Buyer's guide
Free vs paid driving instructor apps
There are genuinely free instructor apps, and for some instructors they are the right answer. But free software is funded somehow, usually by a cut of your lesson payments or a charge per pupil, and that number is often larger than any subscription on the market. Here is how to work out which is cheaper for you.
The short answer
Free is the right call in three situations: you are a PDI on a trainee licence, your diary is already full and you only need somewhere to record it, or you are still deciding whether you want digital record keeping at all. In those cases, ADI Network costs nothing and MyDriveTime is free until you qualify.
Otherwise, do the arithmetic on the whole cost rather than the subscription. On £30,000 of lesson takings a year, an unpublished 2% payment fee costs £600. A £14.99 a month subscription costs £179.88. The cheaper-looking product is frequently the more expensive one, and the difference is hidden in the part nobody advertises.
What "free" means in this market
ADI Network
A genuinely free diary, payments, balance tracking, local job listings and CPD content on iOS and Android, with no subscription fee stated anywhere.
Watch for: The fee on card payments sits in the terms rather than on the site: 2% + 30p per transaction, kept even if you refund the pupil. The app is run by the PassMeFast group and its jobs board supplies PassMeFast courses, so check who owns the pupil relationship, what happens to your data if you leave, and whether pupils can book online themselves.
MyDriveTime, for PDIs
Free with full features until you qualify. On a trainee licence, this is the best offer in the market and you should take it.
Watch for: It steps to £19 a month the moment you qualify, which is the most expensive single-instructor plan among the main UK apps. Plan for that date rather than being surprised by it.
Free trials
GoRoadie Pro gives 60 days, Total Drive and MyDriveTime 30, Passly and DriveSchoolPro 14. Running a trial costs nothing and is the only way to know whether a diary suits how you teach.
Watch for: A trial only tells you something if you put real pupils through it. Booking a fake lesson proves nothing about how the payment flow feels to a nervous seventeen year old.
Work out your own number in two minutes
- Start with your annual takings. Lessons a week, times your hourly rate, times the weeks you actually work. Most full-time ADIs land somewhere between £25,000 and £40,000.
- Multiply by the payment fee. If you take card payments through the platform, this is the number that matters most. Passly is a flat 1.5%, published. GoRoadie is 1.9% on payments you raise. Total Drive sets its fee at sign-up. Free apps mostly do not publish theirs, so ask.
- Add the subscription. Twelve times the monthly fee. This is usually the smallest line in the calculation, which is the opposite of how it is marketed.
- Add what you pay for pupils. Per-pupil marketplace charges and commission channels belong here. A 25% commission on lessons is by far the largest number anyone in this market charges.
- Subtract what it earns you. A refilled cancellation is roughly £38. A new pupil from a free listing is a few hundred pounds over their course of lessons. This is the line that usually decides it.
Our earnings calculator will do the takings part for you if you would rather not do it on paper.
Where Passly sits
Passly is mainly a paid app: £14.99 per instructor per month, £179.88 a year, with a flat 1.5% on lesson payments taken through the platform on top of standard Stripe processing fees. Both numbers are published before you sign up rather than revealed afterwards.
There is also a free tier, and it works the way the rest of this page says free tiers usually work. You can list your business on the Passly marketplace at no cost, with a professional profile that is visible in search, and pay only for the leads you accept. That is a pay-per-lead model, not free software: the diary, pupil management, online booking, card payments and progress tracking are on the paid plan, where marketplace leads are then included at no extra charge.
What you get for it that free apps generally do not include: pupils booking themselves from your real availability, an embeddable booking widget for your own website, one-tap filling of cancelled slots, a free marketplace listing that sends you enquiries at no charge per pupil, and CSV export of everything you have, any time, at no cost.
If none of that is worth £14.99 a month to you, a free app is the rational choice and we would rather say so than sell you something you do not need.
Free vs paid: common questions
Is there a genuinely free driving instructor app?
Yes. ADI Network offers a free diary, payment and job-listing app on iOS and Android with no monthly fee. MyDriveTime is free with full features for PDIs until they qualify. Both are real offers rather than trials. Free is not fee-free though: ADI Network's terms set a 2% + 30p charge on card payments, higher than any published rate among the paid apps, and MyDriveTime does not publish its payment fee at all. Check that figure before you move your payments across.
What does a free driving instructor app actually cost?
Rarely nothing. Free software is usually funded by one of three things: a percentage of your lesson payments, a charge per pupil the platform sends you, or referrals to partner products like insurance and finance. On £30,000 of lesson takings a year, a payment fee you did not notice at 2% costs £600, which is more than three times a £14.99 a month subscription. The subscription is the visible cost, not the biggest one.
When is a free app the right choice?
Three cases, honestly. If you are a PDI on a trainee licence with little income, take MyDriveTime's free offer. If your diary is already full from word of mouth and you only need somewhere to record lessons and balances, a free app does that and paying for lead generation you will not use is wasteful. And if you are testing whether you want digital record keeping at all, start free rather than committing.
When does a paid driving instructor app pay for itself?
Faster than most instructors expect. At £14.99 a month, Passly costs less than half of one lesson. One cancelled hour refilled through gap filling covers it. One new pupil a year from a free marketplace listing covers several years of it. If a paid app saves you two hours of evening admin a month, that is already worth more than the fee at any realistic lesson rate.
Do free apps let pupils book online?
Usually not, or not from your real availability. Self-service booking is the feature most often reserved for paid plans, and in Total Drive's case for the upper paid tiers. It is also the feature that removes the most admin. If pupils booking themselves is what you actually want, check specifically for it rather than assuming a free diary includes it.
Can I move from a free app to a paid one later?
Yes, but check the export terms before you build two years of records inside a product you cannot get data out of. Self-serve CSV export at any time is the standard to hold any vendor to, free or paid. Passly lets you export pupils, lessons and payments as CSV whenever you like, at no charge.
Sources and how we checked
We compared what free driving instructor apps offer against what paid ones charge, and worked out the total annual cost including fees taken on lesson payments rather than the subscription alone. Figures come from each vendor's own published pricing on the dates below. Where a vendor does not publish its payment fee, we say so rather than estimating, and we have set out the cases where a free app is genuinely the better choice.
- ADI Network free app terms checked
- ADI Network terms and conditions (2% + 30p payment fee) checked
- MyDriveTime PDI free offer and pricing checked
- GoRoadie Pro trial length and payment fees checked
- Total Drive pricing and trial checked
- Passly pricing checked
Passly publishes this comparison and sells one of the products in it. Prices and features change: if you spot something out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Try it yourself
Fourteen days free, then £14.99 a month
No card required to start, no contract, and CSV export of everything you put in if you decide it is not for you.