Custom Software for Auto Repair Shops
Your bays make the money. Your counter burns the day.
Every hour your best people spend answering "is my car ready?" is an hour of wrench time you paid for and didn't get. We build shop software that takes the routine counter work — status updates, approvals, reminders — off your service writers.
Sound familiar?
- The phone rings all day with status calls, and each one pulls a service writer — or you — away from cars that pay.
- Parts get ordered off sticky notes on a monitor. When a note falls, a car sits on the lift an extra day waiting on a rotor somebody swore they ordered.
- Estimates come out handwritten, or fight their way out of a legacy system nobody trusts. Either way, customers hesitate — and hesitation kills approvals.
- No-shows blow holes in the morning schedule that the afternoon can't fill.
- Bays sit idle while the counter is slammed, which is the most expensive kind of quiet a shop can have.
What we build for auto repair shops
Digital vehicle check-in with photos
Walk the car with a tablet: photos of every panel, mileage, and customer concerns, time-stamped on the work order. When "that scratch was already there" comes up, the photo is on file, and the tech gets a clean write-up instead of a hallway summary.
Status texting with approval links
"Your car is ready" goes out as a text the second the job closes. When the tech finds worn pads mid-job, the customer gets a photo, a price, and an approve button, so approval doesn't wait on a round of voicemails. Customers can check status without calling.
Parts tracking with reorder alerts
What's on the shelf, what's on order, and what's about to run out — tracked automatically, with alerts before you hit zero on the filters and pads you go through every week, and every order logged so nobody has to remember whether it went in.
Appointment scheduling with reminders
Customers book online against your real bay capacity, and automatic reminders go out the day before and the morning of, with a one-tap confirm or cancel. A cancellation opens the slot back up for someone else to book.
If online booking is the piece you're missing, we've written about when a custom booking system makes sense for a shop with real-world constraints like bay count and tech availability.
Frequently asked questions
What does custom software cost for an auto repair shop?
Standard rates are a $650/month platform fee plus $49/month for each staff login — service writers, techs, whoever signs in — adjusted to your shop and confirmed in a written quote before we build. A five-person shop is $895/month. The monthly fees cover hosting, monitoring, backups, security updates, bug fixes, and email support; text messaging, including customer status texts, is billed separately. Changes after launch are $150/hour, approved in writing first, and a larger build can carry a one-time fee, quoted up front. Here's the full breakdown of what custom software really costs.
We already have a legacy shop management system. Do we have to throw it out?
Not unless you want to. You can keep the old system for what it does well and have us build the missing pieces around it — the status texting, the check-in flow, the parts alerts. If it can export data, we can usually work with it.
How long does a build take?
A single piece, like digital check-in or status texting, typically takes 1–2 weeks; a full system with check-in, texting, parts, and scheduling typically takes 4–8 weeks. Those are ranges from our past projects in other industries, not promises.
Will my techs and service writers actually use it?
That's what it's designed for: a check-in screen with only the fields your service writers use, a photo button big enough for greasy hands, and nothing else in the way. We include email support, and hands-on training for your team can be added to your quote.
Take the routine work off the counter
Tell us where your shop loses time — the phone, the parts shelf, the no-shows. We'll send a written quote to fix it. The quote is free either way.
Get a Quote