How we make money

The business model is a subscription paid by garages that want a listing. That is the whole of it. Anyone reading a price on this site pays nothing, sees no adverts, and is not the product being sold.

You should know this before you trust a number, which is why the page exists and why it is linked from the footer of every page rather than buried.

No garage currently pays anything. Listings are free while the site is being built, and there is no paid tier available to buy today.

Garage listings are built from the public DVSA register of MOT test stations. A business appearing there has not agreed to anything, has not paid anything, and in most cases does not yet know the site exists. That is also why a garage profile does not become a public page until the business claims it: publishing a page about a company that never asked for one, and cannot correct it, is not something we are prepared to do.

What paid tiers will look like

When paid tiers arrive they will buy presentation and reach: a fuller profile, the ability to publish current prices and opening hours, and being contactable through the site. This page will be updated to say exactly what is included on the day it becomes true, rather than describing it in advance.

If that ever changes, anything paid for will be labelled as paid, on the page, next to the listing. A promoted result that is not marked as promoted is an advert disguised as research, and it would make every other figure on the site worth less.

Prices are calculated, not negotiated

Every price comes from the same formula applied to the same sources: parts, plus labour hours at the regional rate, plus VAT. There is no step in that calculation where a garage’s subscription could enter, because the calculation does not know about subscriptions. The methodology page shows the working.

We take no cut of any repair. There is no booking system here, no deposit, and no payment of any kind passes through this site. When you contact a garage you deal with the garage.

That is a deliberate choice rather than a missing feature. A site earning a percentage of the work it recommends has a reason to prefer the expensive job over the cheap one, and a reason to send you to the garage that pays the most rather than the one nearest to you. Removing the commission removes the conflict.

Other things we do not do

• We run no advertising and no sponsored content.
• We take no affiliate fee for sending you to a parts supplier or an insurer.
• We do not sell, rent or share your details. Our privacy page lists what little we collect.

A subscription model still has a pull to it: garages pay us, and garages would rather the published prices were higher. It is worth naming instead of claiming to be above it.

The protection is that prices are computed from published sources by a formula anyone can check, and that the sources are named and dated on every page. A price that moved to please a subscriber would contradict its own working, and that working is printed next to it.

If you think a figure here is wrong, or reads like it was written for the trade rather than the driver, tell me. How corrections are handled is on the editorial policy page.