Fullbay vs Dossier: a repair shop's software against a fleet department's system

If your shop invoices work — to outside customers, to other divisions, or to anyone at all — Fullbay is the product built for that and the one you can budget for this afternoon. Price it at the tier you need and with every seat counted: a five-person shop on Basic is $544 a month, and the integrations most shops treat as mandatory start at Pro, which is $258 before seats.

Get the contract term in the order form, because the vendor's own pricing page and FAQ do not agree about whether month-to-month exists.

If your shop exists to keep your own assets running, and the question your management asks is cost per asset rather than revenue per invoice, Dossier is on the right shape — and the trade is that nothing about its cost is knowable before a scoping conversation. Ask for licence, implementation, training and annual support as separate lines, ask how on-premise prices against hosted, and ask what year two looks like.

If a vendor's own site was unreachable when an independent party tried to read it, that is also a fair thing to raise, politely, in the first call.

And if neither shape is obviously yours — an internal fleet with no invoicing and no appetite for an implementation project — then the published per-asset products are the third option this comparison keeps pointing at. RTA Fleet360's $6, $8 and $11 per asset per month above a 100-asset minimum is a real number you can model, and in a category where only 6 of 25 vendors publish anything, a real number is worth going out of your way for.

Start with who does the work and who pays for it. Fullbay's object model is a repair order with a customer attached: it is built for shops that quote, perform and invoice work, which includes third-party customers as well as an internal fleet.

Dossier's object model is an asset with a maintenance history: preventive schedules, work orders, parts and inventory, fuel and reporting against vehicles the organisation owns.

If you invoice anyone for labour, Fullbay's shape fits and Dossier's does not without work. If your shop exists only to keep your own trucks running and the output is cost per asset rather than an invoice, Dossier's shape fits and Fullbay's billing machinery is overhead you do not need.

Deployment is the second real divider. Dossier is offered on-premise or hosted.

In 2026 that is genuinely unusual, and it is the right answer for a small number of organisations — ones with data-residency rules, an existing on-premise estate, or an operations floor that cannot depend on connectivity. For everyone else it is a cost: servers, patching, backups and a database to own.

Across the 25 products FleetOpsClub lists under fleet maintenance, 6 publish a rate on their own site. Fullbay is one of them.

Dossier is one of three whose pricing page could not be retrieved at the time of checking. That ratio is the context for any shortlist in this category: cost is available for fewer than a quarter of the options.

Read the Dossier price cell as a statement about our research, not about the vendor. It says the page could not be retrieved on the date we tried.

It does not say Dossier hides its pricing, and it does not say Dossier has no pricing page, because we have no evidence for either claim.

On the Fullbay side, read the price cells as one seat. The published monthly figure includes a single full user licence, and the per-user line beneath it is what turns a headline into a bill.

That is the number to carry into a comparison: not $188, but $188 plus the seats your shop actually needs.

Fullbay publishes three tiers and the seat economics underneath them. Basic is $188 a month, Pro $258 and Elite $318, each covering one location and including one full user licence.

Additional full users are $89 a month on Basic, $109 on Pro and $119 on Elite. A timesheet-only user — staff who clock time but do not write service orders — is $25 a month on all three tiers.

An Enterprise tier is quote-only; the page gives a phone number rather than a figure. All verified on 30 September 2026.

The arithmetic is what matters. A five-person shop on Basic is $188 plus four additional full users at $89, which is $544 a month, not $188.

Any comparison that puts Fullbay's $188 next to a competitor's per-asset or per-vehicle rate without doing that addition is comparing a single seat against a whole fleet. The tier split is capability rather than volume: Basic has neither the QuickBooks nor the telematics integration, Pro adds both along with the MOTOR 4-8 labour guide and the AI transcription and translation features, and Elite adds Mitchell 1 ProDemand and TruckSeries, the MOTOR Truck Service Guide and advanced parts pricing.

Fullbay's own published material contradicts itself on contract length, and the contradiction is worth knowing before you negotiate. The pricing page footnote reads "All plans are on an annual agreement with convenient monthly billing", which makes the monthly display a payment schedule rather than a month-to-month commitment.

Its FAQ page says something different: "Fullbay offers customers the option of paying month-to-month without a contract, or locking in savings by switching to an annual contract. You are free to upgrade or downgrade the number of users on your plan, or even cancel your subscription, for any reason, when you are on a month-to-month plan.

" Both quotes are from the vendor's own site. We are not resolving which governs — ask for the term in the order form and read what it says.

For Dossier there is no rate to report and we are not going to estimate one. The vendor's own site did not respond when we tried to read it on 30 September 2026, so no figure here is asserted and no absence is claimed either.

What the record does state is the commercial shape: quote-based through direct sales, priced against fleet size, deployment model, the modules required, and implementation and support needs.

That shape has a predictable consequence for a budget. An implemented enterprise product normally carries a one-off implementation and data-migration cost alongside the licence, and on-premise adds infrastructure you own.

Ask for licence, implementation, training and annual support as four separate lines, and ask what the renewal looks like in year two, because the first-year number almost never recurs unchanged.

Fullbay's rollout is a data-entry project with a shop floor attached. Customers, units, parts catalogue, labour rates and technicians all have to go in, and the part most shops underestimate is the parts catalogue with real costs and markups, because that is what every invoice depends on afterwards.

The second gate is technician adoption of time clocking: the system's labour numbers are only as honest as the clock-in behaviour, and a shop that clocks approximately produces reports that are approximately wrong.

Dossier's rollout is an implementation in the formal sense. Asset records, preventive maintenance schedules, parts inventory and historical maintenance data all have to be migrated, and the schedules in particular have to be rebuilt rather than copied, because a PM interval that was wrong in the old system stays wrong in the new one.

If the deployment is on-premise, add the server, the database, the backup regime and the patching responsibility to the project — those are real costs that no licence line shows.

Day-two admin diverges along the same line. On Fullbay, the recurring admin is commercial: keeping labour rates, parts markups and customer records current so invoices go out right.

On Dossier, the recurring admin is technical and analytical: keeping schedules accurate, keeping parts counts honest, and getting cost-per-asset reporting that a finance team will accept.

One shared point, and it is the one that decides whether either investment pays back. Both systems only produce defensible maintenance records if the records go in at the time the work happens.

The regulatory baseline is not optional here: 49 CFR 396.3(b) requires a record of inspection, repairs and maintenance indicating their date and nature for every vehicle you control for 30 consecutive days, retained for a year and for six months after the vehicle leaves your control. Whichever system you pick, that is the output a roadside inspector or a new-entrant auditor eventually asks to see.