Built by someone who runs a real shop with real cars and real customers — not a Silicon Valley startup that's never touched a wrench, changed a filter, or answered a phone at 7 AM on a Monday.
$400+ per month. That's what the shop management software cost. And it was slow. And buggy. And every feature worth having was locked behind an upsell tier with a name like "Pro Plus Ultra" that cost even more. Every year the price went up. Every year the software stayed the same.
The software company sent salespeople, not engineers. They sent "account managers" who wanted to talk about "growth opportunities" — which is corporate for "we'd like to charge you more." When something broke, you got a chatbot. When you needed a feature, you got a roadmap that never shipped.
The shop owner paying those bills was also a developer. And one day, standing in the shop, watching that $400/month software freeze mid-inspection for the third time that week, a thought landed:
"I could build something better than this."
So they did.
82,650+ lines of code. React 18 frontend. FastAPI backend. PostgreSQL database. Real-time WebSocket sync. Docker deployment. Not a weekend project. Not an MVP. Not a prototype someone threw together to impress investors. A serious platform built to handle the full complexity of real shop operations.
Digital vehicle inspections with photo markup and AI note cleanup. Two-way SMS baked into every repair order. AI-powered follow-ups that recover declined work at 30, 60, and 90 days. integrated payments and text-to-pay. Kanban boards. Inventory management. VIN decoding. Estimates. Invoicing. Reporting. Google review generation. Seasonal campaigns. Tire storage. Loaner tracking. QuickBooks export.
Everything. Because when you build the software you use every day, you don't ship half a product and call it "version one." You ship what the shop actually needs.
Why free?
Because auto shop software shouldn't cost more than a tech's hourly wage. Because independent shops are the backbone of the automotive industry and they deserve tools that help them compete — not monthly bills that bleed them dry. Because the best software is built by people who actually use it, not by people who study "the automotive aftermarket vertical" from a glass office in San Francisco.
The shop management software industry has spent decades extracting rent from people who fix cars for a living. $200/month. $400/month. $999/month. Per-user fees on top. SMS markups on top of that. Annual price hikes because they can. Lock-in because switching is painful. And the software? Middling at best.
That model is broken. Shop Commander is the fix.
No per-user fees. No tier gates. No annual price hikes. No "contact sales for pricing" nonsense. $0/month. Every feature. Every user. Forever.
Every feature exists because a shop needed it, not because a product manager thought it would look good on a slide deck. No focus groups. No advisory boards. Just a shop, and the software it needs.
Export anything, anytime. No lock-in. No hostage situations. No "data export fee" buried on page 47 of the terms of service. Your customers, your vehicles, your history — yours.
82,650 lines of production code running in a real shop. Not a pitch deck. Not a prototype. Not a landing page with a waitlist. Real software solving real problems, today.
Built in Canada. Running in Canadian shops. HST built in as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought bolted on by a developer who had to Google what HST stands for. Bilingual-ready. Designed for the independent shops that keep this country's vehicles running — from the GTA to the Maritimes, from the Prairies to the Rockies.
Most shop management software is built in the US and treats Canadian shops like a rounding error. We built Shop Commander here because this is where our shop is. This is where your shop is. And Canadian shops deserve software that understands that.
82,650+ lines of code. $0/month. Built by a mechanic. Running in a real shop. Ready for yours.
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