can fleece your clients.
The app design can go wrong in more ways than it could go right. If the navigation is not intuitive, the icons are not well-placed, the call-to-action is not visible, or the UI/UX is not smooth, the user may find your app confusing or even irritating.
A lengthy registration process, the need to apply too many filters, or the need to enter too many inputs would also make users lose interest in the app.
Once your app is launched, the biggest challenge for you would be to attract as many users and parking owners as possible. An increasing number of one will automatically increase the numbers for the other and vice versa.
The app model of business works on the “Winner takes all” model where the market leader will be the only one making money.
Here are some tips to swell your user base in no time:
The pain vanilla task of finding the right parking spot is the basic service around which your business will be built. But as today’s users are accustomed to receiving benefits by using mobile apps more, it would be pertinent that you also offer attractive and exclusive offers & benefits to your users. Users must feel that by opting out of your app, they are losing something valuable.
Never compromise on quality. When you broaden your perspective and widen the horizon, you will offer many related services and products to your user.
If any of your partner businesses do not deliver on what they promised, it will reflect badly on you too. When you partner with reputed organizations, you assure that they will take care of their brand image as much as you take care of yours.
Shopping malls, amusement parks, commercial complexes, and large business districts have too many ‘footfalls’ to ignore.
When you partner with them to manage their parking space and display your app prominently to their visitors, you quickly gain a substantial number of users. To partner with such bulk-business drivers, you can offer their select occupants some exclusive deals.
We have listed the core features that a parking spot finder mobile app based solution must have. Remember that the customer end of the app is just that – an app for customers to locate parking spots and make payments.
But there are two more parts of the solution working behind the scenes – the Parking Assistant panel and the Admin/manager’s panel. We have listed the essential features for all three of them for you:
| User Panel | Parking Assistant/Valet Panel Features | Admin Panel |
|---|---|---|
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The following is a list of advanced features that your parking app should have to stand out in the crowd and make a mark with the customers.
If you are wondering if the car parking finder app with all these features will cost a fortune, then you are right and wrong! The cost of app development is greatly affected by the location of your development team – something costing around USD 100K in the USA would cost just a third in India, with exact same quality and features.
In India, the project cost to design, develop, test, and deploy a basic car parking finder app for Android and iOS users would cost around USD 40k.
This will come with a robust backend and custom app design. If you wish toad more features, then it would make the app development more expensive.
The following table gives you an idea about the mobile app development cost based on the location of your development team.
| Region | Hourly rate | Basic level parking app |
| The USA | $100-180 | $80,000-160,000 |
| Great Britain | £100-180 | $120,000-170,000 |
| Western Europe | €80-150 | $130,000-160,000 |
| Eastern Europe | $30-70 | $40,000-55,000 |
| Ukraine | $30-50 | $35,000-40,000 |
| India | $15-30 | $30,000-40,000 |
The expert team at Arka Softwares is always ready and firing on all cylinders to develop a solid mobile app for you to deliver to your customers within your budget and constraints.
There are many factors to consider and many features to include in a great car parking finder app to make it a roaring success. If you are careful from the beginning, you can get your idea developed by a team of expert engineers and designers. Such a team would have sufficient experience in dealing with such complex applications.
At Arka Softwares, we have years of experience dealing with clients with diverse requirements, demands, and challenging constraints that we have always met.
Our services cost nearly a third of what they will cost in the USA and western Europe, making our services one of the most affordable. But rest assured, the quality of the design, features, and functionality are never compromised just because we cost less.
To make a flawless app to help grow your revenues and profits, enhance your brand’s image and recall value, and announce to the world that you have arrived, choose Arka Softwares for your custom car parking finder app development.
There are tons of common headaches that parking apps address cleanly and with ease. It ranges from finding spaces for vehicles and maintaining illegal parking lots. Such incidents can cause lots of fuel loss, resulting in nearly $350 per passenger in a year.
There are IoT sensors installed in parking spaces for finding the presence of a parked vehicle with the help of radar technology.
The best apps to find parking space are Spot Hero, Park Whiz, Passport Parking, and Parclick in 2023.
Yes, Google Assistant comes with a map that displays the parking location of your vehicle. Don’t forget to switch on the parking location card.
Detailed information about available slots is essential for a car parking finder application. Additionally, pay and parking should also be there to help the users.
Jeeto11
The app quickly earned over 1,000 downloads within two months of launch, and users have responded positively. ARKA Softwares boasted experienced resources who were happy to share their knowledge with the internal team.
Archithrones
While the development is ongoing, the client is pleased with the work thus far, which has met expectations. ARKA Softwares puts the needs of the client first, remaining open to feedback on their work. Their team is adaptable, responsive, and hard-working.
Service Provider
I started my project with Arka Softwares because it is a reputed company. And when I started working with them for my project, I found out that they have everything essential for my work. The app is still under development and but quite confident and it will turn out to be the best.
