How to Create an App Like Heetch

Published on December 5th, 2024

Heetch is one of those ride-sharing apps where passengers can find drivers in their city, and it’s extremely convenient and efficient for travel and was launched to give people another choice aside from the traditional taxi service. Heetch focuses on providing an easy experience.

Above all, Heetch features a fixed pricing system, meaning that no one will have to face unexpected costs, and everything to be paid will be shown to them beforehand. This transparency made it a favorite among users, especially in urban areas where ride-sharing is becoming increasingly important. Additionally, Heetch creates a community where drivers can work on earning an income whilst ensuring their neighbors with a trusted transportation option. 

If you plan to create an app like Heetch, here is how to go about it:

Ride-Sharing Market Analysis

The ride-sharing industry has shown significant growth and is projected to continue expanding in the coming years. Here are some key statistics and insights:

Source: Statista

Market Size and Growth

• The global ride-sharing market was valued at USD 85.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 185.1 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 16.6% during this period 1.

• Another estimate suggests that the overall market size in 2022 was between $95.09 billion and $100.55 billion, with expectations of a CAGR of 17.2% leading to a market value of $305 billion by 2029 3.

Market Share Dynamics

• In the U.S. market, Uber has maintained a dominant position, holding a market share that has fluctuated between 68% and 76% since 2017, with a current share of about 74% 4.

• Lyft, while significantly smaller, has also seen growth, with observed sales increasing by 3% year-over-year as of March 2024 5.

Future Projections

• The ride-sharing market is expected to grow by more than 40% between 2023 and 2028, with a projected market value of around $216 billion 6.

What is Heetch? A Ride-hailing App?

Before delving into the development of an app like Heetch, it is essential to comprehend the core functions and outstanding features of the app. Heetch is a ride-hailing app designed to get passengers in touch with local drivers for easy affordable transport. Heetch was founded in 2013 by Teddy Pellerin a co-founder of an app with its headquarters in Paris, France. It started gaining much popularity due to its friendly approach to a community-driven model that distinguishes it from others in ride-hailing services. The application is capable of providing the user with the advantage of reserving rides through his smartphone by presenting him with an easily understandable interface.

Since its establishment, Heetch has expanded to become a group of services operating in many cities in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and it has reached different markets while being responsive to their needs. The firm has maintained an ability to adapt to regulatory compliance and to the benefits of drivers as well by steering towards a fair ecosystem where both parties are on the advantageous side: the passengers and the drivers. Becoming aware of these factors will prove very beneficial for anyone who would like to create an app like heetch in today’s competitive environment.

Must Read: How to Create a Taxi App? A Brief Guide

Growth Factors of Ride-hailing Apps

The ride-hailing industry has presented tremendous growth due to the growing demand for easy and readily available transportation services from the urban population.

Diversification of Competition: Uber and Lyft stand at the front line, while several local as well as regional services like Heetch start out serving different parts of a city and preferences.

Technological Advantages: The invention of Mobile and GPS increases the efficiency and reliability of ride-hailing services, which is the main reason for its improvement in user experience.

Regulatory Issues: The regulatory framework in most cities all over the world and countries is still in the developing stages. This creates a challenge but also provides opportunities for new entrants in this ride-hailing space.

COVID-19 Impact: For ridesharing, the pandemic first broke usage patterns but rebounded when travel restrictions eased, with riders in need of alternative public transport.

User Preferences: In today’s time, riders will not just rely on cost but also on the factor of safety, convenience, as well as on the level of quality in the experience during riding, therefore the services by different ride-hailing applications that are offered to riders.

The above is a general outlook on the map of ride sharing applications, which is informative when one wishes to create a fast-competing application like Heetch.

Top 5 Ride-hailing Apps Like Heetch

Building a car rental application could be an extremely profitable business. However, the learning of what some of the market leaders are currently doing would provide valuable insight into the reasons why these apps like Heetch, succeed. So, without much more ado, here is the list of the top 5 ride-hailing applications to consider in building your app like Heetch:

1. Gett

Gett is a leading ride-hailing app covering more than 150 cities worldwide connecting individuals with both traditional taxis and private-hire cars. The business offers corporate transport solutions and on-demand delivery. It promises low prices, advanced booking options, and much better customer support, becoming highly popular these days.

