We are living in the modern world, where mobility makes its place at the top of the table. Many luxury and sports vehicles are trending in this world, and people want to take them for long and short trips without buying them.
Here is the solution: a car rental app like Sixt enables users to rent a car without a long paperwork process, and they can also rent on a monthly basis from a flexible rental method.
As per the ground-level report, car rental applications are valued at around $108.20 billion in 2025; it is expected to increase to around $124.12 billion by the end of 2029.
The above data reveals that investing in car leasing app development is a remunerative opportunity for entrepreneurs to expand their businesses.
In this blog, we will explore how to develop a car rental app like Sixt, premium features, cost, monetization techniques, and benefits.
Let’s begin the journey!
What is Sixt?
The Sixt is an online car rental platform where users can book or rent a car, and this app is available on both platforms, such as Android and iOS. It offers a wide range of mobility and rental services, such as car sharing, chauffeur services, ride-hailing, and car subscriptions.
The Sixt SE offers various types of vehicles, such as economy cars, luxury cars, sports cars, and minivans. Car rental app like Turo and Sixt provide advanced features such as online booking, real-time availability, and secure payment methods.
- Economy cars to luxury options
- GPS navigation
- Vehicle upgrades
Market Analysis of Car Rental Mobile Applications
- As per the recent survey, vehicle rental applications are expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 86% during the forecast period.
- According to the global market, the average revenue per user of the car leasing app is around $167.45.
- As per the global comparison, the United States is projected to generate the highest revenue in the market, around $33 billion in 2025.
- With deep research, the user penetration was around 3% in 2025, and it is expected to increase to around 10.1% by the end of 2029.
- A global survey found that online platforms generate 75% of car rental sales in the market.
10 Popular Car Rental Applications
To create a car rental with unique functionalities, you need to observe the existing rental car service apps to understand their success level. So, here we provide the top car rental apps:
Applications | Download Users | Stores Ratings | Apps Launched On | Platform Accessibility |
Turo | 10M+ | 4.6 | 2010 | Android/iOS |
Enterprise | 10M+ | 4.7 | 2005 | Android/iOS |
Zipcar | 5M+ | 4.5 | 2000 | Android/iOS |
Getaround | 5M+ | 4.7 | 2009 | Android/iOS |
Hertz | 10M+ | 4.6 | 2007 | Android/iOS |
Rentalcars.com | 10M+ | 4.5 | 2000 | Android/iOS |
Virtuo | 1M+ | 4.6 | 2016 | Android/iOS |
Budget | 10M+ | 4.5 | 2012 | Android/iOS |
Avis | 10M+ | 4.6 | 2006 | Android/iOS |
Zoomcar | 10M+ | 4.0 | 2013 | Android/iOS |
What are the Reasons Businesses Choose to Invest in Car Rental App Development?
We know how rapidly car hire service apps are growing in this competitive market and provide a higher return on investment. Today’s businesses choose car rental mobile app development to increase their business’s online visibility and transform their operations. So, here we provide the various benefits:
1. Higher Market Demand
Let’s start with the first benefit: the demand for car leasing apps increases when self-drive options are available in this market. Most users are ready to take cars on rent for self-drive to increase their privacy. Businesses can make this opportunity to offer automobile rentals as a self-drive to increase their overall sales and drive higher growth.
2. Enhance User Experience
In this second benefit, a car hire service app like Enterprise offers flexibility and convenience to users to book the car online and select their favorite car easily. It provides advanced features such as personalized recommendations, secure payment options, online booking, browsing vehicles, and more. These functionalities can enhance the user’s experience and increase engagement.
3. Revenue Opportunities
Connecting to the third benefit, the auto rental app offers various monetization options for businesses to unlock new revenue streams. These are the best money-making techniques offered by ride rental apps, such as subscription plans, freemium models, delivery fees, transaction fees, advertising, in-app purchases, and collaborations and partnerships.
