Free auto repair shop software exists. So does the free oil change coupon, and every shop owner reading this knows how that coupon ends: the oil change really is free, and then somebody walks to the counter holding the customer’s air filter like it owes them money.
Free software works the same way. The plan is free, and something else pays for it. That is fine, as long as you know what the something else is before your customer list lives inside it.
So this guide only lists tools that are genuinely free to use, not free trials with the word “free” printed a little larger than the word “trial.” Every one was checked on its own pricing page. Where there is a catch, it is written next to the tool, not buried at the bottom.
The free stack, at a glance
No single free product runs a whole shop. A small shop can get surprisingly far stacking a few of them.
| Job | Free tool | What is free | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Repair orders and invoices | Hibbitts Auto Pro | Unlimited estimates and invoices | One user |
| Repair orders, DVI, VIN | Torqvoice (self-hosted) | Unlimited everything | You run the server |
| Generic repair tracking | Odoo Repairs | Free open-source edition | Not built for cars |
| Parts ordering | PartsTech | Unlimited users and suppliers | Paid tiers add tire tools |
| Invoicing and books | Wave Starter | Unlimited invoices and bookkeeping | 2.9% + $0.60 per card |
| Invoicing | Zoho Invoice | Free forever | 500 invoices a year |
| Payments and booking | Square Free | No subscription | Processing fees |
| VIN decoding | NHTSA vPIC | No account or key needed | Manufacturer data only |
| Online booking | Calendly Free | One event type | One calendar |
| Parts invoice reconciliation | WickedFile free trial | 500 scanned pages | A trial, then $299/mo |
Free shop management software
1. Hibbitts Auto Pro: the simplest real free plan
Best for: a one-person shop that needs tickets today.
The Hibbitts free plan lists “Unlimited Estimates & Invoices,” a VIN decoder, vehicle service history, a customer database, financial reporting, nightly backups, and card acceptance, at “No cost (FREE).”
The catch: it is “One User.” Scheduling, reminders, canned jobs, parts and labor estimating, and online parts ordering sit on the Premium plan, which the page lists as “$99 Month (coming soon).” The page also does not name its card processor or rate, so ask before you take your first payment through it.
Why it is on the list: unlimited tickets, free, with nothing to install. Nobody else on this list does all three.
2. Torqvoice: free to self-host, built by a shop owner
Best for: a shop with a second person and someone comfortable running a small server.
Torqvoice was written by a workshop owner who also writes software, and it shows. The self-hosted version is “Free forever” with unlimited customers, vehicles and team members, reports, online payments and custom fields. Its feature set includes work orders, digital vehicle inspections with photos and a shareable report, VIN lookup, and mileage history across visits.
There is also a hosted Cloud Free plan at $0, capped at 20 customers and one team member, which is really a way to try it. Cloud Pro is $99 a year.
The catch, honestly stated: self-hosting means installing it with Docker and keeping that server backed up and updated. Someone has to own that job. It is also a young project, with its public repository created in early 2026, and while the site calls it open source, the repository’s license is the Elastic License 2.0, which is source-available rather than a traditional open-source license. Free to run, yes. Mature and widely adopted, not yet.
Why it is on the list: the only free option I found that is purpose-built for auto repair, inspections included.
3. Odoo Repairs: free, powerful, and not made for cars
Best for: a shop that already runs Odoo, or wants one system for everything and has time to configure it.
Odoo comes in two versions, “Odoo Community (open-source) and Odoo Enterprise (licensed),” per its editions page. The Repairs app is part of the free Community code under the LGPL-3 license. Odoo also offers a hosted “One App Free” plan for unlimited users, and its pricing page says any apps your chosen app depends on come free too. Repairs depends on sales and inventory, so confirm it qualifies before you count on it.
The catch: Odoo’s own documentation describes Repairs as helping companies process “repairs for damaged products returned by customers.” It handles parts, stock, warranty and quotes. It has no VINs, no labor guide and no inspections. You would be adapting a general repair tool to a car shop.
Free parts ordering
4. PartsTech: free, and probably the easiest yes on this page
Best for: every shop that orders parts from more than one supplier.
PartsTech’s pricing page answers the question without hedging: “Yes. PartsTech is totally free to use. In fact, you can use PartsTech for free for as long as you like.” The free plan includes unlimited users, unlimited parts suppliers, live wholesale pricing and inventory, license plate and VIN lookups, vehicle diagrams, and integration with 35+ management systems.
Paid plans add things like full tire supplier access, tire comparison and analytics.
Why it is on the list: it is free, it is built for repair shops, and it removes the most time-consuming phone calls of the day. If you take one thing from this article, take this one.
Free invoicing and bookkeeping
5. Wave Starter
Wave’s free Starter plan lets you “Create unlimited estimates, invoices, bills, and bookkeeping records,” with a mobile app. Card payments run “2.9% + $0.60 per credit card transaction.”
The catch: it is general small-business software. Nothing in it knows what a repair order or a core charge is. For a shop using paper tickets or Hibbitts, it is a solid free set of books.
6. Zoho Invoice
Zoho Invoice is free forever, with limits: “Add up to two users,” “Send up to 500 invoices per year,” and “Powered by Zoho Invoice” branding on your invoices.
The catch: 500 invoices a year is about 40 a month. That fits a very small or very new shop, and almost nobody else.
Free payments, VINs and booking
7. Square Free
Square charges no monthly subscription on its free plan, only processing fees when you take a payment: 2.6% + 15¢ in person, 3.3% + 30¢ online, and 3.5% + 15¢ for manual entry or card on file. Its free Square Appointments plan also includes an online booking site, appointment reminders and unlimited staff calendars.
