The parking industry will never be the same.

A plate reader does one thing: it reads the characters on a plate. When that plate is clean, square to the camera and well lit, it is good at it. The rest of the time it is guessing — and this industry built its entire access layer on top of that guess.

What breaks a plate read: dirt, snow, glare, a tow bar, a bike rack, a paper temporary tag, a dealer frame, stacked characters, a sharp approach angle. And in about half of US states, the plain fact that there is no plate on the front of the car at all.

We don't start with the plate. We start with the car.

The whole vehicle is photographed on the way in — shape, make, model, colour, the dent in the rear quarter, the sticker in the back window, the rack on the roof — and photographed again on the way out. The question is never what does the plate say. It is is this the same car.

The plate is one signal among several. When it reads, it helps. When it doesn't, nothing special happens, because nothing depended on it.

And every answer carries a confidence score. Below the line it refuses instead of guessing, because a refusal is something you can handle and a confident wrong answer is a charge on somebody else's card.

It works best exactly where plate reading falls apart. That isn't a side benefit — it was the brief.

Parking software is expensive because it has been allowed to be. Closed systems, proprietary hardware, a licence for every lane, a fee on every space, and a contract measured in years. The technology moved on. The business model did not.

So we are publishing the whole thing. The code, the wiring, where to buy the hardware, how to install it. Not a trial, not a community edition, not a teaser — the working system, under a licence that means nobody can take it back, close it up and sell it to you again.

You should own the software that controls your gates and your money.

And we are not a surveillance company. We do not track people or watch public space. The system does two things: collect the parking fee, and control who goes in and out. When that's done, the job is finished.

If you are waiting for a polished launch, wait. If you would rather be running parking software nobody has ever charged you for, and you don't mind being early, this is for you.