When nothing off the shelf
quite fits.
One independent garage was running on paper job sheets and a wall calendar. Jobs got lost, invoices went out late, and nobody could answer "what did we do to this car last time?" without digging through a folder.
We built them something to fix it. It worked well enough that other garages started asking, so we turned it into a product — and it's now sold as a subscription to independent garages and mobile mechanics across the UK.
A friend's little boy is non-verbal. The apps that would have given him a voice were priced like medical equipment or locked to one expensive device, so we built him his own.
He taps symbols, the app speaks the sentence, and everything — boards, words, photos — is editable so the vocabulary is genuinely his. It runs offline on an iPad, an Android tablet or in a browser. Nobody paid for it and nobody was going to.
The point of the GarageDash story isn't the software. It's that the problem was specific — specific enough that no off-the-shelf tool fitted, which is why the workshop had defaulted to paper in the first place. That's the situation where building something custom pays for itself quickly.
GarageDash now runs at £29 a month per garage with unlimited users, against competitors who charge per technician. It covers bookings, job sheets, quotes, invoices, customer and vehicle history, parts inventory and digital vehicle health checks, as a Windows app and in any browser.