The fare is per taxi, not per person. Almost nobody splits it.

01  The problem

A number on a meter that ignores how many people are in the car

A taxi from Tel Aviv to Ben Gurion Airport runs around ₪150 on the meter. From Jerusalem, around ₪310. The meter charges the same whether 1 person rides or 3 people do, so every empty seat is money nobody had to spend.

And the alternatives keep narrowing. The shared sherut vans from the airport no longer operate, public transport stops on Shabbat and holidays, and late-night flights land into a taxi line and nothing else. People who would happily share a taxi end up paying the full meter alone, at the exact hours when the fare is highest.

02  Why it stays broken

The demand exists. It is just scattered.

People already try to split taxis, constantly. "Anyone splitting a taxi Thursday night?" in a WhatsApp group that scrolls away in minutes. A post in a 50k-member Facebook group that gets 2 comments, both from last week. An Instagram story that vanishes in 24 hours. Asking strangers with luggage in the taxi line at 2am.

Every one of those is the same question, asked in a place that cannot answer it. A group chat has no memory, no profiles, and no way to choose who you ride with. The coordination problem was never solved because no place was built for it. That is the entire gap PairMee fills: not new taxis, not new drivers, just the missing place.

03  What we built

A matching layer on top of the taxis that already exist

PairMee is deliberately small in scope. We do not own vehicles, employ drivers, or dispatch anything. You post your route and time, see people heading the same way, approve who joins, and share one regular taxi.

The full flow, step by step, is on how it works.

04  The obvious question

Shared rides failed here before. Why is this different?

Israel has a graveyard of shared-mobility services, and anyone who remembers them should ask this. Almost all of them shared one trait: they operated the vehicles. Vans to lease, drivers to pay, routes to subsidize. Every ride burned money until the money stopped.

PairMee operates nothing. No fleet, no drivers, no dispatch center. Riders find each other and split a regular taxi that already exists and is already paid for by its passengers. When a dispatch service opens on the airport corridor, it validates the demand. It does not answer who you ride with, women-only rides, events, or any route beyond its own.

Our honest risk is a different one: enough people posting routes at the same time. That is exactly why PairMee is free, and why it starts where demand already concentrates: Ben Gurion, nights, weekends, and events.

05  The lines we will not cross

What we refuse to do, in writing

A product that matches strangers for a shared ride lives or dies on trust, so we would rather promise less and keep all of it.

• We do not run taxis or touch the money

  PairMee is a matching platform. The taxi is the regular taxi, the meter is the regular meter, and riders split the fare directly between themselves. We never sit in the middle of the payment.

• We do not charge riders to match

  Posting a route, seeing who is going your way, and approving who joins are free today. No booking fees. The business side of PairMee is custom-built solutions for events and enterprises, not the riders splitting a fare.

• We do not fake activity

  No invented user counts, no fake reviews, no rides you can "join" that do not exist. Example routes are labeled as examples and cannot be booked.

• We do not claim safety we cannot enforce

  Everyone signs in with Google and you approve every match, and that is exactly what we say. ID verification is on the roadmap and not live yet, so we do not advertise it. No vague reassurance in place of real mechanisms.

06  Why we built it

A note from the founder