The increasing highlight of vehicles in cities has increased the need of efficient parking systems, although most of the currently available systems are still inadequate because of the high cost of implementation, use of costly sensors, and vulnerability to network jamming affecting real-time functionality. The outcome of such constraints is erroneous updates on availability, access control failure, user frustration and failure to scale particularly in growing cities where infrastructure reliability is compromised. In order to defeat those problems, the current paper proposes the project SmartPark, being a cheap and resistant to outages IoT-based parking manager. The solution will suggest an ultra-low-cost ESP32 platform based hardware node, which has an IR sensor to support the accurate slot detection and gate control and a local caching system will allow temporary booking validation and continuity during temporary interruptions in the internet and full synchronization and payment confirmation will be achieved when the internet is reconnected. A Flutter mobile app provides real time availability, reserve control, time based charge and QR assisted gate entry with an average entrance time of 8.7 seconds. Controlled and semi-realistic experiments involving more than 200 booking events were used to assess the system with an accuracy of 100 percent slot detection and an operational accuracy of 96.4 percent when the system was in operation in the controlled setting and 96.4 percent when the system was in operation in a real world environment and considering network latency and variability in the environment. Satisfaction with the users was rated 4.6/5. Such results suggest that SmartPark is a low-cost and robust parking solution that can be implemented in tight spaces to be used in urban environments with limited resources.