Buying this — Transit OS

You are probably a public body. You buy on a purchase order, after a board meeting, in ninety days, and somebody in finance is going to ask you eleven questions. Here are the answers, in one place, so you can forward this page instead of chasing us for a form.

You do not need a card

We invoice. You give us a purchase order number — or tell us the board has not met yet and you will send it on — and we send a bill to your accounts address on ordinary net-30 terms. Longer if your fiscal calendar needs it; say so and we will match it.

The card option exists for the heritage railways and volunteer operations who would rather just pay, and it is not the main path. Nothing in this product assumes a card.

What your finance office will ask us for

All of it is standard and none of it takes us more than a day. Email hello@transit-os.app and say which you need:

A W-9. Signed, current year, sent the same day.
A certificate of insurance. General liability and professional liability, with your agency named as certificate holder if your policy requires it.
A quote on letterhead, with the line items and the annual figure, for your board packet.
Our vendor registration, in your state's portal or your own — send the link and we will fill it in.
A SAM.gov registration and UEI, if you are spending federal money.
A signed data processing agreement, and a security questionnaire if you have one.

If you have to justify a sole source

Plenty of agencies can buy under a small-purchase threshold and never need this. If you do, the honest grounds are narrow and we would rather you use the real ones than something we made up:

The rider surface ships no JavaScript and loads in about 64 KB. If your riders are rural, elderly, or on a pay-as-you-go plan, that is a service-delivery difference you can evidence rather than assert — measure a competitor's page against ours and put the numbers in the memo.
Everything you put in comes back out. There is a one-click export of every table, and a per-rider export and erase. If your counsel asks what happens when you leave, the answer is on the privacy page and it is short.

What is not a sole-source justification, and we will not help you write: that nobody else does scheduling for small agencies. Several people do, some of them well. If a competitor fits you better we would rather say so — the comparison page names where they win.

If you have to run an RFP

We will answer one. We will also tell you, before you spend three months on it, if we think you would be better served by somebody on your state contract — a procurement you cannot finish is worse for your riders than a product that is second-best.

If you are writing the specification, the requirements worth including are the ones agencies usually forget: a published GTFS feed and GTFS-Realtime, an export of your own data in a documented format, a public rider page that works without JavaScript, and a named person who answers the telephone. We meet all four. So do some others.

What it costs

Every price is on the pricing page, in public, with the per-vehicle overage on the label. There is no enterprise tier whose price depends on how much we think you can pay. The figure your board sees is the figure on the website.

The awkward questions

How long have you been going? Not long. We are small and new, and if that is disqualifying for your agency it is a reasonable thing to be disqualified for. Ask us for the founding-agency terms instead — the price is locked for two years and you get a standing call with us.

What happens if you go under? Your data is exportable in full, today, without asking us. Your GTFS feed is a standard format any successor can read. We would give notice and help you move. We would rather write that down here than be asked it in a meeting and improvise.