Download UrbanGo Driver and sign in.
You can only sign in if you belong to an operator.
UrbanGo Driver is for licensed drivers.
Access is for drivers affiliated to a working operator.
There are no independent drivers here and no profiles put together in an afternoon. To receive a job you have to be added by a real operator, one with a licence to protect that answers for whoever it sends out. There is no form to fill in to get on by yourself, and there is none for anybody.
It means the person working alongside you holds what you hold and carries what you carry. Nobody is topping up the weekend with the family car, and nobody can quote a price out of the market because they have nothing to cover. That is the difference between a platform open to anyone and a tool for the trade.
Licence
The operator who adds you answers for whoever it sends out.
Vehicle
Licensed and tied to you, not whatever car is going.
No short cuts
There is no way to get on by yourself, for anybody.
If you work on your own today and want to get on, the first step is finding an operator who will take you. That is not an obstacle put there to make life hard: it is exactly why everyone in here is somebody like you.
Set your working hours.
You decide when you are on.
You set your hours around the work you want. You are the one running your business.
These are the hours the app looks for you, not the rate bands: outside them nothing arrives and there is nothing to turn down. Change your mind one morning, change your availability, and it applies straight away.
There is one availability and it covers every operator you work with. They see when you are on, so they do not ring you while you are parked up and you do not miss jobs while you are out.
Add your tariff.
It is your business, your vehicle and your service.
Day and night, booking charge, waiting time, minimum fare: they are your numbers and you set them once. They follow you wherever you work, and you revisit them when something changes: fuel, the insurance, a newer car.
When somebody else sets the price you are not saving yourself effort: you are accepting that your costs do not go into the sum. That is how people work at a loss for months without noticing, because taken on its own every job looked fine.
So the hard part is not where you type the rates in. It is knowing which numbers to put there, and you are not left on your own with that.
You do not do this sum in your head.
Put in your car and your numbers. The cost per mile comes out by itself.
Pick the model and the engine, because the model on its own says nothing: between an E 200 d and a 300 d there is most of a litre every hundred kilometres. From there we start with the stated consumption of that exact version, and you add what your hour is worth, what the car cost you and how many miles you expect to keep it for.
Catalogue figures are measured in a laboratory, and your work does not happen in a laboratory: town centres, queues, standing with the engine running, air conditioning, luggage. We start from that figure and correct it for the work you actually do. If you know your real consumption, put that in: yours wins.
Then there is the commission, and this is where it goes wrong most often: you do not add it on, you divide by it. If you want £100 left in your hand, with 20% taken the fare is not £120, it is £125. Five a job looks like nothing. Over a thousand jobs it is five grand.
What comes out is a suggestion, not an obligation: change the numbers and the sum redoes itself as you type. Every line that goes into it is explained below, one by one.
Try it with your own car.
Consumption figures are the ones stated at type approval, WLTP cycle, rounded, and we correct them for the kind of work you do: they stay a category estimate, not a measurement of your car. Everything else you put in, because only you know it: what you pay at the pump, what the car cost you, what you spend in a year and what you want to earn in an hour.
What comes out is a line of reasoning, not a rate recommended by UrbanGo. Always check the result against your own books. And where fares are set for you they come first: a licensing authority fixes the maximum fare for hackney carriage work, and there this tool is for checking whether you are covering your costs, not for deciding the price. Private hire is agreed before the journey, so there the number is yours.
The vehicle
If you know your real consumption, put that in.
Your work
Worked out on an average of 26 km/h.
UrbanGo’s 20% is already in.
The car and the standing costs
A 10 kilometre job costs you £10.90 and has to be sold at £13.62, before the booking charge and any waiting.
These are your costs, not the operator’s.
The sum above covers your car and your hours. The operator has costs that appear nowhere in that table: the office, the people answering the phone at three in the morning, the licence, and the customers built up over years of work that reach you ready made. Their booking fee pays for that. Without it, that work would be yours: keeping the phone on, finding your own customers, chasing the ones who do not pay.
The price is not a number you pick.
It is the sum of what that job costs you.
Setting your own price is an advantage you do not get on the apps, but it is also a responsibility: it has to cover everything, not just today’s fuel.
A fare that does not cover every line is not keen pricing. It is a loss put off, and it turns up with the first tyre to replace or the first insurance renewal.
The lines that go in
- Fuel or electricity, over the real route and not as the crow flies
- Depreciation on the vehicle, the cost everybody forgets
- Insurance, vehicle tax and the MOT, spread over the year’s jobs
- Servicing and tyres
- Your hours, including waiting and the empty run back
- UrbanGo’s commission, 20% of an accepted job
- The operator’s booking fee, where there is one
Your first jobs are free.
After that you top up when you like, and the more you put in the more you get.
The first time you sign in you find £50 of credit already there. Those are your first jobs: you work, you get paid, and you see how it runs before paying anything.
From then on it works one way only: as each job closes, the commission comes off the credit. No card to leave on file, no invoice at the end of the month, no surprise charges. You top up when you like, and the larger the top-up the more credit you get for the same spend: it is a discount on the commission, not a subscription.
The bonus also carries the risk of no-shows. It happens now and then: you get to the pick-up and nobody is there. You accepted that job, the system looked for you, you covered the miles, and the commission comes off the same way the fuel went. That is why on £100 we give you £130: the extra margin is worked out allowing for the jobs that never happen.
The wallet is yours. It does not expire, it stays the same if you change operator or add another one, and nobody can take it off you.
The credit covers UrbanGo’s commission. The operator’s booking fee, where there is one, is a separate line and you settle that with them.
You know what you are getting before you say yes.
That is the difference that counts: you set the fare and you read what is taken before you accept, rather than finding out from a statement at the end of the month.