Catching the school bus shouldn't be a daily challenge. If you don't like,
then we have something you might like very much: SpotMyBus.
SpotMyBus is the smartphone app that shows you where your bus is and tells you when it will arrive at your stop. It's simple to use, accurate, and reliable.
While other apps can tell you how far away the bus is (in miles), only SpotMyBus can tell when it will actually arrive
Middle and high school kids love it because it tells them when the bus will arrive at their stop so they can avoid waiting at the bus stop in poor weather when the bus is runninig late, and never wait for a bus they have actually missed.
Parents love it because nobody has to wait around at the bus stop, and it's easy to meet their kids at just the right time.
Catching the school bus is easy when your school district adopts SpotMyBus!
Never guess again. With SpotMyBus, you can see the exact location of your school bus before you even leave your home.
Never again wait for a missed bus. With SpotMyBus you'll know when the bus will arrive at your stop (or when it left).
SpotMyBus eliminates the need to call your school for bus information. And no more missed calls from your school when the bus is running late.
No more waiting in the cold, wind, rain, or snow.
SpotMyBus accurately predicts when your bus will arrive at your stop.
Track all of the school buses your children ride.
Download
Download
If your school district is already using SpotMyBus, click the Download link on this web site and you can start using SpotMyBus immediately.
If SpotMyBus isn't yet available in your school district, you and your neighbors should ask your school district to adopt SpotMyBus.
Yes, SpotMyBus is free to parents and students in school districts that adopt SpotMyBus.
SpotMyBus is free for parents and students in school districts that adopt SpotMyBus.
SpotMyBus allows you to track all of your children's school buses.
SpotMyBus predicts arrival time with high accuracy, but it simply isn't possible to tell you the exact second your bus will arrive until it actually reaches your stop. Therefore, when SpotMyBus tells you the estimated arrival time it also shows a range (e.g. +/- 2 minutes).
SpotMyBus uses proprietary, statistical methods to ensure that its arrival estimates are the most accurate possible.
Your friends must be in a school district which has already adopted SpotMyBus. As soon as your school district decides to make SpotMyBus available you can use it too.
If SpotMyBus isn't yet available in your school district, you and your neighbors should ask your school district to adopt SpotMyBus.
Presently, for maximum security, SpotMyBus is only available as an app for smartphones and tablets.
Track your school buses in real-time. See them moving on a map in your browser. Quickly & easily generate reports showing speeding, excessive idling, and more.
SpotMyBus includes an app for parents & students. It tells them when their school bus will arrive. It notifies them when their bus is near.
No more missed buses. No more waiting at the bus stop in poor weather. You'll receive fewer angry calls from parents about missed buses, and fewer inquiries asking, "Where's my bus?"
We provide a GPS tracker for each bus. We provide the cellular data service so the trackers can send location information to our servers. We provide the SpotMyBus software. All you need is a web browser.
And, are you ready for this? SpotMyBus is not only the best and easiest-to-use system for tracking your fleet, but it's also the best-priced system at only $29 per bus per month. That's about half the price of other systems.
Not only is SpotMyBus the best-priced system for school bus operators but, when a school district adopts SpotMyBus, all of their parents and students get the SpotMyBus app for free!
Instantly locate any bus in your fleet right on your monitor or tablet. Know exactly when each stop occurred. See average arrival time at each stop and variability.
Identify buses that are speeding.
See any bus or entire fleet on map in real time. See the complete route of any bus, on any day, for any period.
Simply the lowest price in the industry: $29 per bus per month
Oh, and the mobile app is free for parents & students!
Identify buses that are wasting fuel.
Significantly reduce calls from parents asking, "Where's my bus?"
When a bus in your fleet becomes disabled, SpotMyBus identifies it and shows you its exact location.
SpotMyBus identifies and shows buses that are running behind schedule.
At SpotMyBus we belive in transparent pricing. Our price is great and we're right up front about it. Yes, SpotMyBus is only $29 per bus per month. Other companies (Synovia, Zonar, etc.) avoid talking about price as if it is some kind of trade secret. When you do get a price, it will depend on the size of your fleet, which features you purchase, your salesman's mood, and how well you negotiate. When you finally do get a price it will be about $40 per bus per month if your fleet is small and around $32 per bus per month if your fleet is large. Oh, and that price won't include tracking for your parents and students.
If you want your parents and students to be able to track the buses they use, you'll have to pay as much as $4 per bus per month extra, and each parent will have to pay $20-$30 for the school year. SpotMyBus is the only solution that makes the mobile app freely available to parents and students.