4. Online Visibility and Reach
Let’s go ahead to the fourth benefit: a well-designed door to door car services app can lead the way to reach a global audience and increase online visibility. It can also increase the trust and overall sales of rental applications. With a wider audience, entrepreneurs can easily expand their businesses and drive major success rates.
5. Data Insights
Moving to the last benefit, the best car rental apps allow businesses to analyze the customer’s valuable data to grab profitable opportunities. It observes the user’s regular activities, habits, demographics, preferences, most searched products, purchasing patterns, and more. These useful data can identify the areas where businesses improve their products and services quality.
7 Robust Steps to Develop a Car Rental App like Sixt
For a successful Sixt clone app development, follow the robust development steps that can easily clear misunderstandings and doubts. These development stages explain from the initial stage to post-launch services. So, let’s look at the car rental mobile app development process:
1. Define Needs and Goals
In the first stage of development, you need to clear the actual requirements of your private car rental platform and make a proper list of basic and advanced needs. After that, clear the future goals and observe the market demands and requirements about the vehicle rental applications. Prepare a plan for competitors to compete with them in this competitive market.
What are your app’s basic or core requirements? |
Clear your app’s future goals. |
Which top car sharing apps like Sixt are more successful and trending in this competitive market? |
2. Basic and Advanced Features
Let’s move to the second stage of development. Hire dedicated developers to make an organized sheet of your project’s basic and advanced features. To identify the best features, you can observe the features of existing car hire service apps that you can integrate into your project. Identify the primary and secondary users of your app from the targeted audience.
What are your app’s basic or premium features and functions? |
Observe the existing rental car service apps for the best features. |
Make an organized sheet of features and functions to reduce data redundancy. |
3. Choose Tech Stacks
In the third stage of budget car rental app development, tech stacks are one of the most important or significant tasks of the overall development process. It includes various robust tech stacks such as MongoDB, Postman, MYSQL(For Database), HTML, CSS, JavaScript(For Front end), Java, PHP, Python(For Back end), and others.
Which type of tech stacks are used in your car reservation app development? |
Define your scalability requirements. |
Choose advanced or basic tech stacks. |
4. Design UI/UX
Let’s move to the fourth stage of airport car rental app development: hire mobile app developers to design a user-friendly interface that lets users quickly navigate all the functions and services. It involves many advanced designing tools, such as premium templates, themes, UI elements, colors, layouts, and in-built plugins.
What are wireframes in UX design? |
What tools do you use for prototyping? |
How do you ensure a responsive design? |
5. App Development
Let’s go ahead to the fifth stage of peer to peer car sharing app development. Start the real coding for front-end and back-end processes, and integrate a strong database to store a higher amount of data. Implement various processes such as third-party integrations, API integrations, premium features, and service-side processes.
Do you want to create hybrid or native apps? |
Choose highly skilled mobile app developers. |
Integrate a high number of features and functions. |
6. Testing and QA
Let’s move to the sixth stage of p2p car sharing app development, execute the robust testing services such as unit, functional, security, and integration testing to test the app to find bugs and errors. After the conduct, the quality assurance services make sure that all the features are working smoothly and quality remains the same.
Make sure that all features and functions are working properly |
Use various testing methods, such as unit and security testing. |
Check the app’s security measurements. |
7. Publishing and Maintenance
Connect to the last stage of private car rental app development. Consult with a professional mobile app development company to successfully publish the app on specific platforms such as Android and iOS. After launching, conduct maintenance services to maintain the app’s higher load time, ongoing regular updates, fix errors to boost speed, and more.
Launch your app on selected platforms like Android, iOS, and cross-platform. |
Use the best marketing techniques. |
Assign the post-maintenance phases to maintain the app’s performance. |
10 Must-Have Basic and Premium Features of the Sixt Car Rental App
There are many simple and advanced features that allow users to easily access all the services. These features give an idea to businesses of what functionalities integrate into their automobile rental platform:
1. User Profiles
A car rental app like Hertz allows users to create their own accounts via phone numbers, social media platforms, and email addresses.
