Parking should never get in the way of your day.

Nobody drives somewhere to park. You go to a meeting, a birthday or a client. Parking is the part in between, and it should take as little of your time, attention and money as possible.

So we make everything about parking as small as we can: the zone, the meter, the end time, the stopping. One thing we never make small, and that is the price. You see it before you start, and it is the same afterwards.

We started SimplePark as three students who wanted to share empty driveways. It didn’t work: a marketplace needs drivers and owners at the same time, and we couldn’t bring both. But talking to all those drivers taught us something. Finding a spot was annoying. Paying for it was worse: an app with a subscription, a fee that was hard to find, and the worry of forgetting to stop.

So we went to the street, and built the parking app we wanted ourselves. You see the zone, the rate and the maximum parking time before you start. You set an end time, and we stop your parking action on our servers, even when your phone is off. You pay the municipality’s rate, € 0.29 per parking action and € 0.29 per top-up or direct debit. No subscription.

Most people don’t mind paying for parking. What they mind is the rest: the fine because the zone was wrong, the parking action that kept running through dinner, the subscription that charged them in a month they barely parked, the fee they only noticed on their bank statement. Everything we build takes one of those surprises away.

The street was the start. Organizations are next: their people park for work and for themselves in one app, and the organization gets one invoice a month that adds up to the last parking action. After that we want to do the same in garages, at P+R and at the charging point. The parking fades, the price stays in plain sight.