Since a soft launch a month ago Mosgiel business partners Adam Johnston and Briyarne Pascoe have seen several thousand visits made each week to their RUC Hub website.
The AI guided website is a free public platform where vehicle users can track information on the new system in one place.
Over the next few years the government is working towards petrol, electric, hybrid, as well as diesel, vehicles moving into distance-based RUC as petrol tax is phased out.
Mr Johnston said the approaching charges were one of the biggest shifts for road funding in decades, but much of the detail was hard to access for light-vehicle owners.
Rather than wading through difficult-to-follow Cabinet papers, New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) updates and Ministry of Transport documents, the website made it easy for owners, he said.
"We have taken a lot of the official documents, timelines, updates and many, many sources that we were researching and restructured it into plain English and tried to use a lot of symbols and offered it in different languages. Our goal is quite simple — we want to make the RUC transition and the confusion around it less intimidating."
He advises vehicle owners to start doing their homework now.
The RUC transition, likely to involve as many as four million vehicles, is expected to be digitised next year and fully rolled out for the whole fleet in 2028.
The co-founders both quit their jobs a few months ago to work fulltime on the business, living off savings.
A fundraising round is expected to be carried out later this year.
They have moved from South Dunedin to Mosgiel, where Mr Johnston has family, and operate from an office in their home.
Mr Johnston said they previously worked for the food delivery app Delivereasy, and were met with a "slew" of questions from drivers when the changes were first announced in 2025.
"They wanted to know what the changes meant and how they were going to pay tax and the confusion only continued across the months until we realised ... often the answers were there, but they were quite tricky to find, so we decided we would take a crack at explaining it to people ourselves."
The pair started developing the business in late August and pushed it out quietly to carry out early testing.
More than 2000 official documents from 60 organisations were shaped into explainers, a policy timeline and practical tools so drivers can understand the changes.
They use AI to monitor links and key words — and send a summary of changes — when the ministry or other sources post updates.
Mr Johnston said this was manually cross-checked to make sure there were no AI errors, and other systems monitored Parliament and other links.
A chatbot answers questions on each page. Translations in six languages, including te reo Māori, were added a few weeks ago.
Many website visitors are looking for related news, with the most common query asking if their vehicles will need RUC.
Other questions are about where they can buy RUC, if there are online services and who is retailing RUC.
Mr Johnston said they had plans to create more tailored solutions and monetise the site, without advertising.
"We do intend for this to push into a broader ecosystem and hope to start retailing RUC when the new changes come in."
This could include offering RUC over the counter, possibly in a partnership, as many people would prefer this over paying online and as RUC providers were planning to offer only digital services, he said.
A live dashboard on the website tracks about $2 billion per year flowing through the system to give people a clearer view of how road funding works.
The co-founders have also launched RUC Compare as another website so road users can compare the prices of every RUC provider.
Mr Johnston said their main aim was not to push for or against the policy, but to make the system more transparent for drivers, businesses and communities across Otago and beyond.
Eventually, depending on the website’s long-term popularity, they might expand it to a mobile app.