2. Vehicle Search
The Sixt alternatives enable users to search for their favorite vehicle according to their location, preferences, type, and availability.
3. Vehicle Details
Similar apps to Sixt provide detailed information about vehicles, such as vehicle type, model, features, fuel type, and amenities.
4. GPS Integration
The Sixt clone app allows businesses to integrate GPS to track their rental vehicles in real-time and provide updates about their location and speed.
5. Online Payment Methods
Sixt alternatives offer secure online payment options, such as digital banking, e-wallets, debit or credit cards, and bank transfers.
6. One-Way Rental
The Sixt similar apps allow users to pick up from their specific locations and drop off at different locations without any extra charges.
7. Scanning and Verification
An app like Zipcar enables customers to scan and verify their driving license and other important documents through the app to save time.
8. Location-Based Services
Apps similar to Sixt let users search nearby vehicles for rentals and pick up the car instantly to save time.
9. User Support
Sixt similar apps provide the customer support team with 24/7 availability to manage users’ raised concerns and fix them immediately to increase overall performance.
10. Real-Time Availability
The Sixt car share app provides real-time car availability to different locations, and users can book the car according to their nearby locations.
The Cost to Build a Car Rental App like Sixt
The cost to create a car rental app like Sixt is around $8,000 to $25,000 or more, depending on the specific requirements of the project. The Sixt car mobile app development cost is also based on several crucial factors, such as the project’s complexity, infrastructure, deployment platforms, development team, features, functions, and size.
The cost also fluctuates for reasons like maintenance, security, testing, and design. So, here we provide the estimated cost with the app’s complexity:
Car Rental App Development | Estimated Cost | Time Frame |
Simple App Development | $8000 – $12000 | 3 to 5 Months |
Mid-Premium App Development | $13000 – $18000 | 6 to 9 Months |
High-Premium App Development | $25000+ | 9+ Months |
What are the Major Factors That Affect Car Rental App Development Cost?
Several factors can highly impact the overall car ride sharing app development cost. Businesses need to avoid these factors to create a mobile app within their fixed budget. It includes various types of factors such as maintenance, development team, design, and functionalities. So, here we provide the cost-affecting factors with a detailed explanation:
1. Development Team
Let’s talk about the RV rental app Development team. It is one of the most common cost-affecting factors. If your project’s complexity is high, you need to hire an experienced mobile app developer to successfully integrate the premium features and build a strong backend to handle the high number of operations easily. So, more experienced developers demand higher salary packages than mid-level developers.
Developer’s Experience Level | Cost Estimation |
Entry-Level Developer | $15 – $18/ Per Hour |
Mid-Level Developer | $18 – $22/ Per Hour |
Senior-Level Developer | $25+ / Per Hour |
2. Basic and Premium Features
Moving to the second cost-affecting factor, integrating the premium features can be one the biggest reasons for an increase in the car rental app development cost and features. It includes real-time availability, location-based services, one-way rental, scanning and verification, and online payment methods.
These premium features have the ability to affect the overall Sixt app development cost. So, integrate the features according to their development cost to reduce the additional expenses.
Features | Cost Estimation |
Core Features(Vehicle Search and GPS Integration) | $8,000 – $10,000 |
Advanced Features(One-Way Rental and Location-Based Services) | $13,000 – $19,000 |
3. Design UI/UX
The third cost-affecting factor, designing tools and resources, has the ability to increase the cost and change the fixed budget of car sharing app development. If businesses want to design a premium user interface, then they need to purchase paid designing tools such as Adobe XD and Sketch. These highly cost-designing tools can impact the cost of creating similar apps like Sixt.
Design Quality | Cost Estimation |
Basic Design | $8,000 – $12,000 |
Complex Design | $15,000 – $22,000 |
4. Back-End Development
In the second last cost-affecting factor, backend processes can highly affect the development cost. It includes various backend processes, such as integrating third-party integrations, API integrations, implementing features, managing servers, logic processing, and authentication.
