Switching auto repair software? The move is our job.

Why shops stay

Nobody stays for the software. They stay for the history.

Ask an owner why they are still on a system they complain about weekly and the answer is almost never the price. It is the eight years of customer records sitting in it. The Corolla that has been in four times, the fleet account whose vehicles you would have to re-enter one by one, the job from last spring that a warranty argument might still turn on. Nobody wants to start a shop over at a blank screen.

That fear is reasonable, and most vendors are content to let it do the work of a contract. So we do the migration ourselves, as part of onboarding, and we tell you what will and will not come across before you have committed to anything. The point is that leaving your old system should be a decision about the software, not a hostage negotiation about your own records.

Honest scope

What comes across

The spine of a shop record: who your customers are, what they drive, and what you have already done to it.

• Customers — name, phone, and email
• Vehicles — year, make, model, and VIN, tied to the right owner
• Repair order history — every past visit, with its parts and labor totals
• What each of those jobs was worth, so the money history survives the move

That is enough to open a customer, see their car, and read what you did to it last time — which is the whole reason the history mattered in the first place. Once it is loaded it behaves like any other record in the shop: searchable, printable, and there when the vehicle rolls back in.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no professional-services line

Moving your records in is part of getting started. There is no migration fee, no setup fee, no onboarding fee, and no minimum term attached to the offer — the whole bill is the subscription, which is $149 a month for every feature and every member of staff. The first 10 shops lock in $99 a month for as long as they stay subscribed.

Nor is there a contract to sign for the privilege. Month to month, cancelled from your own settings page, no notice period and no retention call. A migration you paid for would give us a reason to make leaving hard; a migration we do for free costs us the same either way, which is roughly the point.

This is not a thought experiment on our side. We have built the importer, run a real shop's records through it, and reconciled the loaded totals back against the source system — including the awkward part, where an old system stored one blended tax figure that cannot be split back into parts tax and labor tax because the rates were never in the file. When something like that turns up in your data, you get told about it and shown the size of it.

Before you sign

Five questions worth asking every vendor, us included

Ask these of whoever you are looking at, in writing, before the demo call turns into a contract. The answers are more useful than any comparison table, ours included — and if a vendor will not answer them plainly, that is itself the answer.

1. What exactly can I take with me, and in what format? "You can print reports" is not a data file. Ask for the list of records and the file type.
2. Does that still work if I cancel? This is the one that separates a promise from a lever. Plenty of systems will read you your data back only while you are paying for it.
3. Who does the migration in, and what does it cost? A four-figure onboarding fee is a switching cost pointed at your next vendor as much as at this one.
4. What is the notice period to cancel? Reviewers of at least one major platform report a notice window that turns "cancel anytime" into another billed quarter. Read the term, not the marketing page.
5. What will not come across, specifically? Every migration leaves something behind. A vendor who says "everything transfers" either has not looked at your data or is telling you what you want to hear.

We wrote our own answers to all five above, which is the only reason we feel entitled to hand you the list. If you want the longer version, our pricing breakdown puts the add-ons and the contract terms of the well-known platforms side by side, and the comparison pages go vendor by vendor.