To the First Dealers and Garages Running on Torque DMS: Thank You

Over the past few weeks, a small group of independent dealers and workshops has done something that is easy to overlook: they moved off software they already knew, onto a platform with no track record, run by a company they had never heard of a month earlier.

That is not a small thing to ask of a business. A dealer's DMS holds every customer record, every deal, every job card. Trusting that to a new, unproven platform is a real risk, and the businesses who have done it over these first few weeks, spread from Lancashire to Greater London, Bedfordshire to West Yorkshire, took that risk before we had a single case study to point to.

Why 'free' had to mean something

Torque DMS is free because it is partner-funded, not because it is a stripped-down version of something else. No subscription, no per-user fee, no trial window that quietly turns into a bill. That model only works if the platform genuinely does the job a paid DMS does, and the only way to find out whether it actually holds up is for real dealers to run real bookings, real invoices, and real customers through it, not a demo account.

That is what this first group has been doing. Every one of them is now a live business running on Torque, not a trial.

What we owe them

The honest answer is that a platform this early is not finished, and will not pretend to be. What we owe the first customers is speed: when something is missing, confusing, or broken, it gets fixed or built, not filed for a future roadmap. That is the actual trade being made here, being early means occasionally hitting a rough edge, in exchange for a platform that responds to what you specifically need rather than a slow, generic release cycle.

It also means being reachable. If you're one of the businesses already live on Torque, you already know you can get a straight answer by picking up the phone rather than filing a support ticket into a queue.

If you're considering it

If you run an independent dealership or workshop and are reading this while comparing options, here is the honest pitch: you would be joining a platform that is still young, built by a team that will actually take your call, with nothing to pay regardless of how it goes. No contract to break if it is not for you.

Applications take a few minutes, and we aim to get back to every one within a business day.

To the dealers and garages already on the platform: thank you for going first.