Taxi management software is a phrase that covers five different products pretending to be one. When a sales rep calls it that, they are usually talking about their slice of the stack. By the time you have bought all five slices from three different vendors, your monthly bill is bigger than your insurance premium, and you are still re-keying bookings.
This guide walks the stack top to bottom. What each layer does, what it costs, which layers talk to each other, and where you can skip a layer entirely if you run under 15 cars. We will also show where your website fits. Most firm owners think the website is separate. It is not.
The Full Stack, Top to Bottom
Here are the five layers, in the order a booking passes through them.
- Passenger surface. The website booking form, the branded passenger app, or the phone call. The first touch.
- Dispatch platform. The desk software the office uses. Receives the job, assigns it to a driver, tracks it end to end.
- Driver app. What the driver taps on to accept, navigate, and mark the job complete.
- Accounts and invoicing. Job data flowing out to corporate invoices, driver settlements, and HMRC.
- Reporting. The layer nobody buys but everyone complains about missing.
A proper vendor platform (iCabbi, Autocab, Cordic) bundles layers 2, 3, and most of 4 into one product. The passenger surface and reporting are where most firm owners end up piecing things together. The website sits across the passenger surface and, done right, across reporting too.
Layer 1: The Passenger Surface
This is where the booking begins and where most firms lose it. You have three surfaces, and passengers use them in different proportions depending on age and trip type.
- Phone calls. Still 40 to 70 percent of bookings for most UK firms under 50 vehicles. Older passengers, late-night, airport pickups with luggage.
- Website booking form. 15 to 40 percent where the site is any good. Younger passengers, pre-booked airport runs, corporate accounts.
- Branded passenger app. 0 to 25 percent depending on fleet size and whether you are competing with Uber directly.
The mistake firms make is assuming a passenger app replaces the website. It does not. Passengers still search “taxi plus town” on Google. They land on your website. Whether they download the app, fill the form, or tap the call button is decided in the first five seconds on the website. If the website is broken, the rest of the stack does not matter.
Our whole offer is built on this layer. The taxi website design page covers the detail.
Layer 2: The Dispatch Platform
This is the software your dispatcher lives in from 6am to midnight. In the UK, three vendors dominate.
- iCabbi. Cloud-based, strong API, favoured by firms that want to connect web bookings directly. See icabbi.com for the full spec.
- Autocab. Well-established, strong in fleet operations, Uber-owned since 2020 but still trading as Autocab.
- Cordic. UK-focused, often seen on mid-size firms, good reporting depth.
You do not need to switch platforms to improve your website. All three expose webhooks or APIs that accept a booking from your site and place it directly in the dispatch queue. That is the handover, and it is the thing that stops your dispatcher re-keying. Our dispatch integrations guide has the side-by-side.
Dispatch platform pricing in 2026 lands between £5 and £20 per vehicle per month for core features. A 20-car fleet is typically paying £200 to £400 a month. The big variance is passenger app and card payment modules, which can double that.
Layer 3: The Driver App
In the UK market, the driver app almost always comes bundled with the dispatch platform. You do not shop for driver apps separately. If you are on iCabbi, you use the iCabbi driver app. Same for Autocab and Cordic.
The exception is firms running a bespoke dispatch or a very old radio-based setup. If that is you, the driver app choice collapses into a broader “upgrade dispatch” question and is not a standalone buy.
Three things to check on the driver app before you sign anything, whichever vendor you pick:
- Battery drain. A driver app that kills an iPhone in four hours loses you drivers, not bookings.
- Offline behaviour. What happens in a basement car park or a rural deadspot.
- Cash and card flow. How the driver marks a cash job vs a card job and whether the passenger gets a receipt automatically.
Layer 4: Accounts and Invoicing
This is where firms with corporate accounts live or die. A decent dispatch platform will export job data to Xero, QuickBooks, or Sage, or will run invoicing natively for your account customers.
If you are under 15 vehicles and your only account customers are the local hospital and one hotel, you can run this in a spreadsheet for years. Do not over-buy. If you are over 30 vehicles with 20-plus corporate accounts, the native accounts module in Autocab or iCabbi is worth the subscription five times over. The hours it saves your office staff pay for it.