Must Check: Cost To Develop A Popular UK-based Rider App Like Gett Taxi

2. Bolt

Born as Taxify, Bolt is one of the fast-growing ride-hailing applications across Europe and Africa. Besides traditional ride-hailing services, it introduced other services like scooter-sharing and food delivery. Bolt offers competitive prices and is highly respected due to the initiative on carbon offsets.

Suggested: Steps to Create Taxi Booking App Like Bolt

3. Lyft

An apparent US-based ridesharing application, Lyft operates in North America. It provides regular ridesharing, carpooling, and scooter-sharing options. What sets them apart from their peers is the ethical practice toward drivers, which includes better pay and better benefits.

4. Uber

Arguably the world’s most recognized ride hailing app, Uber is available in multiple locations around the world and has expanded into food delivery and electric bikes. This company’s success can be attributed to a user-friendly interface, efficient service, and competitive pricing. The negative criticism regarding Uber has been that its pay was not doing anything for the drivers and issues have arisen in certain markets, including where safety factors were involved.

Get: Uber Like App Development

5. Free Now

Of course, it was developed much earlier under the brand MyTaxi, but Free Now is now another wide ride-hailing application company operating lately in Europe and South America. The company offers normal taxi services and carpooling alternatives; they differ from their competitors through sustainability, using electric vehicles for some of their rides.

Also Check: Steps To Create An App Like Free Now

From Request to Ride: How Taxi Booking Apps Work

Taxi booking app-based companies connect passengers to motorists in the vicinity of the passenger through a mobile application. In return, when a passenger requests a ride from a device, an application locates a nearby available driver and sends him or her the request. The passenger request can be accepted or declined by the driver, and once accepted, the application navigates them to the passenger’s desired destination. Normally, the payment is made through the application for cashless.

1. Download and Registration

Users of an application have to download an application from App Store or Google Play to begin taxi booking. Immediately after registration, they are required to fill their personal information with name, email, and payment.

2. Choose Location

After a user signs up, he may choose his location or give an exact address from which he wishes to be picked. This allows the application to track drivers around him and declare an approximate time of arrival.

3. Ask a Ride

The users set a location and then request for a ride. Then, they can select the type of car to arrive in. Then, there is a connection to the nearest available driver.

4. Track Ride

Once the driver accepts the ride, the users track the driver’s location as well as when they are expected to arrive. This provides for real-time updates. This also means real-time communication between the driver and the passenger.

5. Payment and Rating

Payment is automatically processed after arrival at the destination through the registered payment mode from the app. Passengers also get to rate their experience and provide necessary improvements for better ride experiences in the future.

Must Read: 15 Best Cheapest Rideshare Apps

Top Reasons to Develop a Ride-Hailing App

There are a couple of advantages of developing ride-hailing app like heetch that make it popular among users and investors. Some of them include:

1. Additional Revenue Streams

With ride-hailing apps, the driver would have another stream of income, for instance if s/he does not have full-time employment, and if s/he performs other jobs for other people. Most importantly, such apps enable him to earn additional income in his free time and increase his total income.

2. Scalability

Low setup costs make the apps scalable as they can easily expand and scale rapidly if put in front of the right markets with appropriate user acquisition strategies that gain them a large number of users.

3. Efficiency

It assists in matching drivers with passengers efficiently as the waiting time is cut down and also increases the overall efficiency of transportation.

4. Competitive Advantage

Ride-hailing app like heetch brings in a new, highly efficient mode of alternative to other traditional modes of transportation in hypercompetitive industry transportation. This bestows competitive advantages of companies over other companies.

5. Data-driven insights

Ride hailing applications gather so much information on user behavior as well as preferences that can be used to create an excellent experience both for the passengers and for the drivers. But at the same time, it can also be marketed along with the psychographics and extracted using price optimization.

Also Read: Top 10 Best Taxi Apps

7 Key Steps to Build An App Like Heetch

If you are interested to invest in taxi app development and want to develop a ride-hailing app like Heetch, then there are seven major steps you should use as a guide in that process. The first thing that was involved here is conducting thorough market research so that you can understand your target audience and their preferences.

