After a lot of number crunching in January, I learned that I could have saved $546.01 on my Communauto bills in 2025 if I had been on a different plan! I built a free tool, Communauto Cruncher, so you can check your plan too. I built out most of it in January and February, then sat on it. Communauto recently sent out some communications requesting feedback, so I'm releasing it now.
The tool is built in Google sheets. If you just want to use it, click the Communauto Cruncher link and follow the instructions to open the latest version and make your own copy. Otherwise, stick around for the story of why and how I built it.
Communauto is a car-sharing service that lets members book cars that are located throughout cities across Canada for short-term trips. The Ottawa branch was founded in 2000 as Vrtucar by Chris Bradshaw and Wilson Wood
Vrtucar has since merged with Montreal-based Communauto and expanded to over 150 cars across Ottawa. Most cars have to be returned to their home station, but the recently-launched FLEX service allows point-to-point rentals similar to e-scooter and bikeshare rentals.
Although I knew about and collaborated with Chris and Wilson since very close to the beginning through my involvement with Bike Ottawa (then known as Citizens for Safe Cycling), I didn't join until July 2016, on what is now known as the "Value" plan, which has a low monthly fee and moderate per-trip rates. I actually found the simple spreadsheet I used at the time to determine which plan to get:
A year ago, my household's Communauto usage went up, but it didn't occur to me until last month to look at whether I would save money on a plan with a higher monthly fee but lower per-trip rates.
I couldn't find any resources on Communauto's website to help me evaluate this, so I thought I'd quickly enter my data and a couple formulas into a spreadsheet (like I did back in 2016), but Communauto's pricing structure turns out to be really complicated (especially if you go off their rates web page instead of the more comprehensive PDF fee schedule), and what followed was an effort to recreate their calculations as accurately as possible. How else could I tell how much money I'd save?
I started by entering the trip data, which itself was a bit challenging because the invoices—virtually unchanged since 2016—don't include all of the variables that feed into the calculation (e.g. there's no indication if the vehicle you booked was a minivan, which incurs a 15% surcharge)
Then I added the rates to a table and built formulas to look up the different rates and compare them against each other. For each trip, I had to calculate what rate would be used for each given plan (since, for example, the Value plans charge a trip at the Open Plus rate or Long Distance rate if cheaper). Then for each month, I had to determine how much that month's monthly fees and trips would cost on each of the different plans.
The result is the dashboard you see at the top of the post. You can pick any month or range of months, and it will tell you what plan you were billed at, and what the best plan would have been for that range of months. When you scroll down, it displays all of the relevant details of the plan rates, including additional rates that are considered (as well as potential savings with the Damage Protection Plan, but that has caveats):
Having done all the work to be able to calculate accurate Communauto rates, I then turned my sights on the Trip Calculator. Here's the calculator on the Communauto website:
It has a number of shortcomings, including that weekend and other surcharges are relegated to footnotes, it isn't clear about which special rate is applied, and that you can only select dates in the future—to say nothing of the clunky date selection interface.
I built my Trip Calculator in the Communauto Cruncher tool a bit differently. You can choose to either enter an end time or a trip duration, then enter the distance of your trip, and it tells you what the best rate is for each plan, as well as what the breakdown is for each potential rate:
Anyway, my trip calculator goes further than Communauto's, letting you select to include the per-trip Damage Protection Plan fees (if you aren't paying for the monthly DPP) and vehicle surcharge for minivans and family cars:
Like the rest of the Communauto Cruncher tool, it doesn't do FLEX trip estimates, simply because I haven't used a FLEX car yet so I don't have trips reflected on my invoice. If you have FLEX invoice data that you're willing to share, I'd be happy to receive it to start working on that.
I also want the Trip Calculator to tell you when you've already hit the daily maximum for the time rate, so you can extend your trip without incurring any extra costs.
In testing my trip calculator, I noticed a discrepancy between the rates I was calculating and what Communauto's trip calculator was returning. After a number of hours of troubleshooting, it turns out, my numbers were right and Communauto admitted there was a bug in their math.
Since I essentially had to audit Communauto's rates, invoices, and documentation, I actually wrote out a ton of notes for feedback to Communauto, which I've included in the "Attn Communauto" tab of the Communauto Calculator versions sheet. Things like how the invoice doesn't include the vehicle surcharge or details about credits on trips made by secondary drivers. And that it charges an extra penny in HST on every invoice.
This is my first time releasing "software". I used Google Sheets because it's easy and relatively accessible, plus I can get the document to refer to the main versions document to see if a newer version has been released.
Hopefully it's useful to other people (even without the FLEX calculations) and people will be able to use it to analyze and better understand their own Communauto bills.
If you've tried the Communauto Calculator, please fill out this Google Form to help me improve it! If you found it useful and want to show some appreciation for the time I have put into building it, consider "buying me a coffee" on ko_fi.
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