Scarab OS

Nobody counts your logins.

The big platforms charge $239 a month plus $20 for every extra user, so shops quietly stop giving logins to the people who only touch the system twice a week — and then nobody can tell who did what. Attribution is the whole point of a sealed record. A price that punishes it breaks the product to sell the product.

Free

$0

no card, no expiry

The whole app, capped at twenty repairs a month.

Twenty repairs a month is a genuine one-bay, part-time or just-starting shop. Past that it stops letting you write new jobs — it never stops you finishing, invoicing or getting paid on the ones already open.

  • Unlimited people. Everyone gets their own PIN.
  • 20 new repairs a month.
  • No texting — every message carries a carrier charge.
  • 5 GB of photographs.
  • Published to CarKnown \u2014 on every plan, including this one.
  • Add customers by hand; bulk import is on the paid plans.
  • One location.
Shop

$69

per month, per location

One shop, however many people, however many repairs.

This is the whole product for one address. A twenty-bay shop with fourteen people pays what a two-bay shop with two people pays, because logins genuinely cost us nothing. Texts do — 750 a month are included, and past that they are 2¢ each, which is roughly what they cost us.

  • Unlimited people. Everyone gets their own PIN.
  • No limit on repairs.
  • 750 texts a month included, then 2¢ each.
  • 150 GB of photographs.
  • Published to CarKnown \u2014 on every plan, including this one.
  • Bring your customers and back catalogue across.
  • One location.
Group

$199

per month, first five locations

Several shops under one owner, reported together.

Each location keeps its own customers, vehicles and jobs — a wrongly merged history cannot be un-merged, so a group is a reporting relationship, not a shared database. Beyond five locations it is $39 a month each.

  • Unlimited people. Everyone gets their own PIN.
  • No limit on repairs.
  • 3,000 texts a month included, then 2¢ each.
  • 500 GB of photographs.
  • Published to CarKnown \u2014 on every plan, including this one.
  • Bring your customers and back catalogue across.
  • Up to 5 locations reported together, then $39 each.

What is on every plan, including the free one

All of the daily job. Write-ups, estimates the customer approves line by line, tiered inspections, the job board, appointments, the till, invoices, warranties, purchase orders, your own parts vendor, profit per job, books for your accountant, QuickBooks sync, the time clock, the customer portal, follow-ups — and sealed, hash-chained records published to CarKnown, the vehicle's permanent record.

The complaint people make about the mid-priced products is that the things a shop does every hour sit behind the next tier up, so the plan you bought feels deliberately broken. Nothing here works that way. What the plans separate is how much and how many places.

And one honest exception: texting. Every message a shop sends carries a charge from the phone carriers, and it is the only part of running this that gets more expensive the busier you are — for a twenty-bay shop it is nine tenths of what we pay to keep them running. So messages are counted, generously, and past the allowance they are 2¢ each, which is roughly what they cost us. You are never cut off mid-month over it. Photographs are the opposite: five years of a busy shop's pictures costs us less than a dollar a month, so the allowance is set where you will not meet it.

What the others charge

Published entry prices, checked 9/1/2026. Two of these are cheaper than us and it says so. If your problem is purely budget, go and price them — but check what they do and do not include before you get to the number.

ProductEntry priceNote
This app$0 / $69 / $199unlimited users on every plan
Shopmonkey$239/monthplus $20 a month for each extra user
Shop-Ware$279/month
Tekmetric$199/month
AutoLeap$199/month
Shop Boss$199/month
Orderry$69/monthup to 15 employees
ManageAutoShop$49.99/monthper shop
ARI$39.99/monthunlimited users — cheaper than us
AutoRepair Cloud$34.99/monthentry tier; check what the higher tiers add

Who should not switch

If your estimates come out of a published labor time guide, that is your pricing method and we do not have one. Deliberately — but it means changing how you quote, which is not a small thing.

If your counter orders parts from a supplier catalogue inside the software, you can connect your own vendor account here, but we do not supply the catalogue ourselves. If that ordering flow is what your day runs on, price the switch honestly.

Before you move anything: count the logins on your current plan. If you are paying per user, removing the people who touch it twice a week is the fastest saving available to you, and it does not require changing software at all.