Parksy - Parking Made Easy: Find Parking Near Me, Appeal Parking Tickets & More
The Paywall That Was Paying Our Bills
A Parking Company Just Got a Parking Fine — £473,000
by Daniel Battaglia
Parksy charged drivers to contact a space owner for most of a decade. It was defensible, it paid the bills, and it was the single biggest brake on the business. Founder Daniel Battaglia on why a paywall in front of trust filters believers rather than time-wasters — and what happened after removing it across 57 countries. Full written version on Medium. Free to search, free to list, free to contact — and no commission or markups, ever. Find a space, or list your own, appeal annoying tickets and more at parksy.com.
In December 2025 the Competition and Markets Authority fined Euro Car Parks £473,000. Not for the tickets. For ignoring the regulator. The CMA issued a legally binding information notice in July 2025 and made seven separate attempts to get a response — registered post, hand delivery, emails direct to the company's directors. Three months of silence. Euro Car Parks later told the CMA it had blocked the emails, believing them to be fraudulent. The CMA did not accept that as a reasonable excuse, and set the penalty at 75% of the maximum — the first fine ever issued under its new powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. I've spent 14 years on the driver's side of this fight. Forgive me a moment of quiet satisfaction. 00:00 — £473,000, and why a parking company got a parking fine 00:14 — What actually happened: the CMA's December 2025 fixed penalty 00:31 — The distinction everyone gets wrong — not the tickets, the silence 00:44 — Seven attempts. Registered post, hand delivery, emails to directors 01:03 — First use of a power the CMA had never used, set at 75% of maximum 01:11 — The asymmetry: three months of silence vs your 28-day window 01:26 — If only there were somewhere to go when a charge feels unfair 01:53 — The serious bit: "just pay it" was never advice, it was a business model 02:18 — One fine doesn't fix an industry 02:25 — If a charge is on your kitchen table: signage, timestamps, photos 02:43 — Use the operator's appeal first — it's what unlocks the free independent service 02:54 — Why we built the appeal tool Important context, and the CMA said this itself: the penalty is not a finding that Euro Car Parks breached consumer protection law. At the time it was issued, no such investigation had been opened. Euro Car Parks has appealed the penalty to the High Court and the fine is not payable until that appeal is determined. Since this was recorded, the CMA has opened an investigation into Euro Car Parks — looking at parking charges issued to drivers queuing at petrol forecourts, and at the company's appeals process. That one is ongoing. Got a private parking charge? Check the signage, check the timestamps against the grace period, keep every photo, and appeal to the operator first. Then decide with information in front of you. Free parking fine appeal calculator: https://www.parksy.com/appeal-parking-fine-calculator Source: GOV.UK — Competition and Markets Authority, "CMA fines Euro Car Parks £473k for failure to comply with legal information notice," 13 February 2026: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-fines-euro-car-parks-473k-for-failure-to-comply-with-legal-information-notice
The first one. Recorded before there's anything impressive to point at — which is sort of the point. I've spent the last few years in the execution layer of growth: Google Ads on tight budgets, SEO systems running across thousands of pages, and marketplace platforms where supply, demand and user trust all have to hold at once. Small teams, real pressure, not much room to be wrong. Now I'm building Parksy. On the surface it's simple — help people find parking and avoid fines. Underneath it's a marketplace with supply and demand that don't naturally match, strangers who have to trust each other to transact, local search at scale, and the monetisation timing problem that sits underneath all of it. In this episode: 00:00 — Why hitting record before anything has happened is the hard part 00:23 — Background: ads, SEO at scale, and marketplace platforms 00:47 — What Parksy actually is, and why it's harder than it looks 01:14 — The problem with most startup content: too polished or too vague 01:56 — The marketplace loop — supply, demand, high-intent users, revenue 02:08 — Monetise too early and growth stalls; too late and nothing sustains 02:27 — What this show will and won't be There's no perfect playbook for this. There are better ways to think, and most days the job is just making a slightly better decision than yesterday. That's what I'll be sharing here — the frameworks and the trade-offs, including the ones that didn't work. If you're building something, working in growth, or just want to see how the pieces actually fit together, this is for you. — Parksy: https://www.parksy.com More from me: https://www/danielmbattaglia.com.au