You are buying one thing: a three-tap booking
A vehicle test is a chore with a legal deadline attached. Nobody browses. They want the earliest slot that fits, at a fee they already roughly know, from somewhere that will not invent faults.
So the whole value of a test centre website compresses into one interaction: registration, date, confirm. Everything else on the site exists to remove a reason not to finish those three taps. Price a build by how well it does that, and the rest of the quote sorts itself out.
The standard build: Essentials at $500
A single-lane centre needs eight pages and about a fortnight. Two rounds of changes. What those pages have to carry:
- Booking on the first screen, not behind a menu
- The test fee, stated, with any discount you offer
- A fails-and-retests page
- Whether you can do the repairs, and how fast
- Photos of the bay and the team, plus accreditations
- The scheme explained for your country
That fee line does more work than it looks. In many countries the maximum test fee is regulated and drivers already know roughly what it should be, so publishing yours removes hesitation rather than creating it. Check what applies where you operate before writing a number down.
When a centre needs Complete at $1,500
Twenty pages, four weeks, four rounds. Worth it once you are running more than one lane or more than one site, because the extra room goes on:
- A bay or site per page, each separately bookable
- Reminders wired to fire when the next test is due, with one-tap rebooking
- A price list you maintain yourself
- Separate pages for the tests you offer beyond the annual one
Reminders are the quiet reason this tier pays back. A test centre lives on the same customers returning every twelve months, and most garage software can send that reminder — it is usually just switched off, or sending unbranded from an address nobody recognises.
The booking wiring
On a new Complete build, setup is included: the system chosen around your lanes, registration lookup connected so a driver types a plate rather than a make and model, and confirmations tested so they reach an inbox instead of a spam folder. Adding booking to an existing site is quoted within a day and takes about a week.
Autoflow, Garage Hive, Shopmonkey, Tekmetric and Workshop Software are billed to you separately.
If there is already a site
Before spending anything on it, find out whether it deserves the money. A Diagnosis is $299, reported in three days: what is broken, what each repair costs, and a straight fix-or-rebuild answer. Diagnosis and fix runs $799 over roughly two weeks.
Running costs afterwards
- Domain, renewed annually, in your own name
- Garage software, paid direct to whichever platform you run
- Hosting
- A care plan if you would rather fee updates, backups and repairs were somebody else's job: Basic $99/mo, Growth $249/mo including four hours of changes
What actually shifts the quote
- How many lanes or sites need separate booking
- Whether reminders need setting up or already run
- How much the fails-and-retests page has to explain for your scheme
- Whether repairs are offered alongside testing
- Which country's scheme the copy has to describe
Where this sits
We build MOT and inspection centre websites around the three-tap booking at a fixed price. For the wider trade, see the automotive page, and for the conversion audit read why your automotive website is not getting bookings.