How much does car rental software cost in Morocco? The real prices, in dirhams

You want to know what a management system for your rental agency actually costs. You open five Moroccan websites. Five times the same answer: pricing on request. A contact form, a call back from a salesperson, a forty-minute demo, and still not a single number.

Meanwhile you have a Clio due back at 6pm, a customer who still has not sent his CIN, the Moroccan national ID card, over WhatsApp, and a contract waiting to be printed. The time that whole runaround asks of you is exactly the time you do not have.

So here are some numbers. Ours, in dirhams, published on the page. And the ranges we see elsewhere on the market, along with the traps hiding inside them. Including the cases where our cheapest tier is not enough: they exist, and you are better off knowing that before you pay.

There is a legitimate reason for pricing on request. A fleet of 200 cars spread across four branches, with data to recover from an ageing system and a connection to plug into an existing website, has to be quoted case by case. Nobody can put that price on a web page.

But between 5 and 50 vehicles, there is nothing to quote case by case. You want a schedule that does not double-book, clean contracts and invoices, the deposit tracked, the condition report photographed, and a clear view of who owes what to whom. It is the same product for everybody.

At that size, hiding the price is not protecting a complicated quote. It is there to qualify the customer before handing him a number, and to tune that number to whatever he looks able to pay. It is a defensible commercial choice. It is simply not pleasant when you are the one on the other end of the phone.

Before you compare amounts, compare models. On the Moroccan market you run into four of them.

• The licence bought once. You find offers around 2 000 DH for an installation in your own name, on your own domain. Attractive on paper. The real question is what happens the year after: updates, backups, hosting, a breakdown on a Saturday in July. Often, none of that is in the price.
• The annual subscription paid up front. Published rates hover around 7 500 DH before tax per year, so roughly 625 DH a month. The amount itself is fair. The problem is that you commit to twelve months before you know whether the person behind the counter is really going to use the tool.
• The per-vehicle, per-month price. A few dirhams per car. Perfect at 8 cars, painful at 40.
• Free. It gets paid for somewhere else, and we come back to that further down.

The crossover point sits somewhere between 15 and 25 cars, depending on the unit rate. Below it, paying per vehicle genuinely is cheaper, and it is an honest model for an agency starting out with six cars. In that bracket, the vendors who bill this way are doing nothing outrageous.

Above it, the same model turns into a tax on growth. You buy four cars for the season, the bill climbs, and it does not always come back down in October. The flat tier does the opposite: a little expensive at the start, then it stops moving while your fleet keeps growing.

Let us start with a concession. If you have three cars, a notebook and two bookings a week, an Excel spreadsheet does the job. You do not need to pay for anything, and nobody should be selling you the opposite.

The spreadsheet breaks at one precise moment: when two people touch the schedule at the same time. Your partner promises the Duster to somebody at the counter, you promise it to somebody on the phone, and the file does not know it yet. That is where free starts to get expensive.

When software is advertised as free, the price is usually sitting in one of four places. A fee per contract or per booking: painless at 20 contracts a month, much less so at 200. A cap on vehicles, crossed at the worst possible moment, which is to say in July. The absence of support: at 10pm, when the contract will not print and the customer is standing there waiting, you are on your own. And your data, which you do not always own.

The monthly amount is the visible part. The rest gets paid in hours and in hardware.

Setting up first. Entering 40 vehicles with the carte grise, the vehicle registration document, plus insurance, the visite technique, the roadworthiness inspection, the vignette, the annual road tax sticker, and real odometer readings, is not a five-minute job: budget a good half-day, two if your history is spread across three notebooks. Add an hour or two to train whoever works the counter. That cost is real, it appears on no quote, and it only happens once.

Then the hardware, especially if GPS interests you. The software module and the box fitted inside the car are two different expenses. At Moroccan resellers, the prices we observe run from roughly 300 to 900 DH for a consumer-grade tracker, and from 900 to 2 500 DH for professional equipment, plus 250 to 600 DH for the fitting. Some suppliers add their own per-vehicle subscription, often advertised from 80 DH a month: check that point, because it is the one that makes the annual bill.

One last item, to be confirmed by your accountant: is the price you are quoted before tax or after tax. Two quotes that look identical are not always the same thing.

Software is not compared against zero dirhams. It is compared against what your current way of working is losing you, and that figure is one only you can work out.

Take your last twelve months. How many times did you promise the same car twice, and what did that cost in discounts, in taxis, in a customer who never came back? How many mileage overages were never invoiced because nobody wrote down the odometer at departure? How many late returns quietly fell through the cracks? How many deposits did you hand back without being sure of the state of the car, for want of dated photos? And how many times did you rent to a customer that another agency in your own city could have warned you about in thirty seconds?

Add it up, with your real amounts. If the total runs past a few hundred dirhams a month, the question of what the software costs is already settled. If it is close to zero, stay on your spreadsheet: that is a perfectly rational decision, and I would rather tell you here than after you have subscribed.

Elaicar is built in Casablanca and published by Elaitech, for the Moroccan market, billed in dirhams. Here is the entire grid.

• Starter — 99 MAD a month. A small fleet, a single address, one or two people entering the bookings.
• Professional — 399 MAD a month. The tier for the agency running at full speed, with more vehicles, more users and more pick-up points.
• Enterprise — 899 MAD a month. Large fleets, several branches, bigger teams.
• Booking website — 49 MAD a month. An add-on, not a promise bundled into the prices above.
• GPS tracking — 69 MAD a month. The second add-on: live position, speed, trips, stops, zone alerts and real mileage, all tied back to the booking in progress. The tracker itself stays your expense, from whichever supplier you like.

Fourteen days of trial, no bank card. The two add-ons really are add-ons: if you take neither the booking website nor GPS, you do not pay for them. The exact caps of each tier, in vehicles, users and branches, are set out on the pricing page, because that is the number that decides your tier, not a sales pitch.

A vendor that always pushes you toward its highest tier is not being honest. A vendor that lets you believe its entry-level plan suits everybody is no better. Here are the signals.

Stay on Starter if you run a small fleet at a single address, if your bookings come in by phone and WhatsApp, and if only one or two people key in the contracts.

Move up to Professional as soon as one of these three cases shows up. Two people or more are working on the schedule at the same time and you need separate roles. You have opened a second pick-up point, at the airport or in another city. Or your fleet has simply gone past the cap on the entry-level plan, and at that stage it is not sales advice, it is arithmetic: check the cap before you commit.

Enterprise earns its place higher up, when the fleet and the team have both grown large and several branches are running in parallel. Below that case, paying 899 MAD makes no sense and we have no interest in you doing it: a customer who pays too much leaves after six months.

Do not migrate anything for now. Take the trial, load five cars and your next three bookings, then do a real check-out: photos, odometer, fuel level, signature. Do the return as well, with the late fees and the mileage charges worked out without you. One hour is enough to know whether the tool saves you time or takes it from you.

If you would rather first see what daily life looks like inside it, the schedule, the contracts, the condition report, the blacklist of customers shared between agencies, the product overview will teach you more than a sales meeting. And if all you want is the number, it is on display. Nobody is going to ask you to fill in a form to get it.