The Mobility As A Service Market in 2026

Mobility as a Service, usually shortened to MaaS, packages public transport, ride-hailing, car-sharing, bike-sharing and scooters into a single account where a traveller can plan a journey, book every leg and pay once. The business you are planning does not own the buses, cars or bikes. It owns the software, the customer relationship and the commercial agreements that let it resell other operators' capacity. Getting that distinction right is the first thing an investor tests, and it changes how every number in the plan is built.

Estimates of the market's size vary widely because analysts draw the boundary in different places. Precedence Research, 2025 values the global MaaS market at $302.18 billion in 2025 and projects it reaching $1,415.96 billion by 2035. Fortune Business Insights, 2025 puts 2025 at $532.76 billion on a broader definition that folds in more of the underlying transport spend. Whichever figure you cite, the shape is the same: a large base compounding at double digits as cities push travellers away from private cars.

The revenue mix matters more to your plan than the headline number. Mordor Intelligence, 2025 reports that pay-as-you-go accounted for 67.25% of 2025 revenue while subscription bundles are the fastest-growing slice at a 23.88% CAGR through 2031. Separately, Juniper Research, 2022 forecasts MaaS subscriber revenue growing by $47.7 billion by 2027. Read together, those numbers tell a founder to launch on pay-as-you-go to remove the sign-up barrier, then convert frequent riders onto subscriptions once weekly usage is proven.

Adoption is uneven and city-led. The apps travellers actually use, such as Moovit, 2025 with a reported 1.5 billion users across 112 countries and 7,500 transit agencies, grew by nailing one thing first, journey planning, before adding booking and payment. Your plan should name the modes you will integrate in year one and the ones you will add later, rather than promising a national super-app on day one.

Who you are really competing with

The competitive set in MaaS is layered, and naming it precisely matters more than claiming a blue ocean. At the top sit the global journey planners, Moovit (owned by Mobileye) and Citymapper (owned by Via), which have enormous reach but monetise thinly and rarely own the full booking and payment flow. Alongside them are the ride-hailing platforms, led by Uber, which are moving up the stack by adding public transit into their own apps, turning a supplier into a would-be competitor. Then there are the city-owned schemes such as Berlin's Jelbi and Munich's MVGO, which foreclose the consumer market in their home cities but create a licensing opportunity for the platform underneath. Most operators stop their competitive analysis at "we are better than the local transit app"; the number that actually decides the outcome is which of these players controls the ticketing relationship in your launch city. Win that, through an exclusive or preferred operator agreement, and the reach of a Moovit matters far less. A plan that maps these layers and states where you fit reads as strategy rather than optimism.

People Also Ask About Starting a MaaS Business

Four questions come up repeatedly in the research phase. Short, accurate answers here will save you the wrong assumptions later.

What are the four levels of MaaS integration?

The widely used Sochor scale runs from level 0 to level 4. Level 0 is separate services with no integration. Level 1 is information integration, a shared journey planner. Level 2 adds booking and payment for single trips. Level 3 introduces bundled subscriptions across modes, and level 4 aligns the offer with societal goals such as congestion or emissions targets set by a city. Most commercially successful apps live at levels 1 and 2. Your plan should state the level you launch at and the trigger for moving up, because each step multiplies integration and settlement complexity.

Which cities have working MaaS schemes?

Helsinki is the reference case through the Whim app from MaaS Global, built on Finland's open-data law. Berlin runs Jelbi, operated by transit authority BVG on technology from Trafi, and Munich runs MVGO on the same stack. These are useful comparables because they show two routes to market: an independent operator like Whim, and a city-owned app that licenses a platform. Your business model section should say which of those two you are.

Do MaaS apps actually reduce car ownership?

The evidence is mixed and honest plans say so. Bundled subscriptions can shift some trips away from private cars in dense, transit-rich cities, but the effect is weak where public transport is thin. Do not build a forecast that assumes households sell a car because they downloaded your app. Build it on trip volume and retention you can measure.

What data does a MaaS platform depend on?

At minimum you need static timetable data in GTFS format, live positions in GTFS-Realtime, bike and scooter availability in GBFS, and, for regulated micromobility, the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) that many cities now require. Access to that data, and the right to resell trips on top of it, is a commercial negotiation. Treat it as a milestone in the plan, not a technical afterthought.