1. Conduct Market Research

But before that, it’s highly important to understand the needs and preferences of your target audience and who are probably the potential competitors. Everything will be helpful in guiding decisions during the development process.

2. Determine the Best Tech Stack

The right choice of the tech stack builds a stable and user-friendly app. Here, a well-chosen tech stack is going to affect your application’s performance as well as scalability and general user experience while using the application. Besides all these factors, various conditions like the requirements of your project, the skills of your development team, and the long-term maintainability of technologies chosen are included in that.

All of this calls for the right selection of programming languages, frameworks, as well as your libraries that will give you the appropriate functionalities for your app. For instance, you might choose to have a well-known mobile app development frameworks in place to help you easily manage an update and offer wider access to a community if support is needed. Finally, it is through careful thought of your stack that opens up a road for the success of your application.

3. Design an Intuitive UI/UX

The user interface and experience come second to none as avenues to attract fresh users to a site and retain them for a longer period. An optimum app design should be intuitive and not convoluted; an app that’s easy for the user to find what they are looking for without any frustration. Visual appeal comes in as another crucial factor, which is that your app will have attractive designs keeping a user’s attention and inspiring further exploration.

4. Build the App

An app nowadays should be planned and prepared in advance. Develop your MVP-the most basic version of your application with the bare essentials for testing and finalizing purposes. This approach will provide you with early feedback from actual end-users and show the eventual bugs that might occur in the future before investing your time in more development.

Whereas designing your app, functionality over aesthetics should be prominent. Though it will look beautiful graphically, its core functionality in your app cannot be compromised. You should test and debug properly to ensure a smooth run of your app on different devices as well as platforms.

5. Testing and Quality Assurance

Testing and quality assurance is the most sensitive part of mobile app development to build an app like heetch. Here, bugs, errors, user experience issues, and all the other verification aspects must be checked to see if the application works as planned. This also increases the chances that beta testing with a small group of users can provide feedback and indicate areas that need improvement.

6. Launching and Marketing

After all this is done, and your app has finally fully developed and has been tested, you can then release it into the market. Marketing campaigns play an essential role for promoting your app and reaching the correct target audience. This involved building a website or landing page, using social media platforms, working with influencers or bloggers, and running paid ads.

You should also optimize your app on the app stores using proper keywords, relevant visuals and descriptions, and updates in user ratings and reviews regularly.

7. Continuous Support and Upgrades

The journey does not end when the application is launched, because your app needs continuous support and upgrade to keep users engaged and satisfied. That could include responding to queries or complaints from the user, debugging or fixing bugs or even glitches, as well as features they requested.

Monitoring and reviewing data from user downloads, retention rates, and in-app purchases would also provide insights into your audience to make the right decisions for future upgrades.

Must Check: 10 Best Taxi Booking Apps in USA For Quick Rides

Features of the Taxi Booking App

Having discussed the stages required to develop and launch an app like heetch, the next thing we will have to consider will be must-have features for a taxi booking app. These are some of the most important features that will enable easier and smoother experiences for users; they are going to make your app like heetch a differentiator against other apps.

1. User Panel

2. Driver Panel

3. Admin Panel

Cost to Create an App like Heetch

The cost of building an app like Heetch would depend on what features and complexities you put into it and the platform. Talking about creating a simple taxi booking application that has top-level functionalities, it would be somewhere in the range of $10,000 to $50,000. But in order to include some feature that’s advanced or you need both you must produce it on Android as well as iOS, so it would then shoot up to $100,000 or more.

Developer’s fees may be in-house or outsourced and management/maintenance together with marketing costs form other fees.

Suggested: Taxi App Development Cost

Innovations and Future Trends in Ride-Hailing Apps

Since ride-hailing apps have been gaining rapid popularity, this market should only grow within the next coming years. Moreover, new technologies and changing demands from customers will imply further innovations in this industry. Some of the potential future trends for ride-hailing apps include:

1. Electric and Autonomous Vehicles

Currently, with the increase in electric and autonomous vehicles, some ride-hailing companies will start putting them into their fleets. Their future adoption is highly probable; therefore, carbon emissions will reduce, and both companies and consumers may see cost savings in addition.

