Max Brun explains AirGarage's pay-by-the-minute billing system, which charges only for time parked instead of forcing upfront guesses like traditional meters. The company uses license plate recognition and stored payment methods to automatically charge loyal customers, eliminating parking tickets.
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Don't you charge as far as like on the usage side for the actual time that someone parks there versus saying like an hour or half day or a day? Yeah, exactly. I mean, one of the things we did when we started Air Garage was basically just, we didn't know anything about parking at all. We have no experience in parking. We have no background in parking except now having run this business as long as we have. And so one of the things we did obviously from the beginning was just ask ourselves the questions of, well, why are things done the way that they're done in the parking industry? And Should they be done that way? And 2 examples of that from the very beginning that we built into our system that don't exist in other locations. One, which you mentioned, is, you know, if you think about most parking meters or places that you park, right, what happens is you go up to the meter and you kind of have to just guess how long you're going to be there for, right? When you get there, you put a certain amount on the meter and then you have to just hope that you're correct about that time. And Inevitably what happens 99% of the time is either you wind up paying for too much parking and you leave before your meter's expired, or you wind up paying for too little and then you're stressed because you're in a restaurant and you're worried that you're going to get ticketed or towed because you didn't pay for enough time and you just have to guess, right? And it's like, why do you have to guess? And if you actually trace back the history, why do most parking systems and parking apps even today, even now in the software, you still have to guess upfront how much time am I going to use and try to pay for that amount of time? Why does it work that way? If you look back at the history, the parking meter was invented sometime in like the 1930s. And the original parking meters, the way that they worked is you physically inserted a coin into the meter and it physically wound up the device, and then it was a spring-loaded device that would twist backwards in time. And so that all carried through all the way to today where parking meters— or sorry, not even parking meters, parking apps mostly still use that philosophy because it's just a skeuomorphized version of the ancient parking meter, and it doesn't have to work that way anymore, right? So one of the first things we did was when we started it, it's like, hey, when you get to the Air Garage lot, you push start, and when you get done, you push end, and you pay for the exact amount of time that you use. So if you park for an hour and 36 minutes, we charge you for an hour and 36 minutes. We don't charge you for 2 hours. We don't charge you for 1 hour. Charge you for exactly what you used, prorated down to the minute. And we got a lot of really good feedback from drivers immediately about that, where they were like, oh, it's kind of a cool dopamine hit that like my parking bill wasn't $4, it was $3.67 or whatever exact amount I used. So that was one example of things we questioned. The other example is if you are a loyal customer of a parking facility in pretty much anywhere in the country at this point, right? And you park there every single day and you pay the machine or you pay through their app every single day, you're a loyal customer. But then on the, you know, one day you're in a rush, You're late for an appointment, you forget to pay. What are they going to do? They're going to ticket or tow your car and they have no memory of you being a loyal customer. They have no idea that you park there every single day and they treat you just like everybody else, which is just absurd. And our whole philosophy is, you know, it's at the time, 2018, we have a thing called the database. We know who you are. We have a customer profile. We have your phone number, your license plate, your credit card on file. So if you park in one of our lots ever and you pay us ever, Or you pay for a ticket that we've left you, or whatever it happens to be, we now have your info on file. Next time you do park with us, if we see that you're in the lot and you didn't pay for the day, we're just going to automatically charge you for the day of parking and send you a message to say, hey, as a courtesy, instead of ticketing or towing your car, we just charged you for your parking. Because at the end of the day, what we want is for you to pay for your parking, and what you want is to pay for your parking. And so why wouldn't we just remember who you are and charge you automatically if you're in our lot for a second or third or however many times? Especially if you're a loyal customer, right? You have been there hundreds of times. Why would we ticket or immobilize your car? And that's just the way that the industry works because they just don't have technology really baked in at a fundamental level into most of these businesses.