So there you have it, $29 per bus per month includes everything: trackers, cell service for the trackers, unlimited use of the cloud-based SpotMyBus tracking and reporting software for your transportation department, and unlimited use of our great mobile app for your parents and students.
Really, it's twice the system for half the price!
We love small school districts, and we feel priviledged to work with them. Until now, many small school districts simply could not afford real-time school bus tracking. With SpotMyBus every school district can track their school buses, and we get small school districts up and running in no time!
We love large school districts. Transportation for a large school district is such a big and complex problem that effective solutions are not enough, they must also be simple to implement and use.
Our trackers are the simplest to install (only 4-wires). SpotMyBus software presents the simplest display with the most information and performs routine tasks with the fewest clicks and keystrokes.
SpotMyBus software even shows you the status of each bus (moving, idling, running late, out-of-service) continuously without any clicks or keystrokes!
Of course you can. Let's conduct a pilot. We're happy to provide you with a set of trackers to install on a sample of your buses. We'll also set up a SpotMyBus account for you and your staff.
As soon as you install the trackers you'll be able to see your buses moving in real time, trace their historical movements, and produce a variety of helpful reports.
The pilot is entirely free of cost or obligation.
It's easy. You can start with a pilot if you like, where we send you some trackers to install in a sample of your buses, and provide you and your staff with an account to use. This let's you try-before-you-buy so you know exactly what you're getting.
When you're ready to roll out SpotMyBus to your entire fleet, that's easy too. Just provide us with a list of your bus numbers (and/or route numbers) and we'll set everything up. We'll send you trackers for each of your buses (labelled to show which tracker goes on which bus). Install the trackers and you're up and running.
Yes. Only your staff will have access to your bus data via the web. Only parents and students will be able to use the SpotMyBus app to track buses, and only the buses which serve them.
Unlike other systems, the SpotMyBus app does not collect any personal information about parents or children. The SpotMyBus app includes no advertising and no information of any sort is ever sold or distributed. The most secure information is the information never collected.
Also, feel free to read our privacy policy, the most protective in the industry. If you look, you'll find that many of our competitors don't even post privacy policies.
When SpotMyBus entered the school bus tracking space we were surprised at the lack of transparency in pricing. The most basic question when buying almost anything is, “How much does it cost?” At SpotMyBus the answer is simple because our pricing is completely transparent: $29 per bus per month. Large school district, small district, city or rural, our price is the same and there are no additional up-front or hidden costs. Everything is included in our lowest-in-industry price (except installation which we leave to our customers who are best-qualified to work on their buses).
Our competitors treat pricing like it's a trade secret. They won't just come out and give you a price. When you do get a price it will depend on your fleet size, your sales person, the length of the contract, how affluent your school district appears to be, and who knows what else. Worst of all, the price won't be a bottom-line price. To see what we mean, take a look at the Pricing chart to the right. Please notice that when we say our price is $29/bus/month that's exactly what we mean. There are no additional or hidden costs. You pay $29/bus/month in the first year, in the second year, and in every year. You won't find any surprises when we send a quote: it will be exactly $29/bus/month.
Please consult the Features chart to the right to see some of the many capabilities SpotMyBus provides, many of which simply are not available in any other product. We are confident that SpotMyBus is the best GPS tracking system, and we will be pleased to provide an in-person or online demonstration.
It is tempting to imagine that higher prices indicate higher quality. In the case of a manufactured good, higher quality materials and craftsmanship generally do cost more. It really does cost more to produce a Cadillac than a Hyundai and the quality and price difference is obvious.
School bus tracking requires a tracking device, but all good-quality trackers are in the same price range. Aside from the tracker, the rest is software. The software determines what the system can do, how well it does it, how pleasant or difficult the system is to use, and how happy your transportation department and your parents/students will be with it.
Software isn't a manufactured good. Once software is developed any number of copies can be produced at no additional cost. The reality is that price simply does not indicate the quality of software—at all! In fact, higher quality software can actually cost less than lower quality software because it can be more reliable, easier to maintain and enhance, and may require fewer costly resources.
For example, SpotMyBus software was designed, from the very beginning, to minimize the amount of data that must be sent from the buses to our servers. The highest single cost in GPS tracking is the cost of cellular connectivity used to send location (and other) information from the moving buses to the Internet-connected servers. SpotMyBus sends information using far less than half as much data as any of our competitors. We are able to reflect these lower connectivity costs in our best-in-industry pricing ($29/bus/month). Similarly, we wrote all of our server software from scratch. The SpotMyBus server software is so efficient that we need fewer servers than our competitors and this is also reflected in our pricing. Higher quality enables lower pricing.
