Tada, a three-month old ride-hailing app, has been touted as the next best ride-hailing app by Today.

How much Tada charges?

Tada has been praised for offering prices that do not fluctuate much -- in other words, little to no surge pricing.

Here is a list of prices cited by riders interviewed:

Holland Village to Thomson on a rainy weekend

Other apps: S$36 ❌

Tada: S$16 ✔️

Hougang to Jurong

Other apps: S$24 ❌

Tada: S$17 ✔️

Clarke Quay to Sengkang at 1am

Other apps: S$46 ❌

Tada: S$24 ✔️

Plaza Singapura to Sengkang at 11pm

Other apps: S$39 ❌

Tada: S$20 ✔️

Surpassed expectations

The company behind Tada is Mass Vehicle Ledger (MVL).

The app is attracting both riders and drivers, and has surpassed its own sign-up expectations.

Launched on July 26 in Singapore, the app is reportedly seeing between 1,000 and 1,500 new user sign-ups daily, up from about 600 a day previously.

About 19,000 private hire car drivers are now on board to serve its 110,000-strong user base.

This is significantly higher than its initial year-end target of between 2,000 and 3,000 drivers.

Tada Taxi

To add to the main app, Tada Taxi was launched in the third week of November.

It is a new mobile application with a pool of 2,000 taxi drivers.

Tada Taxi will not take a cut from the drivers, nor will it impose any levy on the booking fees set by the respective taxi companies.

Shorter waiting times for riders

Rider waiting times have been cut from 40 minutes to around 10 minutes, or to less than a minute sometimes.

The worry among riders is that prices are not sustainable in the long run as drivers would naturally want to earn more than less.

But Tada has other monetisation plans in mind.

How Tada makes money

Tada does not take a cut from its drivers, which means drivers do not pay Tada commission.

The app charges a transaction fee of 3.4 percent with an additional 50 cents on credit-card payments, which goes to the payment gateway Stripe.

One of the ways in which the company plans to make money is through data.

It runs on a blockchain system and will gather data on its users, such as driving speeds and traffic records, as well as on vehicles’ repair history.

The company hopes to sell the data to third parties, such as autonomous driving research laboratories and insurers -- with users’ consent where relevant.

Tada could also tie up with rental and insurance companies.

It can then offer their services, such as car insurance, to the platform’s customers and drivers, receiving a fee for being an agent.

Kay Woo, the founder of MVL Foundation, said the company was not seeking profits.

Part of its revenue will defray operational costs, such as the wages of staff members and founders, with the rest distributed to drivers and customers in incentives.

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