News: new version with new features

Dear Caroster users,

Best wishes for 2025! We are pleased to announce the roll-out of Caroster Beta 8! Thanks to your invaluable feedback, this new version includes new features that make organizing your trips even easier.

Our goal for 2025: to improve your user experience and make it easier for you to organize your travel:

What's new?

📣 Version Beta 8 Caroster:

This new version incorporates several improvements to make your journeys easier:

✔️ Simplified management of round-trips within the same event

✔️ Advanced trip search to find carpools more easily

✔️ Improved map navigation for route finding

✔️ Better route organization with display of driver's first and last name

🚗 A clarified, turnkey Caroster Plus offering:

Caroster Plus can now be activated directly when you create your event. Designed to meet the needs of professional events, it offers:

✔️ Restricted access to modifications for better management

✔️ Administrators can assign passengers to people looking for a ride.

✔️ New, simplified, secure connection with no need to create a password, just an e-mail link (magic link technology).

🌍 Italian translation: Thanks to the help of our contributors, Caroster is now available in a new language.

📜 Published cookie policy: No marketing cookies here, just what's needed to ensure smooth and secure use: DPD Caroster.

⬇️ Find out more in the team word

Coming soon

💼 C orporate version to manage commuter carpooling with Caroster Pro: We're working on a Caroster Pro version that simplifies the management of regular commutes, particularly in the context of home-to-work trips for companies and organizations. This version is in line with our commitment to supporting companies in their drive for more sustainable mobility.

🔄 Caroster website under construction: The complete redesign of the website is well underway. We're in the content writing phase to better highlight Caroster's added value and its various use cases, with the addition of a blog in particular.

Thanks

• Many thanks to our contributors who made Caroster's translation possible:

  • Italian@ipiccininiatex

  • Italian: Andrea Spila Andrea Spila

  • Translations are available here: https://translate.codeberg.org/projects/caroster/web-app/.

• Thanks to all the contributors who have made this new version possible:

  • Tim Izzo, Octree (link: https://5ika.ch)

  • Thomas Rüesch, Octree @truesch (link: https://git.octree.ch/truesch)

A word from the team

Our aim is to be as close as possible to you, and that means being transparent about our choices. Here's a third attempt with this post from Caroster's product managers, Xavier von Aarburg and Mathilde Draps.

1. The new Caroster Beta 8

Dear users, this beta 8 version is a new milestone for us.

We've worked to make your experience more fluid and intuitive: map navigation has been optimized for computer users, with smoother zooming and moving. It is now possible to manage round trips directly in events, and identifying routes has been made simpler thanks to the display of drivers' first and last names.

Caroster Plus has been optimized with features that simplify account creation with the introduction of magiclink. This eliminates the need to create a password-protected account as required, while guaranteeing event security.

What's more, access to sensitive information is restricted. Unlike Caroster Basic, only drivers and passengers can see each other's information if they share the same route. The administrator, on the other hand, is the only one to see the full names of users. On Caroster Plus, it is now possible to retrieve the waiting list for administrators. In other words, when a passenger activates an alert, the administrator sees them on the waiting list and can place them on a route. This was a much-requested feature, and we're curious to see how it will be used.

Here's a glimpse of a Caroster Plus guest event:

2. New Caroster Plus pricing

For Caroster Plus, we've adapted the price, which now varies according to the number of participants and is fixed per event:

- Up to 250 participants: €25

- 250 to 1,000 participants: €100

- From 1,000 to 5,000 participants: €300

- Over 5,000 participants: price on request

Depending on the volume selected, we offer discounts.

The price of €25 per event was being tested, and we observed that the larger the event, the more value Caroster brings to the carpooling organization. A larger structure also has more resources to contribute to the service. This price therefore seems reasonable to us, and fits in with the spirit of solidarity we want to create with Caroster, with proportional prices that should help us maintain the project and guarantee its future development.

3. Community contributions

Caroster is now available in Italian! We were pleasantly surprised to receive two unsolicited proposals for Italian translations, one from a professional Italian/English translator. Thanks to their contribution, we're now able to make the service even more accessible!

Finally, we have published a clear cookie policy in line with our values: only cookies necessary for the proper functioning of the application are used, with no marketing cookies, in compliance with European requirements. The drafting of this policy was made possible thanks to feedback from a Caroster user. The feedback we receive, whether it's a simple question or a request for compliance, enables us to improve a little more every day.

4. A growing need: commuter carpooling for companies

At the same time, we've been receiving a lot of requests from companies who would like a car-sharing platform dedicated to their organization for the home-to-work car-sharing of their employees. Initially, this wasn't a niche we wanted to get involved in, as our philosophy was not to reinvent the wheel, and we felt that other players more focused on this issue and with greater resources, such as Blablacar daily or Karos, to name but a few, were already offering solutions. But it turns out that they don't seem to be fully meeting the needs of certain companies. So we're working on developing a Caroster Pro version for businesses, to meet the need for commuter carpooling.

Unlike one-off events, regular journeys such as commuting require a completely different kind of organization. There are several different needs within the same problem: some organizations need to know who's going where, and to form teams for the long term, while others (often large organizations with several departments) need to organize their day-to-day journeys on a trip-by-trip basis, as people don't know each other. We're currently working on a version that best meets this second need.

Our mission remains unchanged: to promote more sustainable and collaborative mobility through car-sharing, by developing a digital commons.

We look forward to continuing to build this adventure with you and sharing our progress!

With enthusiasm,

Xavier von Aarburg & Mathilde Draps - Caroster Product Managers

Useful links

🌍 Want to help translate Caroster? Find out how to translate easily with Codeberg: Translating the Caroster app as a contributor

💬 Feedbacks in real time: Feel free to give us your suggestions for improvements here: Caroster evolution: your suggestions. We've created statuses so you can track how your feedback is being taken into account. They are invaluable to us in improving Caroster and developing the features that matter most to you.

🔗 Calculate the real cost of a car journey: Are you organizing or driving to an event? Calculate the real cost of this trip here: https://futur.eco/cout-voiture (Beta version currently).

We hope you enjoy these updates, and look forward to hearing from you with any suggestions you may have. Thank you for being part of the Caroster community!

See you soon.

- The Caroster team