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Swapneel Shah, 28, a Pune-based computer engineer has started a website that gives pre-calculated fares to commuters.

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It was in one of those heated arguments with an autorickshaw driver over fare that later ignited a simple idea in the mind of Swapneel Shah, a 28-year-old computer engineer from Pune, to start a website that gives pre-calculated fares to commuters. 

After working for five months on the idea, he started www.taxiautofare.com, which is attracting more than a lakh visitors a month. Requests are also pouring in from people across the country to add more cities to the existing list of 20.

The site is a free service that allows a user to estimate the taxi and autorickshaw fare between any two locations in a city. Not only are fares calculated, but the service also displays a Google map with the detailed route and distance. The website also has a mobile version.

“Each time we have to take an autorickshaw outside the railway station or bus stand in an unknown city — or sometimes even in your home city — we aren’t very excited about it. During my stay in Mumbai and Bangalore for more than five years I had to take an autorickshaw twice a day,” he remembers.   

“I used to be worried about tampered meters, felt sick bargaining over fares, and sometimes even scared when arguments with the drivers went bad. This prompted me to start this website, which was launched last October,” said Shah, who left his high-paying job in a reputed firm to become an entrepreneur.

The start-up he founded last March, Softusvista, has now employed eight people. The firm is into software outsourcing for the clients, mainly in the UK. “The website doesn’t generate any revenue for us other than the advertisement profit that is used to run the site. We started with fares of some of the metros and Tier-I cities. The response was really encouraging and people wanted us to add cities like Ahmedabad, Amritsar and Chandigarh,” said Shah.

Another challenge the team faced was covering fares across many cities and to ensure that those are updated and accurate. “We were happy to get this information from our users who volunteered to report fares in their cities and contribute towards this initiative,” he said.

Though the website has no commercial tie-ups, it also gives fares of more than 10 private cab operators including Cel Cabs, Easy Cabs, Hello Taxi, Mega Cabs, Meru Cabs, Metro Cabs, Quick Cabs and Wings Radio Cabs that operate in different cities.
Enthused by the response from the users, the team also started another four websites, three of them launched last week. This includes a website to calculate the petrol consumption from one point in a city to another, bank locater that will provide information on 100-plus banks to a user with a database of around 75,000 branches across the country. Coming up next: “Users are demanding a website to locate the nearest ATM branch of a bank, which we are currently working on,” he said.
 

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