What It Costs to Launch a MaaS Business

Because the product is a platform rather than a fleet, most of the launch budget is engineering, integration and compliance, not vehicles or property. A functional MVP with iOS and Android apps, a booking backend and a small set of live integrations typically runs $50,000 to $150,000 (£40,000 to £118,000) and takes three to six months. An enterprise-grade platform intended to be licensed to a city starts around $250,000. Plan to spend an extra 15% to 25% of the build cost every year on maintenance before you add a single feature.

Cost breakdown

• Platform and app MVP: $50,000–$150,000 (£40K–£118K), covering iOS, Android and the booking backend
• Mode and payment integrations: $12,000–$40,000 (£9K–£32K) for transit APIs, ride-hail, micromobility and a payment gateway
• Licensing, legal and compliance: $8,000–$30,000 (£6K–£24K) including e-money advice and permit filings
• Cloud, mapping and routing licences: $6,000–$20,000 (£5K–£16K) in the first year, scaling with trip volume
• Launch marketing and first partnerships: $10,000–$40,000 (£8K–£32K) to acquire early riders and sign operators

Funding routes

MaaS is a software business with a regulated payment layer, so funding usually blends non-dilutive and equity capital. In the US, the SBA 7(a) programme can back a technology company up to $5 million with terms to 10 years for working capital, though lenders will want signed operator or city agreements before they treat projected trip revenue as real. In the UK, the government Start Up Loan offers up to £25,000 per founder at 6% fixed with free mentoring, a sensible bridge to a pre-seed round. Because deep-integration MaaS is capital-intensive and city-dependent, most operators raise a pre-seed round of £250,000 to £750,000 once they can show weekly retention in one city. Our bespoke business plan service builds the lender-ready and investor-ready financials that make either route credible.

UK founders should also weigh the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) and Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), which give angel investors 50% and 30% income-tax relief respectively and make a pre-seed round materially easier to close. A MaaS platform usually qualifies as a knowledge-intensive company, which raises the amount that can be raised under these schemes. To use them the plan and forecast must satisfy the scheme rules on trade, timing and use of funds, so the document has to be written with that eligibility in mind rather than retrofitted afterwards. Grant funding tied to clean-air and decarbonisation targets is a further non-dilutive layer worth naming where a city or transport authority is a launch partner.

Integration Partners & Platform Vendors

A MaaS operator is only as strong as the suppliers it plugs into. There are two lists to build: the transport modes you resell, and the technology vendors that let you resell them. Naming credible options in the plan shows an investor you understand the supply chain rather than assuming it appears for free.

Transport modes to integrate

• Public transport authorities for timetables, live running and, ideally, ticketing (the trips that anchor the app)
• Ride-hailing suppliers such as Uber, Bolt or a local licensed taxi network via their partner APIs
• Micromobility operators like Lime, Tier or Voi for bikes and e-scooters, usually exposed through GBFS
• Car-share and rental providers for longer or out-of-town trips the app cannot otherwise serve

Technology and platform vendors

• White-label MaaS platforms such as Trafi (which powers Berlin's Jelbi and Munich's MVGO) or SkedGo's TripGo SDK, if you choose to license rather than build
• Routing and journey-planning engines including OpenTripPlanner or a commercial equivalent
• Mapping and geocoding from Google Maps Platform, Mapbox or an open alternative
• Payments and stored value through Stripe, Adyen or an e-money partner that handles settlement across operators

The build-versus-license decision belongs in the plan explicitly. Licensing a platform like Trafi shortens time to market and de-risks the engineering, but it caps differentiation and adds a revenue share. Building your own, the path an ambitious pre-seed team often takes, protects margin and IP but pushes launch out by months. State which you chose and why; a strong market research and content section makes that trade-off with numbers rather than opinion.

How Mobility As A Service Operators Earn

Four revenue streams recur across the sector, and the strongest plans layer them rather than betting on one. First, subscription bundles split into Free or Basic, Premium and Corporate tiers, giving predictable monthly revenue from frequent riders. Second, pay-as-you-go booking fees capture the casual and tourist rider who will never subscribe, still the majority of the market at 67.25% of 2025 revenue. Third, B2B and white-label SaaS licences sold to cities and transport authorities, often the most durable line because public contracts are multi-year. Fourth, commission on integrated bookings plus optional data and advertising services.

