Side work is its own kind of business. A few jobs a week in a good month, none in a bad one, and most of them for people who already have your number. The paperwork is the same as a full time van, a price agreed on before you start and money collected when you finish, but the software bill arrives every month whether the jobs did or not.
So this page asks a narrower question than our main shortlist of apps for mobile mechanics. What is the least you can spend, in money and in commitment, and still send a proper estimate and take a card from a phone? Four criteria answer it. They are printed below, ahead of the list, and the list follows them.
Three of the four are pass or fail: the product works from a phone, it sends an estimate and takes a card payment, and it asks for no contract. A product that misses part of one of those sits below every product that meets all three, whatever it costs. Among the products that meet all three, the first criterion sets the order, so the cheaper start ranks higher.
Fixty publishes this page and is seventh on it, which is where the criteria put a product with the highest entry price of the eight and no free plan. Each claim about another company is quoted from that company’s own site, with the link and the date it was read sitting under it. Where their site does not answer a question, the entry says it is not stated on their site rather than guessing.
Divide the bill by the jobs
The cleanest way to compare software for side work is to stop reading the monthly price and start reading the price per job. Take the monthly figure and divide it by the jobs a normal month brings in. At three jobs a month, every product on this page costs a third of its price on each of those jobs. In a month with no jobs, it costs all of it and earns nothing back.
That is the whole reason criterion one orders this list. A full time mobile mechanic doing several jobs a day barely notices the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive product here, because it disappears across a month of work. Spread across four weekend jobs it does not disappear, and on a small job it can be the bigger part of the margin.
It also explains why the free plans sit at the top instead of being written off as limited. A free plan has no monthly bill to divide by the jobs, so the question stops being whether it is worth the money and becomes whether it does the work. For a handful of customers who already trust you, it often does.
It cuts the other way once the jobs are steady. The cost per job of a paid plan shrinks every week you stay busy, and the gap between two monthly prices matters less than a single approved estimate that would otherwise have gone quiet. That is the point where Fixty, at $99/mo for Starter, starts to make sense for side work, and not before it.
When a free plan stops being enough
Start free if you can. The two free starts on this page have different shapes, and knowing the shape tells you how you will outgrow it.
ARI’s free tier runs out by count. Their pricing page caps it at five each of invoices, estimates, inspections, clients and vehicles. If most of your customers are new each month, five clients does not last long; if the same few people keep calling you back, it lasts much longer. Count last year’s customers before you start and you will know roughly when the paid plan arrives.
Deelo’s free plan runs out by size rather than by time: one user seat, a gigabyte of storage and a monthly allowance of AI credits, with their name on the pages your customers open. For one person doing side jobs the seat never bites. The storage might, if you photograph every job, and the branding is a matter of taste. Some customers will not notice it, and some will wonder whose estimate they are reading.
Either way, the signal to start paying has little to do with a plan’s limits. It is the follow up starting to slip. An estimate you sent on a Tuesday night that nobody answered by Saturday. An invoice that has sat open for three weeks because chasing it kept falling off the list. When that starts happening, look for the product that does the chasing for you, and confirm on its own pages that it does, because a paid plan is not automatically that product.
Keeping side work separate from the day job
Whatever you pick, set it up as a separate business from the first job, even if it is only you and a toolbox. Use an email address that is not your personal one, and send side work payments to an account that holds nothing else. At tax time you will have one clean record of what came in, rather than a year of payments mixed in with your groceries.
Read your employment agreement before you advertise. Some shops and dealerships have rules about outside work, about working on their customers’ cars, or about using their tools and bays after hours. A list of apps cannot answer that for you, but it is the thing most likely to end a side business that is otherwise going well.
Check your insurance too. Working on somebody’s car in their driveway is a different risk from working in a shop that carries its own coverage, and the coverage at the day job belongs to your employer rather than to you. Our guide on mobile mechanic insurance lists what to ask a broker before you take the first paid job.
Then let the software carry the customer side and nothing else. The estimate, the approval, the invoice and the payment all happen in the app, which keeps most of that conversation out of your personal text threads with people you met once. That separation is worth having even on a free plan.
How to choose in one evening
Open the two free ones first. Put one real job from last month into Deelo and the same job into ARI: the customer, the vehicle, the estimate and the invoice. Whichever one you would actually open again on a Sunday night is your answer for now, and finding out cost you nothing.
If you already know you will pay, because the jobs are steady and the paperwork is the part you hate, pick one paid trial and start it in a week when you have jobs booked. QuoteIQ, Orderry and Fixty all publish one, and QuoteIQ is the cheapest of the three to keep afterwards. Orderry’s trial asks for nothing but an account. Fixty’s is the one to try if the problem is customers who mean to approve the estimate and never get around to it.
Whichever you try, send a real estimate to a real customer and get paid through it. A trial of 14 days, or of seven, tells you nothing if no customer goes through it, and side work is lumpy enough that two quiet weeks can use up a whole trial. Pick the week first, then start the clock.
If Fixty is the one that fits
Fixty is a CRM for one mobile mechanic: estimates approved by text, photo inspections, scheduling and card payments, all from a phone. If one of the products above suits your work better, buy that one instead.
Starter $99/mo · Growth $149/mo · 14 days free on both plans. Cancel anytime.