SpotMyBus has developed the highest quality mobile app to let parents and students track their buses, and we were the first (and only) company to make these apps available to parents and students for free. Why did we do this? The simple reality is that when parents have to pay for a mobile app the overwhelming majority simply will not buy it. If they don't buy it they can't use it. If they don't use it they will continue to call your transportation department to ask, "Where's my bus?" Providing the mobile app for free encourages parents and students to use it. When the app is free, usage rates are typically in the 50% - 80% range. When the app is not free, typical usage rates are only 3% - 5% which means you'll continue to receive 95% - 97% of those calls asking, “Where's my bus?”
| SpotMyBus | |
| Pricing transparency | ✓ |
| GPS cost/bus/month | $29 |
| Additional/hidden costs | never |
| Tracker cost/bus | $0 |
| Activation fee cost/bus | $0 |
| Driver time & attendance/bus/month | $0 |
| Mobile app/bus/month | $0 |
| Training | $0 |
| Year 1 cost/bus/month | $29 |
| Years 2+ cost/bus/month | $29 |
| SpotMyBus | |
| Driver time & attendance | ✓ |
| Mobile app (for parents/students) | ✓ |
| Predicts arrival time | ✓ |
| Tracks multiple buses | ✓ |
| Automatically finds bus stop locations | ✓ |
| Does not require routing software | ✓ |
| Eliminates need for data integration | ✓ |
| Safety | ✓ |
|
Speaks directions (No need for display. Displays distract drivers and are illegal in some states) |
✓ |
| Speed aware | ✓ |
| Knows speed limit on road | ✓ |
| Alerts driver when speeding | ✓ |
| Alerts dispatcher | ✓ |
| Black box crash recorder | ✓ |
| Reporting | ✓ |
| Fully map-based | ✓ |
| Excessive idling | ✓ |
| True speeding report | ✓ |
| Harsh braking report | ✓ |
| Bus stop arrival report | ✓ |
| Vehicle usage report | ✓ |
| Late to school report | ✓ |
| Shows cellular dead zones | ✓ |
| Add landmarks (schools/depots) | ✓ |
| Fuel monitoring | ✓ |
| Odometer monitoring | ✓ |
We take your privacy seriously. Hardly a month goes by without hearing about a major retailer, bank, hospital, credit card reporting agency, or federal or state agency or department being hacked. There are thousands more hacks each month which do not make the news. Any company claiming that your data is securely stored in their computer systems is sharing a wish not a fact. Simply put: the only truly secure information is the information you do not provide.
SpotMyBus does not ask for or capture any personal information about anyone. It doesn't know the names, addresses, phone number, e-mail address, or anyting else about any SpotMyBus user; all SpotMyBus users are completely anonymous. Since no such data exists in our system, it simply cannot be stolen by hackers. Our approach to privacy and security is the only foolproof one: we do not collect any personally identifiable information so we cannot share it and it cannot be stolen.
You and your kids are safe with us. You will not see any ads embedded in any of our products. We do not use our web or mobile apps to advertise or market to adults or children.
The SpotMyBus app which runs on your phone does not attempt to obtain or infer your identity or any information about you
and does not transfer any information about you to our servers or anywhere else. SpotMyBus requires some Android
"permissions" to run on an Android phone, but all are necessary for the app to perform, and none are intended or used
to gather information about you or your location.
These are the permissions SpotMyBus requires and why it needs them:
SpotMyBus uses your GPS location to show your position on the map. SpotMyBus does not store your location and does not send it anywhere.
Necessary for SpotMyBus to store information about buses and bus routes you wish to track.
Necessary to access maps and to receive bus location updates.
SpotMyBus uses your phone's network access (wi-fi or over-the-air) to communicate with our servers, to receive maps for display, and to receive bus location updates.
SpotMyBus checks your network connections to let you know when you have no connection and cannot receive bus location updates.
The SpotMyBus app will vibrate when the bus location changes.
SpotMyBus prevents the phone from sleeping while it is in the middle of receiving bus location updates.
When you install SpotMyBus it will place a shortcut (icon) on your phone's home screen. You can, of course, remove it if you so desire.
SpotMyBus verfies that it will be able to store bus and route information on your phone.
No company is more concerned about your privacy than ours.
If you are a parent or student who has installed the mobile app, and you need assistance please click here to visit our support page.