Driving work in Paramaribo mostly runs through the centrales. Ulstrel, Hertog, Tourtonne and the others take the call, set the price and hand you the job. It works, and for drivers with a good centrale it works well. It also means the price is never yours.
Intra doesn't replace that. It adds another way for passengers to find you, where the price is yours to set and all of it is yours to keep.
How Intra works for drivers
A passenger posts the trip they want. Drivers nearby send their own price for it. The passenger sees the offers side by side and picks one.
Before you quote anything, you see the pickup, the drop-off and the number of passengers. Three things follow from that:
You set the price. Not a centrale, not a meter, not an algorithm. A late run across the Wijdenbosch bridge to Meerzorg in the rain? Price it for what it is. A short trip around the corner on a quiet Tuesday afternoon? Quote sharp and take it.
You keep all of it. Intra takes no commission. The passenger pays you in cash at the end of the trip. No platform cut, no weekly fee, no plan, no balance waiting to be paid out.
Nobody assigns you work. You choose which requests to quote on and which to skip.
What you need to start
- A car, bus or moto-bike
- A valid driver's licence
- A smartphone with internet
- Ten minutes: sign in with your phone number (+597), take a selfie holding your licence, pick Driver, add a photo of your car
The full list, including what gets checked and how long approval takes, is in what you need to drive for Intra Cab. The app works in Dutch as well as English — tap the flag at the top to switch.
Drive when you want to
No shifts, no minimum hours. Open the app when you want work and close it when you don't. If you need to stop for a while — food, family, fuel — pause new requests for a few hours and nothing comes through until you're back.
That makes it workable alongside a centrale, or alongside a day job, rather than instead of either.
Where you'll find trips
Most activity is in and around Paramaribo: the centre and the Waterkant, out to the neighbourhoods north and south, Zorg en Hoop for the small domestic flights, and across the bridge into Commewijne. The run down to Johan Adolf Pengel International at Zanderij is around 45 kilometres each way — a trip worth pricing properly, and one passengers are glad to book in advance rather than hope for a car at the door.
You can receive a request from anywhere in Suriname. Trips are only sent to drivers in the same country as the passenger, so you won't be shown requests from Guyana. Whether a request comes through depends on a passenger being near you at the time.
Honest about the stage we're at
Intra is new in Suriname. There is not a passenger waiting on every street, and the centrales have decades of head start. It would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.
So the sensible way to use it is alongside whatever you do now. Keep your centrale, keep your regulars, and let Intra add trips on top when they come. There is no fee and no exclusivity, so you give up nothing by having it installed.
What is worth knowing is that the first drivers matter more than the later ones. A passenger who opens the app and gets an offer within a minute comes back. One who gets nothing doesn't. Every driver who is online makes that first experience better for the next passenger — and right now, in Paramaribo, that is a short list to be on.
Getting started
The app is free on Android and iPhone.
Download Intra and sign up as a driver
Or read more about how driving on Intra works · in het Nederlands: rijden in Suriname zonder commissie