So, this backend development is highly expensive as compared to front-end development. It involves highly expensive technologies used to build the backend, such as Python, Java, and Node.js.
Backend Development | Cost Estimation |
Basic Backend Process | $10,000 – $18,000 |
Premium Backend Process | $20,000 – $28,000 |
5. Maintenance and Support
The last cost-affecting factor is maintenance and support, which easily impact the overall on-demand car rentals app development cost. The maintenance phase includes adding new enhancements, updating outdated features, providing regular ongoing updates, and fixing bugs and glitches.
Support services include managing and handling customers’ or users’ basic and complex queries. Hiring a customer support team is very expensive, and maintenance services also increase the cost.
Maintenance Phase | Cost Estimation |
Simple Maintenance Phase | $2,000 – $4,000/year |
Complex Maintenance Phase | $7,000 – $9,000/year |
How to Generate Profit From Car Rental Apps Like Sixt?
There are various ways to make money from automobile rental apps like Getaround, but businesses have no idea how to generate new revenue streams to grow their business. So, here, we offer robust monetization opportunities that can easily increase the overall valuation of businesses:
1. Transaction Fees
Let’s move to the first monetization technique: if a user purchases anything from your car leasing app, then you can charge a transaction fee of around 5% to 10%. Let’s suppose the user wants to purchase the subscription plans and additional features, then transaction fees are added to the checkout section.
2. Subscription Plans
In the second money-making opportunity, vehicle hire apps like Rentalcars.com offer subscription plans such as basic, premium, and enterprise for accessing advanced functionalities. Users can purchase a subscription to unlock the full potential of the app; subscription plans can be purchased monthly, quarterly, and yearly. So it can easily generate new revenue streams for businesses.
3. Freemium Model
Let’s connect to the third profit-making opportunity: car leasing applications offer a free version with simple features for new members or users. However, they cannot access the advanced functionalities if they want to access the premium services. They need to purchase the additional features inside the app.
4. Advertising
In the fourth money-making opportunity, an app like Virtuo allows third-party businesses or agencies to show their products or items as advertising in your app. There are various types of advertisements, such as banner ads, pop-window ads, image ads, video ads, and display ads. So, you can charge a fee for showing their products in your other apps like Sixt.
5. Collaborations
Moving to the last monetization technique. You can collaborate or partner with other business-related agencies or firms and allow them to sell their products and services via your car reservation app. You can charge a commission-based fee for selling each product and service. According to the taxi app development company, this commission-based model can generate new revenue streams for businesses.
Conclusion
Now, the time has come to finish the blog with remarkable thoughts. We explored with detailed information about how to develop a car rental app like Sixt and what is the overall development cost. We consider the future recommendations that show how rapidly the car hiring business is growing, and investing in them is one of the most profitable opportunities for businesses. It allows users to rent a car according to their specific locations and choose a wide variety of cars based on personalized recommendations.
So, if you are planning to create a car rental app like Sixt, you can contact a car rental software development company for innovative development solutions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Car Rental App Like Sixt?
The cost to build a car rental app like Sixt is around $8,000 to $25,000 or higher, depending on the client’s special demands. The cost depends on the premium features, functions, complexity, infrastructure, development team, and deployment platforms.
Q2. How Much Time Does It Take To Develop a Car Rental App Like Sixt?
To launch a car rental app like Sixt, it mainly takes around 3 to 9 months. The development time depends on various factors such as higher complexity, a high number of features, developers working hours, and more.
Q3. What are the Core Features of An App Like Sixt?
There are many core features of an app like Sixt that can enhance the user’s and businesses’ experience.
- Vehicle Search
- User Profiles
- GPS Integration
- Online Payment Options
- One-Way Rental
Q4. Which Technologies Are Used to Launch a Car Rental App Like Sixt?
Here, we provide the robust technologies that are used to make a car rental app like Sixt:
- Java
- React Native
- Python
- Kotlin
- Swift