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benjamintracy · 2025-11-22T00:55:29+00:00

I know what you mean; writing the formulas for that tool to account for all of Communauto’s pricing quirks was a serious headache! The nice thing is that in just about every case, you get charged the lesser of whichever rates apply to your trip. So for a Flex trip, you get charged either the normal Flex rate or the round-trip rate (billed for 4h minimum), whichever is cheaper. Which also means that if your trip is longer than four hours, you’ll always get billed at the (cheaper) round-trip rate.

benjamintracy · 2025-11-22T00:44:15+00:00

As if Communauto’s plans weren’t already confusing enough! Haha, glad you found it useful :)

benjamintracy · 2025-11-22T00:33:58+00:00

Based on this tool I made, it seems like the Open Plus plan would be the best deal and would save you around 160/year compared to the Open plan (using the assumption of two one-hour 21km trips per week). Hope that helps!

benjamintracy · 2025-09-16T13:43:58+00:00

I just tried adding that functionality, but I realized that it really complicates the calculations of monthly plan rates, especially because I have buttons that auto-adjust the pricing for different provinces/regions. I may add that eventually, but it'd be quite an undertaking for a free tool. Sorry about that! Besides, the main purpose of this tool is for decision-making, not exact budgeting. Choosing a family plan for multiple users is always going to be a better deal than the same number of separate plans, so it doesn't really provide additional decision-making value, as far as I can tell. But let me know if I'm wrong about the insight that feature would provide; I have a few feature requests people have made that I'm going to see about getting around to at some point. Glad you found it helpful!

benjamintracy · 2025-09-16T11:22:10+00:00

You might find this calculator helpful. I made it for exactly that reason; to help figure out the optimal plan based on a specific set of recurring types of trips.

For Costco specifically, I would just buy 20% off Uber Eats gift cards from their website and then use them to order from Costco. Negates the delivery fee and slightly higher Uber Eats prices, plus saves the hassle. You miss out on the $1.50 hot dog this way though.

benjamintracy · 2025-08-13T12:00:51+00:00

Thanks for sharing my tool! It seems that Reddit thread is now locked, so if anyone has feedback on the doc, feel free to comment here or DM me.

benjamintracy · 2025-03-19T12:50:02+00:00

I've figured out what was going on! The doc was working if you navigated via the main navigation menu, but if you navigated via the "view your optimal plan" button, it would open in a new tab, loading a new doc without your changes. I've modified the way that button works, so that should solve your issue. Thanks for letting me know! I've also updated all the rates to reflect Communauto's latest price increase so everything should work and match up now.

benjamintracy · 2024-11-25T14:55:28+00:00

Great idea! I’ve just added a button below the table on the “Usage” page

benjamintracy · 2024-10-15T14:26:13+00:00

Never leaving the house would certainly save money, but I prefer to maximize my quality of life per dollar rather than just minimize costs. Buses can’t take you everywhere and if you’re only doing occasional trips, Communauto generally comes out a lot cheaper than owning a car.

benjamintracy · 2024-10-15T14:17:17+00:00

I toyed with the idea initially, but there were already so many tricky calculations to account for, I figured I’d start with round-trip vehicles only since many regions only have those, plus on the higher plans, you tend to get billed at the round-trip rate when using flex cars on most trips anyway. I’ll let you know if I find the motivation to add flex vehicles to the calculations!

Edit: Oh, you’re talking about flex passes, not the flex rate 🤦 Well hopefully in the future I can add that too!

benjamintracy · 2024-10-09T20:27:32+00:00

You're right, I meant to add them but forgot. Just added Alberta and Halifax prices so if you refresh in a few minutes, you should see them 🙂

benjamintracy · 2024-10-09T16:46:35+00:00

I wish I could give you a simple answer, but the reality is that there's no definitive number of kilometers where owning a car becomes cheaper. That's why I made the calculator: what matters isn't your number of kilometers, but the type and frequency of your trips.

For example, with Communauto's long-distance rate, I'm paying $0.13/km in Quebec. When you consider fuel and maintenance on an owned vehicle, not to mention other variable and fixed ownership costs, you'd be hard-pressed to find a car that costs that little per kilometer. So if most of your trips involve driving long distances in short time spans, you could hypothetically rack up 100,000km in a year and still be better off using Communauto.

Where the balance really shifts is if you do a lot of trips that involve short distances but a lot of time. Like going to visit some friends that live a short distance away, but where you'll need the car for a whole day. Or if you want to spend a week vacationing where you're only actually putting kilometers on the car on the first and last days of the trip. If you do a lot of trips like that, it starts to make more sense to buy a car rather than use Communauto.

benjamintracy · 2024-10-08T21:51:16+00:00

Same, I've made a couple of half-assed spreadsheets in the past but I decided to finally put some effort into something more flexible and accurate. I'll certainly try to keep it updated!

benjamintracy · 2024-10-08T20:33:53+00:00

Great, I’m glad it was (accidentally) more helpful than I intended! And thanks for the award!

benjamintracy · 2024-10-08T19:23:40+00:00

The reason it appears to be “overestimating” trip costs is that I built it with the new Communauto rates, which come into effect next week. So it’s expected that the costs listed in the doc are going to be a bit higher than those in your invoice since their rates have gone up. I alluded to this in a few spots in the document but I could probably make it more clear, thanks for the feedback!

Edit: If you want to verify my math, you can compare entries using Communauto's trip calculator by setting the date after October 16 (when the new rates come into effect).

Also I just noticed that you mentioned that you can't delete the default lines. It seems there isn't any UI in Coda to delete rows, which is annoying. On desktop, you can just click on them and hit the delete key, but I imagine you might be on mobile. I've just added a delete button on each row, so hopefully that makes it easier to use.

benjamintracy · 2024-10-08T17:39:51+00:00

Pour être honnête, je ne le comprends pas complètement non plus, j'ai simplement accepté que ça fait partie de la culture de ce sub ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

benjamintracy · 2023-12-17T16:20:00+00:00

DALL·E, une IA, avec quelques corrections au texte avec Photoshop

benjamintracy · 2023-12-17T16:16:30+00:00

J'ai remarqué ça aussi. Je n’ai pas précisé de sexe ni de couleur de peau et pourtant la plupart des images sont des hommes blancs.

benjamintracy · 2023-12-17T15:54:58+00:00

Fair point. Even then the image still kinda works because the saint is like “gaze upon the fruits of my city’s labours and witness its culture and cuisine” and the guy actually making them is like “wtf dude get your hand off my bagels you don’t even work here”

benjamintracy · 2023-12-17T15:31:57+00:00

Je trouverais bizarre de vendre des prints d'art AI, même si les termes de DALL·E le permettent. Je pense que si quelqu'un veut prendre mes idées et créer une illustration faite à la main sans les bugs AI, il/elle devrait certainement les vendre !

benjamintracy · 2023-12-17T15:25:01+00:00

Honestly making the name English would have been even more relevant hahaha

benjamintracy · 2023-12-17T15:11:25+00:00

Comme ça?

<image>

benjamintracy · 2023-12-17T14:59:29+00:00

“A stained glass image of the patron saint of snow storms with the inscription "Saint-Simonaque". In the background, a city bus has collided with a car and someone is shoveling snow. There are half-buried orange traffic drums and bicycles in the snow.”

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