75p on fares under £15. £1 on fares £15 and over. That's the whole pricing page. The rest is why.
Every ride you book on Bustle has a small booking fee on top of the fare — 75p on fares under £15, £1 on fares £15 and over. Your driver keeps 100% of the fare itself. The booking fee goes to Bustle. Here's why.
For the Newcastle launch, the booking fee is waived for every rider, every trip. We want as many people as possible to try Bustle — and we want to hear exactly what you think of it.
Your feedback in those first weeks shapes everything: what we build next, what we fix, what we kill. Use it, break it, tell us what's wrong with it. The booking fee only kicks in once we're confident Bustle is doing its job properly.
75p–£1£0 during launchEach trip triggers real costs — payment processing, mapping, servers, fraud checks, support. Those costs scale with how many rides happen, not how many drivers are signed up.
A flat booking fee is the honest way to cover them.
Bustle drivers pay us a flat monthly subscription — not a commission on every fare. That means the more they drive, the more they keep. We love that.
But it only works if we're not losing money every time they complete a ride. A small booking fee per ride keeps the maths working whether a driver does 10 trips a week or 400. Without it, we'd eventually have to cap how much our drivers could use Bustle — and caps are exactly the kind of friction we refuse to build.
Ride-hailing is littered with platforms that burnt through investor cash, got bought out, and slowly became worse for everyone. We're not interested in that.
Bustle is built to be a long-term fixture in Newcastle and the UK cities we'll grow into after it. That means being profitable from the start — not at some imaginary future date once we've "scaled."
The platforms you already know took billions in venture capital. To pay that back, they had to squeeze drivers, squeeze riders, and introduce surge pricing, hidden cuts, and features that made the product slowly worse.
That process has a name — enshittification — and it's what happens when a company has to answer to investors expecting a 10x return.
Bustle is bootstrapped. The booking fee is the thing that means we never have to take that kind of money. It keeps us independent, which keeps us honest.
The fare is the fare, whatever the weather or the time of day.
They keep every penny of the fare. We take nothing from their earnings.
What you see before you book is what you pay. No service charges bolted on at the end.
Your driver still walks away with 100% of the fare. That's the whole point of Bustle, and the booking fee is how we stay that way.
Questions? Email usWe actually read them — hello@bustle.cab