Square is a general point-of-sale system, not a repair order system, so it handles the money while something else handles the car. The full breakdown of payment options is in the guide to choosing an automotive POS system.
8. NHTSA vPIC VIN decoder
The federal government’s VIN decoder identifies “specific information encoded in the number,” accepts partial VINs, and needs no account or key. NHTSA also publishes developer APIs for it.
The catch: in NHTSA’s own words, “The information displayed through NHTSA’s VIN decoder is reported by the manufacturer.” It tells you what the car is, not what is wrong with it.
9. Calendly Free
Calendly’s free plan is “Always free” with one event type, one calendar connection and a customizable booking page. For a one-bay shop that wants customers to book an oil change without calling, that is enough.
The free WickedFile trial, and what it is for
10. WickedFile free trial: 500 scanned pages, no credit card
Everything above helps you write tickets, order parts and get paid. None of it checks what you were billed for those parts. That is the job WickedFile does, and you can try it for free.
The free trial includes 500 scanned pages, no credit card, with your shop management system integration, credit card and bank integration, and multiple users.
Here is what those 500 pages do. You upload vendor invoices, credit memos and statements. WickedFile reads them, matches every part to the repair order it was bought for, and flags the exceptions:
- Parts bought but never sold on a repair order.
- Returns with no credit. The part went back. The money did not.
- Uncredited cores.
- Credits the vendor issued but never applied to your statement.
- Card or bank charges with no invoice behind them.
Each scanned page is one page of an invoice, credit memo or statement, so you can work out exactly how far 500 goes for your shop before you start. Point it at your biggest vendor first, because that is usually where the surprise lives. If it finds nothing, you have spent nothing and learned your parts process is tighter than most.
To be straight about the limits: WickedFile is not shop management software. It does not write repair orders, order parts or take payments, and it does not replace your books. It sits between your vendor paperwork and your repair orders. And after the trial it is not free: the Grow plan is $299 a month, flat. A one-bay shop with two vendors can reconcile with a folder and a highlighter, and should. Once you have several vendors and a few hundred invoices a month, the trial is the fastest way to find out what the folder has been missing.
If you want the background first, what parts reconciliation is and why it matters explains the problem the trial is testing for.
Four that look free and are not
These come up in every search for free shop software. They are fine products. They are just not free.
| Product | Why it shows up | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|
| ARI | Calls itself freemium | Free up to “5 Invoices, Estimates, Inspections, Clients, vehicles,” then $39.99/mo |
| Auto Repair HQ | ”Free” in the Microsoft Store | ”A monthly fee of $19.99 is required after trial” |
| Tekmetric | Searched alongside “free" | "Tekmetric offers free demos but not free trials.” $199/mo |
| AutoLeap | Same | No free trial. $199/mo |
Five clients is a slow Tuesday morning. Treat ARI’s free tier as a trial, because that is what its own pricing page calls it in the next sentence.
The swipe usually costs more than the software
Here is the math that changes how you read this whole category. It is illustrative, so plug in your own numbers.
According to accounting firm Paar Melis’s 2025 benchmark report, the average repair order runs about $702. Say your shop takes 250 card payments a month at that average: $175,500 a month through a card reader.
At Square’s published in-person rate of 2.6% + 15¢, that is about $4,600 a month. At its card-on-file rate of 3.5% + 15¢, it is about $6,180. The gap is roughly $1,580 a month, from nothing more than how the card was taken. A Tekmetric subscription is $199.
So a free tool with a mediocre processing rate can cost more in a quarter than a paid one costs in a year. The software fee is the one number on the page that does not grow when you get busier, which makes it the least dangerous one to obsess over. (I realize I just told you to stop worrying about the price of software in an article about free software. I contain multitudes. Mostly invoices.)
Check the exit before the entrance
A shop’s customer and vehicle history is the closest thing it has to an asset nobody lists on the balance sheet. Free plans are where that history usually starts living, because free is where small shops start.
Before you enter a single customer, ask one question: if I leave, what do I get back, and in what format? Self-hosted tools like Torqvoice give you the database itself, which is the strongest answer there is. Hosted free plans mostly do not publish one, so ask and get it in writing.
For a sense of what a written answer looks like, low-cost invoicing vendor Auto Repair Bill states that “your data will always be available and your account accessable even after cancellation or expiry,” with ZIP backups and Excel export. (The spelling is theirs. The promise is the part that counts.) Moving records is never free either: Shop Boss publishes $399 and $899 data transfer fees for bringing your history into its system.
Which free setup fits your shop
- One person, wants zero setup: Hibbitts free plan, PartsTech, Square Free. Done by lunch.
- Two or three people, someone handy with a server: Torqvoice self-hosted, PartsTech, Wave for the books.
- Already doing 40+ tickets a week: free tools will start costing you time, which is the expensive kind of free. Compare real platforms in the shop management software roundup.
- Any size, with several parts vendors: run a month of invoices through the WickedFile trial and see what it finds.
If you are still sketching the whole system, this layout of a repair shop software stack is the map, and van-based operators should read mobile mechanic software first.
Free is a perfectly good way to start a shop. Just read the coupon, check what is in the customer’s hand when they walk up to the counter, and make sure the air filter in this story is never your customer list.
Sources: Hibbitts Auto Pro · Torqvoice · Odoo editions · Odoo pricing · PartsTech pricing · Wave pricing · Zoho Invoice pricing · Square fees · NHTSA vPIC VIN decoder · Calendly pricing · ARI pricing · Tekmetric pricing · AutoLeap pricing · Auto Repair Bill · Shop Boss pricing