Buying a train ticket in Britain can be a trying experience. Getting the best price available for a journey by rail, while faced with lengthy queues to see a sales clerk, can test the most robust patience.

In the coming months, commuters on Greater Anglia will be offered a new service that aims to simplify the rail journey and charge users the best price, avoiding rail travel’s often-byzantine fares.

MultiPass is an app that finds the best fare for the day or week, depending on how the user has travelled previously. Commuters have to check in on the app after arriving at a train station. The app then works as a virtual pass, recording journeys, with data used to work out best fare. A trial involving 100 people last year is now being extended to a full operating system from May in a bid to replace paper tickets.

Alexander Peschkoff, one of three co-founders, said there was a frustrating complexity about the type of tickets bought from a machine in a train station – from understanding what time is considered peak or off-peak to being unable to change the ticket once you have bought it.

“The idea was to recreate something similar to the ticket office experience where you go in to the ticket office and you say ‘I am going to Manchester’ [and they say] ‘when are you coming back? Tomorrow? Here is your ticket.’ Done,” he said.

The MultiPass system works in a similar way to London’s Oyster card, where the cheapest fare is calculated for all journeys taken in one day. When the user goes into a train station, a beacon registers that they are there via the app and they input their destination. A barcode ticket is issued on the phone to show an inspector.

The actual price of the tickets used is only settled at the end of the week, giving the best possible price based on the single and return journeys, and also takes into account whether a weekly travel card would cut the users’ bill.

“If you buy a single but then your plans change and you have to go back then you have to buy another single,” said Peschkoff. “With MultiPass, we give you a virtual ticket, a soft ticket. It is stored in the cloud and it is only settled at the end of the week. If you travel more during the week, we will cancel the original ticket and we will replace it with a more suited and better version of the ticket.

Buying tickets at ticketing machines does not guarantee best price. Photograph: NewsCast

“If you wake up on a Monday morning and decide to go to Cambridge and buy a single, with MultiPass you always buy a single, you get a soft single ticket, you go to Cambridge and then you come back. We say we have already charged you £19.90 for a single but the return is £24 so we will only charge you the price of the return,” Peschkoff explains.

If the customers travel to Cambridge and back each day, then by Thursday they will have accumulated four return tickets in the cloud. So MultiPass will cancel them all and replace them with a cheaper seven-day season ticket.

“Then we tell you that you can travel on Friday, Saturday, Sunday for free because you have bought the ticket,” Peschkoff adds.

This may allow users to take advantage of tickets that they may not have been aware of, according to Peschkoff, who said three-quarters of people bought their tickets at the station.

Many travellers were unaware, he said, that return tickets were valid for 30 days after they were bought. The majority of people who would benefit from buying a weekly ticket are not buying them because of the expense. “People don’t realise this,” he said.

An initial trial was held at 24 stations between London Liverpool Street and Cambridge with 100 customers. The Greater Anglia rail network, operated by Abellio, will be fitted with beacons by May and the MultiPass system will then be rolled out, route by route. The first routes to go live will be London-Cambridge, followed by lines to Southend and Norwich. All routes will be completed by the end of the year, said Peschkoff.

How MultiPass works. Photograph: Abellio Greater Anglia

Another pilot scheme is planned for the north of England, most likely between Sheffield, Doncaster and York. MultiPass’s goal is to become a nationwide system of ticketing, eventually being used on contactless payment cards in the same manner as has been adopted by London Underground. Navigating the complex grid that is the British rail network – and its 24 operators – is an enormous challenge, however, with the only slight relief being that some companies run multiple rail franchises. “It is rocket science,” said Peschkoff.

There has been some resistance from operators that benefit from customers buying tickets at a higher price, he said, and there is a complex bureaucracy of winning multiple approvals and permissions through every operator.

The company makes money by taking a commission from the operators on the tickets that are sold, while the consumer does not pay any more for their journeys. So far, £2m has been invested in the company and it has received £1.1m from Innovate UK, the government agency that supports funding research and technology development. It has also developed a secure wearable device.

Peschkoff said tackling the UK’s complex rail and ticketing system would give them a better footing for international expansion. “Once we have cracked the UK, the rest is plain sailing.”