Margins split in two. The software layer, the part of the business that runs the app and takes fees, carries a gross margin of 55% to 75%. But once you resell a trip you paid an operator for, the blended operator net margin is far thinner, usually 8% to 18%. That is why profit in MaaS comes from retention and licensing, not from marking up a single bus fare.

A worked city example

Take a single-city operator one year after launch. It has 12,000 active subscribers on a $19 per month Premium tier, which is $2.74 million of subscription revenue a year. On top of that it earns 9% commission on $6 million of trips resold through the app, adding $540,000. Blended gross margin across both lines runs about 62%, and annual operating cost, mostly a small engineering and partnerships team plus cloud and mapping, is around $1.6 million. That leaves roughly $430,000 of contribution before growth spend, the point at which the business becomes fundable for a seed round. Change the subscriber count or the churn rate and this number moves fast, which is exactly why the model has to be built on cohort retention, not a single blended average.

Additional streams to model where they fit: corporate mobility budgets (employers who buy Premium seats for staff), integration of government-subsidised fares, and anonymised movement-data products sold to planners. Each adds resilience, but none should be counted on before it is contracted.

Target Market & Customer Acquisition

A MaaS app that tries to serve everyone in a city on day one usually serves no one well. The plan should segment the market and name which group you win first, because acquisition cost and retention differ sharply between them. Three segments matter.

The three segments that carry the business

• Daily commuters: the retention engine. They ride four to ten times a week, convert to subscriptions readily, and forgive minor friction once the app is part of their routine. They are expensive to acquire but cheap to keep, and they anchor predictable revenue.
• Casual and visitor riders: tourists, occasional travellers and people between cars. They will never subscribe, so you monetise them through pay-as-you-go fees. They are cheap to acquire through app-store search and transit-hub signage, and they inflate active-user counts that help fundraising, but do not confuse their volume with loyalty.
• Corporate and institutional accounts: employers, universities and hospitals that buy Premium seats or expense mobility for staff. These deals are slow to close but high value and sticky, and they turn a consumer app into a B2B business with multi-year revenue.

Model each segment separately, with its own acquisition cost, conversion rate and monthly retention. A blended average hides the fact that one commuter can be worth twenty casual riders over two years. Investors who know the sector will ask for this split, and a plan that already shows it reads as operationally serious.

How MaaS operators actually acquire riders

Paid advertising is the least efficient channel here, because the product is bought at the moment of travel, not while scrolling. The channels that work are physical and partnership-led. Signage and QR codes at transit hubs, tram stops and bike docks convert travellers at the point of need. Bundling with a public-transport authority puts the app in front of every existing rider at close to zero cost, which is why the operator relationships in your supply section double as your cheapest marketing. Employer partnerships open the corporate segment through a single sales conversation rather than thousands of ad impressions. The plan's marketing section should map each channel to the segment it reaches and give a realistic cost per acquired, retained rider, not a vanity download figure.

City-by-City Demand: Where MaaS Works First

MaaS is not a national product you switch on. It is won one city at a time, because every deal, data feed and permit is local. Density, the strength of public transport and the regulator's appetite decide whether a launch is realistic. The plan should name the specific city you launch in and rank the next three, with the reason for each.

• Helsinki: the proving ground for Whim, backed by Finland's open-data law. High transit density and a supportive regulator make it the template for an independent operator.
• Berlin and Munich: city-authority apps (Jelbi and MVGO) built on Trafi's platform. The model here is licensing technology to the public sector rather than running a consumer brand.
• London and Manchester: deep transit networks plus the DfT's MaaS Code of Practice make the UK viable, though open ticketing data is still uneven outside the capital.
• US metros (California cities, New York): strong ride-hail and micromobility supply, but fragmented transit ticketing and state-level TNC rules mean the aggregator role is easier than full booking integration.

The pattern is clear: launch where transit is dense, data is open and one motivated public partner will sign. A plan that lists target cities in priority order, with the specific operator you will approach first in each, reads as operational rather than aspirational. If your first city is smaller and car-dependent, say so and lean on pay-as-you-go and micromobility rather than promising car replacement.

