For the solo mechanic

When you work alone, there is nobody else to take the call. You are halfway through a hydraulic bleed, the syringe is in the caliper, and the phone rings. It is someone asking whether you have time this week. You either let it go to voicemail and maybe lose the job, or you stop, wipe your hands, and lose ten minutes and your place in the bleed.

The admin comes at the end of the day. You write up what you did on each bike from memory, text the customers whose bikes are done, send invoices to the two who will pay later, and try to remember what parts you used so you can reorder them. None of it is paid time, and all of it is necessary.

A solo mechanic does not need a big system. You need the smallest set of tools that answer the phone for you, make the inspection quick and consistent, and turn a finished job into a record and an invoice without retyping it.

Starter is $20 per user per month and covers two modules. For one person, that is $20 a month. Most solo mechanics pick Service and one other: Phony if the phone is the problem, or Accounting if the books are. Phony adds $0.12 per minute of call time on top, on any plan, so a month of short calls costs what those minutes add up to.

Growth, at $99 a month, makes sense for a solo shop only if you want more than two modules, since it includes five. If you want Service, Phony and Accounting together, Growth is the plan that allows it. Otherwise Starter is the right size.

Every workspace starts with a 30-day free trial, no card required, with every module switched on. Use the month to build your tune-up checklist, run it on real bikes, and see whether Phony handles your calls the way you want before choosing your two modules.

Be clear-eyed about what you get today. In Service, the path from request to invoice is built: a request from your web form or typed in yourself, a numbered quote with optional lines, a job with its visit on the schedule, the checklist that has to be in before the visit closes, and an invoice made from the job in one click. The end-of-day write-up mostly disappears, because the quote lines become the job lines and the job lines become the invoice.

What is not built matters to a one-person shop too. Sending a quote or invoice marks it sent but does not email or text it, so you still send it yourself. Payments are recorded by hand, with no pay links or QR codes, and there is no 'your bike is ready' text. Jobs are recorded against the customer's name and address rather than the bike, because bike records are on the roadmap, and there is no parts inventory, so reordering is still from memory.

For many one-person shops, a clean quote-to-invoice trail, a consistent inspection and the phone answered by Phony are worth $20 a month. If pay links or ready texts are what you need most, start the trial, run a few jobs through it, and decide with those gaps in view.