
// Development
How Much does it Cost to Create a BlaBlaCar Clone?
// Development
BlaBlaCar is a free ride-sharing platform, which is very popular in Europe. It has a user-friendly design and a wide range of features that meet the needs of both passengers and drivers. Later, we’ll tell you how much the creation of a BlaBlaCar clone costs, what tech stack is necessary for it, and what team of developers to look for.
The complexity of the project and the developer’s location have the greatest impact on the cost of the development of such ride-sharing platforms as BlaBlaCar. As for the complexity, this is about the number of features and the depth of their development. In terms of this criterion, all projects are usually divided into simple ones — takes up to 400 hours to develop (design + coding), moderate – 400 to 800 hours, and complex – 800 to 1500 hours and more.
Developer’s location is important because salaries of designers, programmers, and management personnel in IT may vary greatly in different countries. Specifically, a specialist’s average rate in the USA is $95 per hour, Western Europe — $67 per hour, Eastern Europe — $32 per hour.
Here is how much the development averagely costs depending on these two factors:
The creation of a clone of such a platform as BlaBlaCar consists of several stages: preparatory stage, design development, direct coding, testing, deployment, and promotion. Here is their brief description and estimated cost (time rate in the USA / Europe).
If you simply clone BlaBlaCar and release this clone to the market, this project hardly will turn out to be successful because it’s unlikely that people are going to go to your platform if they are already using the original or another ride-sharing service. Therefore, before proceeding directly to the clone creation, you need to explore the market to understand what project your target audience needs exactly.
The cost of such research depends on its depth:
If you’re planning to enter a highly competitive market, then it won’t be enough to duplicate BlaBlaCar’s design. You will need to conduct research and understand what appearance of a ride-sharing service will be suitable for your niche and target audience. You also have to find out what the users like about the design of BlaBlaCar and your other competitors and what they would like to change, remove, or add.
Here are the main development stages of a unique design and their cost:
Machine learning algorithms — from 200 hours or from $6400. Artificial intelligence can be used to automate the communication with users on standard requests, optimization of the trip routes, traffic analysis, optimization of calculation of trip cost, demand forecasting, etc.
Integration with transport services — from 50 hours or from $1600. In BlaBlaCar, you can look not only for the drivers of private cars but also for the routes of buses and other local regular transport links. You can implement this functionality when developing your BlaBlaCar clone.
Chatbot for market of demand — from 100 hours or from $3200. You can develop chatbots, which would help clients to look for the necessary routes and book seats or provide the users with unique offers.
Voice commands — from 100 hours or from $3200. Let Google Assistant, Siri, Cortona, or Alexa help your clients to manage key features with voice commands.
Security — from 50 hours or from $1600. Getting into a stranger’s car is always a risk just like the other way around – when you invite a stranger into your car. So you must ensure that your users feel safe and have the opportunity to react to dangerous situations in some way. Here are several ways that famous ride-sharing companies use to solve that problem: