Strategy · Product design · Engineering · Multi-tenant SaaS
Chauffeur
A multi-tenant chauffeur SaaS exportable to any shared cPanel host — so franchisees onboard without DevOps.
Overview
Why we built it
The founder had run a chauffeur service in Islamabad for nine years. He wanted to franchise it — Karachi, Lahore, Multan, then GCC cities. Off-the-shelf options were dispatcher SaaS built for ride-hailing economies (Uber-style) or fleet-management software priced for 500+ vehicles. Neither fit a 20–80 driver chauffeur operation with mostly corporate and pre-booked travel. He needed something *his shape*. He needed it to run on shared hosting, because every franchisee he'd ever met hated DevOps.
Outcomes
60%
drop in WhatsApp bookings in 30 days
96%+
on-time pickup rate (was ~80%)
10 min
to onboard a new franchise tenant
Approach
The shape: pre-booked + corporate, not on-demand
Chauffeur services aren't Uber. 70% of bookings are scheduled days in advance: airport runs, business meetings, multi-stop corporate days, recurring weekly engagements. The dispatch problem is *forecasting capacity* and *honouring commitments*, not matching the nearest car. We designed around that — corporate accounts as first-class entities, recurring rides, named drivers with named clients, surge pricing only for genuine peak windows.
In one line
“Ten minutes from a new franchise signing to a fully branded, multi-tenant SaaS running on their own $5 cPanel host.”
The build
Multi-tenant from day zero
Each city / franchise is a separate tenant with its own branding, pricing, driver pool, and reports — but shares one codebase. We used PHP namespaces + a single MariaDB with row-level tenant isolation. Onboarding tenant #2 is a settings page, not a rebuild. The founder onboarded Karachi 10 minutes after we shipped tenant management.
What we shipped
Brand identity
Type + palette + iconography for the platform.
Marketing + booking site
Public site with instant booking + corporate codes.
Dispatch console
Live ride board, drag-to-assign, driver heatmap.
Driver PWA
Installable from URL, works on $80 Android phones.
Corporate accounts
Custom pricing, monthly statements, employee allowlists.
Multi-currency payouts
Stripe + local PSPs, daily settlement to drivers.
Tenant analytics
Per-franchise dashboards · revenue, utilisation, NPS.
cPanel-exportable
One-click ZIP a franchisee uploads to shared hosting.
Outcome
Where we are now
Live in Islamabad as the founder's own operation. Karachi franchisee onboarded month 2. Two more cities in active scoping. The founder is now building a marketing site to sell the platform itself to other chauffeur operators internationally — we're shipping a second-tier SaaS layer where Filenod operates the hosting for non-technical buyers who don't want shared hosting either.
“The product is good. The thing that made it work for me as a franchisor is that my franchisees in Lahore and Karachi can take the export, upload it to whatever $5 hosting plan they bought, and run. No DevOps. No retainer they can't afford. That changed our economics.”
Built on
PHP 8.3 · MariaDB 11 · Tailwind v4 · Vanilla JS PWA · Google Maps API · Stripe + local PSPs · cPanel-friendly deploy · Docker for ops
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