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Comment by emptybits | Hacker News Reader

I have been out of this industry annd without stake in it for years. But I co-founded PayByPhone, the original pay-for-parking app. TFA suggests that it’s charging $0 in fees. Is this true?

Then aside from theories of corrupt decision making, why wouldn’t every city or parking provider choose the $0 option? (Particularly city governments with a responsibility to their residents.)

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The option that's fee-free to users probably costs more for the city, whereas the ones that charge a fee will probably be cheaper or even free for the city.

A city council member trying to balance a budget isn't engaging in corruption by choosing the option that reduces an expense in the city budget, even if it just places the cost on the people paying for parking instead. Constituents would be more likely to complain about higher property taxes or cuts to city services than to complain about a fee like this.

Maybe they just got bribed, but that seems less likely.

PayByPhone also shows ads in the parking experience (thankfully, not too obtrusively, and not until the parking is confirmed). So, they could be covering some of the cost that way.

That looks like an opportunity for an "ad-free" pro subscription.

> A city council member trying to balance a budget isn't engaging in corruption by choosing the option that reduces an expense in the city budget, even if it just places the cost on the people

Sounds like a pretty solid definition of corruption to me. Siphon private individuals' money into a corporation instead of using public money to offer public services.

The problem with using an expansive definition like this is that doing so desensitizes people to the kind of corruption where politicians literally just accept money or valuables in exchange for misusing their power. E.g. "All politicians are corrupt, so who cares if he takes bribes? At least he agrees with me on X/Y/Z."

The key difference is that the politician is not being personally enriched by saving money in the city budget this way.

I agree, this is just politicians making a decision that non-drivers are not subsidizing the cost of something that mostly impacts drivers. Once that decision is made by politicians, collecting fee directly by private entity is more economical than passing the fee to government and paid out to the private entity.

For some stuff e.g. third party managed golf booking websites, they charge the golf course "no fees" per booking, but they get 100% of the revenue from 1 or 2 bookings per day, whatever the exact terms.

> responsibility to their residents

I've lived in a lot of places.

In most places electeds usually have some conception of a sort of broadly construed responsibility is to residents.

But in larger cities it's a responsibility to voters and voting blocs, not residents per se. And this is particularly true in older east coast cities.

Living in Washington and yes, there are zero fees in the cities listed (and others). Great app, thank you for making it, it makes life a lot easier for me and the city!

Up here in BC PayByPhone used to charge the same rates as meters. Now, most cities have taken out the meter and PayByPhone charges a per transaction fee.

Dinner running long and you need 10 more minutes? That’s .25 for parking and .35 for the app.

I think Vancouver used to batch at the end of the day (I would only see one transaction for all sessions in a day) eat the transaction fee, and paid a flat yearly rate to PayByPhone for managing it. The new contract - signed after meters disappeared- added the fees.

It pisses me off to no end that if I try to do the right thing and pay for a quick few minutes to run in somewhere I get whacked with a transaction fee that costs more than parking.

There is no transaction fee (or "convenience fee") in Vancouver. "Like PayByPhone, there are no added fees for using HotSpot to pay for parking."[1] (2026)

It definitely happens in some cities and with private operators. It shouldn't and there used to be a strong reason why. When we were still rolling PayByPhone out to as many cities as we could, the argument was strong (and often accepted by the city) that by having no additional app usage fees the city would see more rapid adoption of the service by users. That was everyone's goal because a reduced need for meter coverage in busy areas, for new meters in new areas, and reduced physical wear and tear and vandalism and theft, the cheaper the city's operating and capital costs are. Those costs are real.

As the radius of paid parking expands in a metro area, and it always does, it's an enormous cost saving for cities (read: taxpayers) to see it happen with apps and not hardware on streets. The maintenance contracts of meter manufacturers is truly a racket. The city will pay millions up front for a neighbourhood of meters and then pay hundreds of thousands per year for the maintenance contract. Forever. That sort of nonsense is buried in parking rates.

So yeah, IMO, transaction fees are mostly bullshit. Apps help keep capital and operating costs low. They're ahead of the game by ditching street hardware and eating the very small transaction costs (their merchant accounts are typically low cost because of the sheer volume they push through).

[1] https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/mobile-option-pay-for-str...

I'm looking at three receipts from the past few months with fees added on top of parking fees. You are correct that they are not called convenience fees. They are called SMS reminder fee, and SMS confirmation fee totalling $.26 on every single transaction.

By digging through google and reddit (can't find this anywhere in the PayByPhone app) I can see that it is possible to avoid these fees by digging into user settings, although the app NEVER told me that I was being opted in to this optional fee, and nowhere in the receipt, the checkout screen, or the settings screen does it note that the setting is connected to a fee and optional or vice versa.

I maintain that charging a 500% upcharge on SMS sending (making an assumption that they are paying the highest possible rate for sms send at twilio, which would be excpetionally stupid. EDIT: I just checked, Twilio charges are less than I remember. The real markup is 1,400% per text) that users do not know they can disable is abusive.

So you are correct that there is no convenience fee. There is just an "optional" fee that you are default opted into, and opt-out is buried 3 layers deep in the settings of the app, that charges 1400% markup on cost to send a text message for an app that has notifications. Is there a single setting to disable all SMS? nope. You have to opt out for each message type. Honestly, I think this sort of dark pattern is far more abusive than convenience fees when the city has already negotiated to eat that, and PayByPhone opts you into paying for something without notification. I would be pretty embarrassed to ship this. Its either incredibly bad UX design, or intentional dark patterns.

It shouldn't take a highly technical user having a random interaction with a founder to discover that they have been paying fees they didn't need to after being opted-in without notification (no mention of costs or opting in in the TOS).

EDIT: I dug into the help page. The fees listing is paginated, so at first glance it appears that SMS fees do not apply in Vancouver until you paginate through. Fees have now been increased to $.15. The upside is that I can now say that I literally got nickel and dimed by PayByPhone

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