Three lines on the board, and a fourth nobody prints

A customer standing at a service counter has one question that matters more than the total: will it be more than you said? The board on the wall is where that question is answered or avoided. Most repair shops avoid it — a laminated sheet of “from” prices with no scope, or no sheet at all, on the theory that a number in print becomes a number to argue with. The opposite is true. A printed floor with a scope attached is what lets a customer decide to walk in before they ever call, and what lets the person at the counter say “that is what it said” without the conversation turning.

This page is the board a shop can defend, written for the trades that live on it — independent garages, tyre shops, quick-lube lanes, the one-bay shop behind the petrol station. It has three parts: the three lines worth printing, the page and the code that carry them into the car park, and the measured printed pieces that make the code work at the distances a shop actually has.

A repair shop is the one shop that cannot print a price

A café can print a flat white at $4 because the flat white is the same object every time. A brake job is not. Three things move the number before the technician has touched the car: the vehicle (pad size, rotor thickness, whether the calliper needs a kit), the condition (a seized bolt on a fifteen-year-old car is an hour nobody quoted), and the parts tier (economy, original-equipment, or the performance pad the customer read about on a forum). No honest board can absorb those three into one figure.

What a board can do is separate the part of the job that is fixed from the part that is not, and say so in the same breath:

That block is not a quote and does not pretend to be one. It is a floor plus a scope, and it survives contact with every car that comes through the door — because the two numbers it does not contain are the two it promises to quote before the work starts. The rest of this page is how to build the same block for oil and tyres, where the arithmetic is kinder, and how to put the whole thing where a customer will read it at eleven at night with a noise in the front end.

The three lines worth printing

Four lines, really, because brakes are two: pads and rotors. Everything else a shop does — diagnostics, alignment, air-conditioning, timing belts — is either too variable to print or too big to belong on a board that a stranger reads in eight seconds. These four are the ones customers shop on, and the ones where a printed floor changes whether the phone rings.

The reference column is not the shop's price and must never be printed as one. It is there to show the spread the customer is already seeing when they search, and to explain why the board's figure has to carry a scope: the same oil change has a published range from $35 to $188 depending on oil, capacity and who performs it, and a customer who has read two of those pages will assume the worst number unless the board tells them which job it is selling.

Two of those figures deserve a note. Walmart's “from $18 per tyre” is the chain's own published starting price for its installation package — mounting, lifetime balance and rotation, and a service pack or valve stem on tyres bought there; a tyre carried in from elsewhere is a different, smaller line with parts separate. Pep Boys' $30 is the figure its own current coupon terms state for installation, “including balancing and valve stems or TPMS service kit”. Both are on the retailers' own pages, which is why they are quotable at all — and both are per tyre, so a set of four is four times the number before disposal and tax.

The fourth line most boards leave out

Ask a shop owner why they stopped printing prices and the answer is usually one story about a customer who read a number and heard a promise. The story is almost never about the number. It is about the four small lines that appear at the bottom of the invoice and were never mentioned at the top: shop supplies, old-tyre disposal, a TPMS service kit, and the seized fastener that became an hour of labour.

None of those is dishonest. All of them are avoidable arguments, and the cheapest way to avoid an argument is to print the list before it happens:

Six lines, and the board stops being a contract and becomes what it should be: a description of how the bill is built. A customer who reads “frozen or broken hardware · quoted before we continue” has been told, in advance, the exact sentence they will hear if the bolt snaps — and the sentence stops being bad news and becomes the policy they agreed to.

The page behind the code: seven blocks

Everything above fits on one mobile page, and the page is where most of the reading happens: in a car park, at night, with a noise that started this morning. Seven blocks, in this order, is what a shop page needs. Anything past seven is a website, and a website is a different purchase.

Two details worth building in from the start. The price table is one table, not an image — a price printed into a JPEG cannot be read by a screen reader, cannot be found by the site's own search, and cannot be edited without a designer. And the status of an item is a field, not a new paragraph: “sold out”, “back Wednesday”, “limited to two per customer” belong on the row, so the same list that sells the tyre also reports the stock.

Waiting-room card and counter POP, measured

A shop is read from three distances, and each wants its own piece. The customer at the counter is 0.4–0.6 m from the card in the stand; the one at the door is 1.2–1.5 m from the poster; the one sitting in the waiting area is 2.5–3 m from whatever is on the far wall. These are the measured figures from the print files this site produces:

Two things in that table are measured rather than stated. The black square is the code as it actually prints: our files include the four-module quiet zone inside the stated width, so a 126 mm code measures 101.4 mm of black — that is 33 modules across at 3.07 mm each, with four modules of margin on each side, eight in total, making up the difference. The 42 mm card code measures 33.8 mm of black, 1.02 mm per module. Both figures come out of the PDF files themselves, not from a specification on a website.