Operations & Technology: What You Actually Run

The operations section is where many MaaS plans go thin, and it is the one an investor with sector experience reads most closely. A MaaS operator runs three things day to day: a technology platform, a web of live data feeds, and a settlement process that moves money between the operators whose trips it resold. Getting each described concretely is what separates a fundable plan from a pitch.

The build-versus-buy decision, priced

Every MaaS founder faces the same fork. Licensing a white-label platform such as Trafi or an SDK like SkedGo's TripGo gets you to market in weeks rather than months and removes most of the engineering risk, at the cost of a revenue share and limited differentiation. Building your own protects margin and intellectual property and lets you tune the rider experience, but it pushes launch out by three to six months and needs a standing engineering team. State the decision explicitly and defend it with numbers: a team targeting a single city and a fast proof point often licenses first and rebuilds later, while a team raising on proprietary technology builds from the start. A plan that leaves this unresolved reads as unfinished.

The data layer you depend on

Journey planning needs static timetables in GTFS and live positions in GTFS-Realtime; shared bikes and scooters come through GBFS; and regulated micromobility increasingly requires the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) that cities use to monitor fleets. None of this is free to assume. Each feed is a commercial and technical relationship that can break, change format or be withdrawn, so the operations plan should name the feeds, the fallback if one fails, and who owns the integration. The strongest plans treat data access as a set of dated milestones with named counterparties rather than a line that says "we will integrate public transport".

Settlement, support and the unglamorous middle

When a rider pays once for a journey that spans a tram, a bike and a taxi, someone has to split that fare three ways, handle the refund when the bike is faulty, and reconcile against each operator's payment cycle. This settlement and reconciliation work is real engineering and finance headcount, and it is the single most under-modelled cost in the sector. Add customer support that can resolve a failed booking mid-journey, and fraud controls on stored value, and you have the operational spine of the business. A plan that budgets for this looks honest; one that omits it looks like it has never run a live trip.

Milestones a reviewer looks for

• Month 0–3: anchor operator agreement signed, platform build or licence decision made, e-money partner selected
• Month 3–6: level-1 journey planning live, first two modes integrated, closed beta in one city
• Month 6–9: booking and payment (level 2) live, pay-as-you-go monetisation switched on
• Month 9–12: subscription tier launched to proven commuters, first corporate account in pilot

Licensing & Legal Requirements

The aggregator app itself is rarely the licensed object. The trips it books and the money it moves are. That is the mental model to carry into this section: you inherit the regulation of every mode you resell, plus payment rules for handling customer funds.

United States

• Where you resell or operate pre-arranged rides, a Transportation Network Company (TNC) permit is required, held at state level. In California this is the TCP-P subclass established under CPUC Decision 13-09-045, and a TNC may not own the vehicles it dispatches.
• State-by-state rules differ; a permit in one state does not carry to the next, so the plan should treat each launch state as a separate compliance task.
• Payment handling: holding or transmitting customer funds can trigger money transmitter registration with state regulators and FinCEN, usually avoided by using a licensed payment partner.
• Insurance and data: commercial liability plus data-protection duties under state privacy laws such as the CCPA.

United Kingdom

• The Bus Services Act 2017 requires operators to publish routes, fares and timetables as open data, the raw material a MaaS app depends on.
• The Department for Transport's MaaS Code of Practice is voluntary but sets clear expectations on accessibility, multimodal ticketing, data sharing and consumer protection; public partners will expect you to follow it.
• Where you hold customer funds or issue stored value, you need e-money or payment services authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), with safeguarding of customer money.
• Any owned or contracted passenger transport brings PSV operator licensing and local taxi or private-hire rules into scope.

Finland (and the direction of travel)

• Finland's Act on Transport Services (2018) was the world's first MaaS-enabling law. It compels transport operators to open ticketing and payment interfaces so aggregators such as Whim can resell trips.
• It is worth citing in any plan because it shows regulators moving toward mandated open data, the single biggest structural advantage for the aggregator model, and signals where the UK and EU may head next.

