If you have tried to price shop management software, you already know the pattern. The pricing page shows three tiers, the feature you actually need sits in the top one, and the real number does not show up until you are on a demo call. Then the add-ons start.
We sell shop software, so read this knowing that. But every number below is public, and we checked all of it — including our competitors’. Shop owners keep telling us the thing they hate is not the price. It is not knowing the price. So here it is, all of it. If you’re weighing whether a free tool covers you instead, we priced those separately in free auto repair shop software.
The short version
Month to month, for one shop, the vendors below run from $99.99 at the bottom to $999 at the top. Torque360 aside, the entry tier of each ladder sits between $199 and $279 a month, and the second rung runs $349 to $399.
The sticker is rarely what you pay. Add-ons are quoted separately and stack on top of the tier you picked: Tekmetric’s marketing module is another $345 a month per shop, and Shop-Ware sells a CRM and online-scheduler package for another $249 a month — more than Torque360 charges for its entire product.
What the big names charge
All checked on the vendors’ own pricing pages on 7 August 2026, and they change without notice. Month-to-month rate first, annual-billing rate second.
Tekmetric runs $199 (Start), $349 (Grow), and $439 (Scale) month to month; annual billing drops those to $179, $309, and $409. Price the add-ons before you price the tier: multi-shop management is another $70 a month per shop, the Tire Suite another $39 a month per shop, and the marketing module another $345 a month per shop — for what that $345 buys, most of it is on our free list in auto repair shop marketing.
Shops also report the built-in labor guide falling short — one Capterra reviewer called it “so full of holes it is unuseable” — and the fix shops describe is paying a second company for a real one.
Shopmonkey runs $239 (Basic), $399 (Clever), and $499 (Genius) month to month; $215, $359, and $449 on annual billing. Notice which of those two numbers you are being quoted — an annual rate repeated without the word “annual” is how a $239 plan gets remembered as a $215 plan.
The cost that never appears on a tier list is the update you did not ask for. Shopmonkey’s forced v2.0 migration produced a wave of one-star reviews on Capterra from shops whose daily flow broke overnight — and a morning of bays waiting while your writer relearns the ticket screen is real money.
Torque360 is the budget option at $99.99 (Starter) or $199.99 (Turbo) month to month; $89.99 and $179.99 annually. Read the fine print on Starter — it caps you at 5 co-users, where Turbo is unlimited. That is per-seat pricing wearing a costume. Hire a sixth person and your software bill jumps a tier.
AutoLeap runs $199 (Essentials), $349 (Pro), and $449 (Elite) month to month; $179, $309, and $409 on annual billing. They publish the tiers now, so the sticker is not the thing to watch. The term is.
Their pricing page states no contract length at all, while shop owners on Capterra and on the Diagnostic Network forum report annual agreements with auto-renewal and a 60-day cancellation-notice window. That is what shop owners report, not something AutoLeap states — which is exactly why you get the full-year total and the cancellation terms in writing before you sign.
Shop Boss runs $199 (Gold), $349 (Platinum), $449 (Premier), and $649 (Premier Plus) month to month; $179, $314, $404, and $584 on annual billing. Four rungs is a long ladder for a small shop, and the only question that matters is which rung the thing you came for is actually on.
Shop-Ware runs $279 (Startup), $389 (Pro), $499 (Master), and $999 (Ultimate+) month to month; $251, $350, $449, and $899 on annual billing. Their CRM and online-scheduler package is a separate $249 a month on top of any of them.
Mitchell 1 publishes nothing. No pricing page, no starting number, no tier list — the only way to learn what it costs your shop is to take the call and be quoted. The product itself is the industry’s legacy workhorse, and shops do go back to it. One Software Advice reviewer of Tekmetric described exactly that and wrote: “ITS JUST SLOWER. Within two hours of switching back to Mitchell, everybody was telling me it was faster writing estimates.”
The costs that are not on the pricing page
- Card processing. This is the number least likely to appear on any pricing page, and on a busy month it can outrun the subscription. It is also the easiest one to settle in a single email. Ask three things: does the vendor add a percentage on top of the processor’s fee, what is that rate in writing, and can you keep your own processor. A vendor that answers all three plainly has nothing to hide. One that turns it into a sales conversation has told you something.