The one place your website ties into this layer is the corporate account sign-up form. A proper account page on your site, with a sign-up form that feeds into your dispatch account module, is how you win tenders. The portfolio page shows a few examples in the wild.
Layer 5: Reporting
The layer everyone forgets until they need to prove something to a licensing officer, a bank, or a tender panel. Good reporting answers three questions quickly.
- How many jobs did we run last month, broken down by source (website, phone, app, account)?
- What is our average fare by area, by day of week, by vehicle type?
- Which driver is earning what, and are we compliant with PHV or hackney licensing duty rules?
Dispatch platforms handle the job-level reporting. Your website handles booking-source reporting (which marketing channel drove which booking). Licensing duty compliance sits across both. For the regulatory view, the gov.uk taxis and private hire vehicles page covers the current rules.
What You Can Skip Under 15 Vehicles
This is the section firm owners actually want to read. Here is the honest skip list for a 5 to 15 car firm in 2026.
| Layer | Skip, keep, or upgrade? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Website | Upgrade | The cheapest layer to upgrade and the one that pays back fastest at this fleet size |
| Dispatch platform | Keep | Stay on iCabbi, Autocab, or Cordic. Do not switch for switching’s sake. |
| Driver app | Keep | Bundled with dispatch. Nothing to buy separately. |
| Branded passenger app | Skip | Below 15 cars, the app downloads will not justify the monthly fee |
| Native accounts module | Skip | A spreadsheet and Xero cost you £30 a month vs £200 for a module you will half-use |
| Advanced reporting add-ons | Skip | The core dispatch reports cover what you need |
At this fleet size, the biggest return on pound spent is almost always the website and local SEO. A £799 Essential build plus £49 to £99 a month SEO beats a £200-a-month passenger app rollout every time. The local SEO guide has the numbers on why.
How the Layers Actually Talk to Each Other
This is the bit vendors hate explaining because it is where the connections leak money. Here is how a booking should flow end to end.
- Passenger fills the form on your website. Pickup, drop-off, time, contact number.
- Your site calculates a fare using a mileage matrix or a mapping API, and shows it to the passenger in under three seconds.
- The passenger confirms. The site fires a webhook or API call into your dispatch platform.
- Dispatch receives the job as a structured record. Address, fare, vehicle type, notes. Not an email.
- Dispatch assigns the job to a driver. The driver app pings.
- Job runs. Completion, card payment (if any), and fare land back in dispatch.
- Dispatch rolls the job into the nightly report and the end-of-month invoice.
The weakest link in most UK firms is step 3. The website fires an email, not a webhook, and a human becomes the API. That human misses a booking every Friday night around 11pm because they are taking a call. That is the break the website upgrade fixes.
Where Our Website Builds Fit
We build layer 1, the passenger surface, and we wire it cleanly into layer 2, the dispatch platform. That is the scope. We do not sell dispatch. We do not build driver apps. We work on top of what you already have.
| Tier | Price | Dispatch handover |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | £499 | Form emails dispatch inbox |
| Essential | £799 | Webhook into iCabbi, Autocab, or Cordic |
| Fleet | £1,499 | Full API integration with account portal and fixed airport quotes |
Add £29 to £129 a month for the care plan that keeps the plumbing working. Full pricing is on one page.
Your Move This Week
Write down your current stack on a single sheet of paper. Five boxes: passenger surface, dispatch, driver app, accounts, reporting. For each box, note the vendor, the monthly cost, and what you actually use it for.
You will find one of two things. Either you are paying for a layer you barely use, or you have a gap where bookings leak out. Both are easy to act on once you can see them.
If the gap is at layer 1 or the handover from layer 1 to layer 2, book a free booking funnel audit. We will look at your site, map the handover, and send a one-page PDF with the fixes. No pitch attached. Request your audit here. Our full services page covers what we can and cannot help with.
Taxi management software sounds complicated because vendors prefer it that way. Once you see the five layers, you can spend with purpose. Most firms under 15 cars need one good layer well-wired. Not five average ones stitched together.