If you’ve ever been faced with problems such as high parking rates, losing track of where you parked your car or getting ticketed for forgetting to extend your meter time, 2014 Belmont graduate Andy Seavers might have a solution for you. METER’D, a mobile app Seavers created to help fill in the gaps of a pleasant parking experience, allows you to search for nearby available parking on a virtual map and view its pricing. With this model, customers can compare pricing rates of the spaces around them to decide where they want to leave their car. The app has other features that allow the user to pay for parking via credit card, extend their parking time from wherever they are and find their car via turn-by-turn GPS directions when they are ready to leave.
The main idea of the app is to lower parking rates by allowing anyone to offer up space for parking, whether they are a homeowner with driveway space near a popular retail district or a business with lot spaces available after 5 p.m. With more space available for parking and more competitors in the industry, Seavers assumes parking rates will naturally decline.
Among his current goals for the new company, Seavers hopes to expand the app to other cities in the U.S. “METER’D is currently in a soft-launch in Nashville, with a goal to prove that this business model works by the beginning of next year,” said Seavers. “With a successful pilot under our belt, we will expand to Charleston, S.C. and will raise an investment round.”
Seavers is also working toward partnering with local businesses to develop another feature for the app that offers discounts to locations near a customer’s parking spot. “This functionality will be tested over the next few months, but is not scheduled to go live until the week of SXSW in Austin, Texas in March of 2017,” Seavers said. “We are, however, collecting the names of interested businesses. They can email me directly at andy@meterd.com.”
For more information on METER’D, check out its website.