PayByPhone API
A documented REST API on an Apigee developer portal covers parking accounts, vehicles, zones, and sessions. Credentials go to municipal partners, operators, and integrators only; there is no self-serve signup. Versioning is pinned per endpoint via the X-Pbp-Version header.
Frequently asked questions
PayByPhone scores C on the API Report Card. A documented REST API on an Apigee developer portal covers parking accounts, vehicles, zones, and sessions. Credentials go to municipal partners, operators, and integrators only; there is no self-serve signup. Versioning is pinned per endpoint via the X-Pbp-Version header.
PayByPhone has an official API, but teams routinely hit its limits: gated access, partial coverage, or paid tiers. Most end up supplementing it with exports or an unofficial API layer like Supergood.
PayByPhone is a mobile and web parking payments platform that lets drivers start, extend, and end parking sessions from their phone instead of feeding a meter, and lets cities and private operators replace or supplement physical meter hardware with zone-based digital payments.
Government / Public Sector, specifically municipal parking authorities, transportation departments, university and college parking offices, and private parking operators in North America and Europe (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, and beyond). A driver opens the app at a parking spot, enters the zone or location number printed on the sign, selects their vehicle license plate, chooses a duration, and pays via stored credit/debit card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay.
Very high within mobile parking payments. PayByPhone reports 70M+ all-time users and operations in 1,300+ cities worldwide as of 2025-2026, making it one of the two or three largest mobile parking payment platforms globally alongside ParkMobile and EasyPark.
PayByPhone holds data that is operationally critical to both drivers and cities: every parking session (zone, start/end time, rate, amount paid), the linked vehicle license plates per user, stored payment instruments, push/SMS reminder events, receipts and expense data for fleets, and, on the municipal side, zone configurations, rate schedules, revenue reconciliation feeds, and enforcement query logs that determine whether a citation gets issued.
Mature and modernizing. The product is roughly 25 years old (founded ~2000) but has been re-platformed multiple times under successive owners (PayPoint, Volkswagen Financial Services, now Corpay/FLEETCOR).
Developer portal access is gated behind partner onboarding rather than self-serve signup, making it impractical for end users, fleets, or third-party app developers to integrate directly. Per-endpoint versioning via `X-Pbp-Version` header means callers must track and pin versions individually, and community docs note that error handling and retry semantics require careful client implementation (exponential backoff for 5xx). Full sourced list under Sources below.
Common alternatives include ParkMobile (EasyPark Group), Passport (Passport Labs), Flowbird, EasyPark Group, Parkopedia, HONK. Graded alternatives appear under "More from the report card" below.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.