Looking at Podium for your shop? Read this first.

What Podium is, fairly

A big communications platform that happens to do reviews.

Podium is a real product with a lot in it — a shared texting inbox, webchat for your site, phones, payments, AI that answers leads, and review requests. It's popular in automotive, and if you run multiple locations with a front desk living in that inbox all day, the bundle can genuinely earn its price.

The price is the thing to see clearly. As of July 2026, their plans start near $399 a month and run to $599 and up, quoted by sales rather than published — and the add-ons stack: per-seat charges, extra phone lines, setup fees, per-location charges. Multi-location shops report real-world totals of $700 to $900 a month. Check their current pricing yourself — it may have changed, and you should never take a competitor's word for it. Including ours.

One more honest note: if all you want is the cheapest review-request tool, that isn't Podium and it isn't us either. Simpler tools exist below $100. What follows is why we built ours anyway.

What we built instead, at our own counter

One job, done the way a shop actually needs it done.

Brian's Reviews Go-Getter does the reviews job, for auto repair shops, and nothing else. One-tap review requests when the work is done, one gentle reminder for folks who forgot — and the part we care most about: when something wasn't right, the customer gets an easy private way to tell you first, so you fix the problem instead of reading about it on Google.

It brought our shop 100+ five-star reviews in six months. It's $100 a month, flat, published right here — no quote call, no seats, no setup fee, no add-ons. It works with Shopmonkey, riding your real repair orders (here's how it fits the ecosystem), and the trial is self-service: 14 days free, set up in a few minutes.