Tekmetric and Shopmonkey are both well-built pieces of software. I want to say that up front, because this isn't a takedown. I used tools like them for years as a flat rate tech, and they do a lot of things right. This is really a story about three specific moments where the software I was using and the way I actually worked didn't match up, and what I did about it once I had the chance to do something about it.
The clock that only understood one job at a time
Flat rate work doesn't happen one job at a time. You clock into a brake job, parts get called in, you walk over and start the water pump on the car next to it while you wait, then you're back on the brake job twenty minutes later. That's just Tuesday. Every time clock I used treated that as an edge case, or didn't handle it at all, so techs either fudged the numbers or ate the dead time. I didn't think of this as a missing feature so much as a basic misunderstanding of how the job actually works. When I built ShopSynq, multi-vehicle time tracking wasn't a nice-to-have I added later. It was one of the first things I built, because it's the thing that was wrong for me every single day on the floor.
Finding out the price after the demo
I remember being a shop owner trying to evaluate software and having to book a call just to find out what something cost. I understand why sales-led pricing exists, bigger operations often want a custom quote and a real conversation. But if you're a one or two person shop trying to figure out whether a tool fits your budget, a mandatory demo before you see a number is a wall, not a feature. So Solo, Shop, and Pro pricing sits right on the site. $79 a month gets you a real answer in under a minute, and you can start a trial without talking to anyone first.
The Clock
Multi-vehicle time tracking, because flat rate techs don't work one job at a time.
The Price
Published pricing, no demo required to find out what it costs.
The Solo Plan
Built for one person running the whole shop, not a scaled-down enterprise tier.
Being the only user on the plan
Before I built ShopSynq, I ran my own shop here in Cardington largely by myself. Most of the software I looked at was priced and designed around a team, a service advisor here, a couple techs there, and a solo operation felt like an afterthought bolted onto the bottom of the pricing page. The Solo plan exists because I was that customer. One user, full workflow, $79 a month, and nothing about it feels like a downgrade from a bigger tier. It's just built for the shop that's actually just you.
"I didn't sit down to build a competitor to anybody. I sat down to fix three specific things that were wrong for me, and it turned into a company."— Kian, Founder
Where things actually stand
ShopSynq went live June 14, and I still don't fully know how far this goes. I know it works, real shops are running real ROs through it right now, including my own. What I don't know yet is how it holds up at scale, or what the fourth version of "this was wrong for me every day" turns out to be. That's still getting written.
If any of those three things, the clock, the pricing, the solo plan, sound like something you've run into yourself, that's really the whole pitch. Try it on your own shop and see if it fits the way you actually work.