- Texting. Sometimes included, sometimes metered per message, sometimes a paid module. If your shop texts every estimate and every invoice — and it should, because that is how approvals happen now — a per-message fee quietly turns into a real line on the bill. Ask whether texting is included, then ask whether “included” has a monthly cap.
- Contracts and auto-renewal. Month to month means the vendor has to keep earning your business. An annual term with a notice window means they do not. Shop owners in reviews describe finding out the difference the expensive way, at renewal.
- Getting your records out. Not a line item — a lock. Shops moving from one platform to another report that their customer list, vehicles, and history did not come with them. One Shopmonkey user, a service manager, wrote it in capitals on Capterra: “YOUR INFORMATION WILL NOT TRANSFER TO OTHER MANAGEMENT SOFTWARES!” Ask any vendor, before you sign, exactly what you can take with you and in what format — and what happens to your records the day you stop paying.
The software bill is usually the smallest number in this whole conversation. Your labor rate is the biggest one. If you want to see what a dollar on your door rate is actually worth, the auto repair labor rate calculator works out your effective rate.
What a fair deal looks like
- One public price. If the number only comes out on a demo call, you cannot compare it to anything until you have spent an hour on the phone.
- Every user included. A shop is a team. Per-seat pricing taxes hiring.
- The whole product, not a ladder. Texting, inspections, payments, and reports should be what you bought. If the thing you came for is two tiers up, the tier you were quoted was never the price.
- Month to month, and a straight answer about your records. Ask what happens to your ROs and your history the day you stop paying. “They stay readable” and “call your account manager” are very different answers.
Where BayDocket fits
BayDocket is $149 a month, flat — or $1,490 a year, which works out to two months free. The first 10 shops pay $99 a month, or $990 a year, for as long as the subscription stays active; cancel and resubscribe later and the then-current list price applies.
That is every feature and every staff member: estimates with per-job text approvals, photo DVIs, invoicing and text-to-pay, scheduling, parts inventory with vendors and purchase orders, and owner reports. If you just need an invoice template while you’re deciding, we keep a free printable one with no signup either.
No tiers, no add-ons, no per-user pricing, and no cut of your card payments — the money lands in your own account and Stripe’s processing fee comes out of it, with nothing added on top, because your shop is the merchant of record rather than us.
No contract either — and since this post just spent a section on that word, here is the exact version. There is no term commitment and no notice window. Both plans do renew until you cancel, you cancel it yourself in your billing settings whenever you like, and it runs to the end of the month or year you have already paid for. Monthly renews monthly, annual renews annually, and that is the whole of the commitment.
If you do stop paying, your shop goes read-only. Every RO, invoice, inspection photo, and customer record stays exactly where it is, readable and printable. Nothing gets deleted to pressure you into re-subscribing.
We are a young product built alongside a real pilot shop, so here is the honest half: there is no labor guide, no QuickBooks sync, and no online customer booking. We just told you to ask every vendor what you can take with you and in what format, so here is our own answer. Settings has a Your data section, and the button there hands the owner one zip file. In it: customers, vehicles, every repair order with every line on it — estimates and declined jobs included — invoices with the tax broken out by rate, voided ones kept and flagged, and one cash ledger of deposits, payments and reversals. Plain CSV, money in dollars, dates in your shop’s own timezone, and a README that explains each file. Not in it: photos, inspections, appointments, inventory, text history, the staff list, canned jobs, and vehicle recommendations. There is also no QuickBooks-format file, no scheduled or emailed export, and no way to ask for just a date range. And it still works after you cancel, which is the only version of that promise worth making.
What there is, you can see for yourself — open a loaded demo shop running on real-looking data, with no signup and no sales call.
If you are pricing specific tools, we keep honest side-by-sides: BayDocket vs Tekmetric, BayDocket vs Shopmonkey, BayDocket vs AutoLeap, BayDocket vs Shop Boss, BayDocket vs Shop-Ware, and BayDocket vs Mitchell 1.