2. Multi-model Transportation

It can be said that in the near future, ride-hailing apps could make their customers’ lives easier by integrating within multi-modal transportation systems. That would without a doubt be through incorporating other modes of transportation such as public transit, bikes, scooters, and even air into these applications.

3. Hyper- Personalization and AI-Driven Experience

With the growth of technology, ride-hailing applications can gather more data about their users and leverage this to personalize their application experience. Examples can include AI-driven suggestions for routes, preferred vehicles, and entertainment in the car. Thus investing in ai development services of your taxi business can be beneficial

Tech Stack used in Ride-hailing App Development

Tech stack with which the ride-hailing application is developed is constantly shifting and varies between different organizations. Nevertheless, quite a few commonly used technologies are:

How can iTechnolabs help you to build an app like Heetch?

At iTechnolabs, you can meet the best mobile app developers and designers who can help you create a ride-hailing application like Heetch. We’re high on the expertise in using the latest tools and technologies to design mobile applications of quality, appealing, and durable, set in such a way that your target audience will definitely prefer your application.

Our long-time experience in taxi booking app development will help create a specific understanding of the ride-hailing market with proper implementation of features such as real-time tracking, secure payment options, and robust user interfaces. Whatever you may need-be it creating a new app or reshaping an existing one-we are here to guide you through the process of development, ensuring your app stands out in a competitive landscape. Our services include:

• Customized Development : We understand that each business is distinct with different needs and challenges. That’s why we provide specifically customized development solutions in order to solve exactly those requirements, ensuring that your application is perfectly aligned with your business goals and operational workflows.
• User Experience Design: Our very talented design team is here to create intuitive and user-friendly interfaces that are not only visually attractive but also great enhancers to the overall experience of your customers. In pursuit of this usability and accessibility, we strive towards making users satisfied and engaged while they navigate through your application.
• Integration with Third Party Services: The integration of multiple third party services can be done to enhance the functionality of your app. These include payment gateways, safe transactions, advanced mapping services supporting location-based features, and powerful analytic tools that will help you have an understanding of the behavior and performance of users.
• The real-time communication: With our considerable experience in implementing real-time communication technologies like WebSockets or Firebase, we can allow features to your app that would include live tracking and instant updates. This capability generally fosters deeper engagement and responsiveness, more than making your application dynamic and user-centric.

Conclusion:

Our end-to-end mobile app development services help you meet your specific needs and allow you to build an app like heetch for your taxi business. From conceptualization and design to deployment and maintenance, we work closely with you every step of the way to ensure your application is a powerful tool that truly drives business growth. We could make your idea a reality with our expertise, innovation, and dedication to deliver an excellent user experience that sets your app apart from the rest.

FAQ’s

Q1. How Much Does It Cost to Develop An App Like Heetch?

The cost of developing an app like Heetch depends on the variety of factors involved, such as a simple feature, technology used, development time, and all the resources it requires. It would be hard to quote the exact figure without getting into the details of your requirements but an basic taxi booking app can range from $10,000 to $50,000. Further our team can give you the perfect estimation after reviewing the project needs.

Q2. How Long Does It Take to Develop An App Like Heetch Paris Taxi?

The time required to develop an app like Heetch Paris Taxi will depend upon the scope of your project. With our agile development process and experience team, we always ensure timely, high-quality production. Our developers will jointly sit with you to plan a real-time schedule according to your project needs.

Q3. What will be the Maintenance Cost of a Taxi Booking App?

Maintenance cost would largely vary depending upon the features you may wish to have in your taxi booking application, the bug fixing, and updates. Hence, if you wish your app to be functioning smoothly and to continue solving the user’s needs, then regular maintenance and updates should be undertaken. Our company can provide maintenance at competitive rates to ensure that your app is kept updated and running at its best performance.

Q4: Which of the Business Models Can Be Used for a Taxi Booking App?

There are a myriad of business models that can be adopted into taxi booking apps, though some of these include commission-based, subscription-based, or even a hybrid model. The best business model is still one that is suited to your target market and competition with respect to revenue goals. Based on this, our team will assist you in identifying the best-suited business model for your application to ensure long-term success.