Similar frameworks are emerging across the EU under multimodal travel information rules, and in Singapore and parts of Australia through transit-authority-led schemes. The safe planning assumption is that data access improves over time but payment and passenger-transport licensing stay strict. Build the licensing timeline into the plan as dated milestones, because a lender or investor reads a vague regulatory section as unpriced risk.

Five Costly Mistakes in a MaaS Plan

Reviewing plans in this niche, the same avoidable errors recur. Fixing them before you send the document to an investor or lender is the cheapest edit you will ever make.

1. Building the app before signing an operator

The most common failure is spending the whole budget on engineering, then discovering the local transit authority will not share ticketing data on acceptable terms. Sign at least one anchor operator, or secure a letter of intent, before the first sprint. The plan should list who is committed, not who might be interested.

2. Underestimating settlement and reconciliation

Reselling trips across modes means splitting revenue, handling refunds and reconciling with every operator, often on different payment cycles. Founders routinely leave this out of the cost model. It is real engineering and finance work, and it belongs in both the operations and the cost sections.

3. Assuming one city's rules transfer

A TNC permit, an open-data feed and a friendly regulator in your launch city do not travel to the next one. Treat each city as its own go-to-market and compliance project, and phase expansion accordingly rather than modelling a straight-line national rollout.

4. Chasing deep integration too early

Level 3 and 4 integration, with bundled subscriptions and policy alignment, is where the vision lives, but it is expensive and slow. Prove demand at levels 1 and 2 first. A plan that promises a full mobility super-app in year one reads as naive.

5. Ignoring accessibility duties

Public partners and, increasingly, regulators require the app to serve disabled and older travellers. Retrofitting accessibility is costly and can stall a public contract. Design it in from the start and say so in the plan.

MaaS Terms Every Founder (and Investor) Expects You to Know

Mobility as a Service carries its own vocabulary, and using it correctly in the plan signals you understand the mechanics. These are the terms that come up in operator negotiations and due diligence.

• Aggregator vs. operator: an aggregator surfaces information and booking across modes; an operator also takes commercial responsibility for the trip, holds the customer relationship and settles with providers. Investors will ask which you are.
• GTFS / GTFS-Realtime: the General Transit Feed Specification, the standard format for static timetables and live vehicle positions. Without it, journey planning does not work.
• GBFS: the General Bikeshare Feed Specification, the equivalent standard for shared bike and scooter availability.
• MDS: the Mobility Data Specification, increasingly required by cities to regulate and monitor shared micromobility fleets on public streets.
• Deep integration: the Sochor levels 0 to 4 describing how tightly modes are combined, from information only up to bundled subscriptions aligned with city policy.
• Multimodal ticketing: a single payment or ticket that spans several transport modes in one journey, the core convenience MaaS sells.
• Settlement / reconciliation: the back-office process of splitting fare revenue and refunds across the operators whose trips you resold.
• E-money authorisation: regulatory permission (from the FCA in the UK) to hold or issue stored customer funds, needed once you take money before the trip is taken.

Sample Business Plan Preview

Here is an extract from a mobility as a service plan written in the Avvale house style, so you can see the level of specificity the template drives toward:

What's in the Template

Every Avvale business plan template is pre-structured for its industry. For mobility as a service, the prompts push you toward operator agreements, retention economics and the regulatory path rather than generic filler:

• Executive Summary:the operator-versus-aggregator model stated in the first 60 seconds
• Company Overview:legal structure, launch city, and the founding team's transport and fintech credibility
• Market Analysis:MaaS market size, revenue-mix trends and the integration level you target
• Supply & Partnerships:the transport modes and technology vendors you integrate, with commitment status
• Customer Analysis:commuter, casual and corporate segments, and how each is acquired and retained
• Revenue & Unit Economics:subscription, pay-as-you-go, licensing and commission, modelled by cohort
• Operations & Technology:build-versus-license, settlement, data feeds (GTFS, GBFS, MDS) and roadmap
• Regulatory & Risk:TNC, FCA and data duties as dated milestones, not a disclaimer

The optional Financial Forecast add-on, included in the $300/£250 and $1,000/£800 packages, provides a five-year Excel model with income statement, cash flow, balance sheet, cohort retention and break-even analysis built for a MaaS operator. If you would rather have a specialist write the whole document, our business plan writer team does exactly that.

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