Field Notes

The Squatch Is Real: Why We Built Our Own Shop Software

Every Pacific Northwest town has a guy who swears he’s seen Bigfoot. Our version of that story starts: a master tech swears he can build better shop software than the stuff he’s paying for every month. The difference is, we have screenshots.

Squatch Soft grew out of a working European auto shop in Idaho’s Treasure Valley — three locations, a lot of BMWs, and a front counter that lives or dies by its software. For years that software was rented: per-seat pricing, modules behind paywalls, and our own guest history sitting on somebody else’s server, in somebody else’s format, retrievable at somebody else’s pleasure.

Self-Hosted Isn't Scary (Anymore)

“Self-hosted” used to be a warning label. It meant a dusty server, a guy named Dale who’d set it up in 2009, and a backup tape nobody had tested since the Obama administration.

That’s not what it means now — and it’s the entire bet behind ShopDesk.

What self-hosted means in practice: a small, quiet computer in your shop runs the program. Your team opens it in a browser, same as any cloud app. The difference is whose computer it is. Yours.