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