Then the arithmetic the wall forces. The industry rule of thumb is one unit of code per ten units of distance, so a 126 mm code is planned for 1.26 m and a 42 mm code for 0.42 m. A person sitting 3 m from a wall needs roughly 300 mm of code, and that does not fit on A4: 300 mm of code on a 210 mm-wide sheet is geometrically impossible. On A3 — 420 mm wide — a 250 mm code leaves 85 mm of paper on each side, which is a name and one line of copy and nothing else. So the far wall of a waiting room is not a poster problem; it is the wrong piece in the wrong place. The better answer is a card in the counter stand at 0.42 m, where the customer is already close, and a poster at 1.26 m at the door — and if the waiting area truly needs something, a 250 mm code on A3 built from the same artwork, not a smaller code on the same A4.

Three numbers keep all of this scannable when it is printed at home or at a copy shop. Every code carries a four-module quiet zone on all four sides — the margin Denso Wave's FAQ and GS1's 2D barcode guideline both require — so the white border is part of the code, and a border line, a photo or a price sticker printed into it is the most common reason a well-made sign fails at the counter and works on the desk. The printer's floor is about 0.17 mm per module, with four printer dots per module (0.33 mm) recommended at 300 dpi; at 1.02 mm per module the card is six times the floor and three times the recommended spacing, and the poster's 3.07 mm is eighteen times and nine times. And print at 100%: “fit to page” is how A4 artwork lands on US Letter, which is 215.9 × 279.4 mm, and the shorter height forces a 94% scale — the 42 mm card code becomes 39 mm and the cut marks stop matching the cards.

Why the payload length decides whether it scans

The code on the sign has 33 modules across, plus the four-module margin, so 41 squares — at error correction level M, which is what these files use. That is not a design choice made at the printer; it is what a short address produces. Encode something longer and the code does not grow: the same piece of paper holds more modules, each one smaller. Measured with the same QR call the kit makes, at error correction M, on the payloads a shop would actually use:

The useful conclusion is not “shorten your URL”. It is that tracking belongs on the link, not in the code. Forty characters of campaign parameters take the card from 1.02 mm per module to 0.86 mm — a sixth of every module gone, on the one piece the customer handles under a fluorescent light — to tell you which sign they scanned. If a shop genuinely wants to know whether the counter card or the door poster gets used, the answer is two printed pieces with two short addresses, not one piece with a harvested one.

The eight files a repair shop actually gets

The printed kit was built for restaurants, where the table card is the whole point. A repair shop has no tables — it has a counter, a waiting room, a bay door and a clipboard — so the kit has a second shape: the same price, six pieces fewer, nothing about the page changed.

With tables — fifteen pieces. Live page · delivery note · A4 QR poster · QR image · print menu · table cards · Business Profile kit · table tent · 70 mm stickers · Wi-Fi cards · menu screen · edit runbook · delivery-app notices · review cards · bring-a-friend cards.

No tables — the page plus eight files. Live page · delivery note · A4 QR poster · QR image · printable price list · Business Profile kit · edit runbook · review cards.

The six that come out are the six that need a table or a menu board: the table cards, the table tent, the 70 mm stickers, the guest Wi-Fi card, the wall menu screen and the delivery-app notices. What stays is exactly a repair shop's set — the A4 poster for the counter or the door, the printable price list to clip to a clipboard or slide into the job folder, the QR image for the shop's own Google listing and the local paper, the review cards for the customer who says “I'll tell my brother”, the Business Profile kit so the listing and the page say the same thing, and the runbook so Monday's price change is a thumb, not a phone call to whoever built the page.

The review card is the piece shops underestimate. It is 93.0 × 126.5 mm, cut four to a sheet, with a 42 mm code that opens the Google review form — and it is the only printed thing in the shop that produces new customers while nobody is watching. Put one in the counter stand and one on the clipboard that goes out with the keys; the customer who has just paid is the one who will use it.

Every package gets the same files: $49 is the whole kit for ten tables' worth of printing, $89 for thirty, $149 for a hundred and a faster first draft. The contents do not change with the price — only the count of printed cards and the revision rounds.

What the monthly route costs instead

A shop that decides it needs “a website” is usually sold a general builder, and the price is a subscription. Here are the routes side by side, at the prices each vendor published, with the arithmetic left visible:

Put those numbers against a shop's own ticket. At a $335 average brake job — RepairPal's national figure for pads — $612 over three years is two brake jobs and a set of tyres, spent on a hosting bill for a page that holds four prices. The monthly plans are not silly: they buy an editor, a shop, a blog and a domain, and a shop that sells parts online or runs a booking calendar should buy one. The question is narrower: does a two-bay garage need to rent an editor for three years to publish four lines and a phone number?

If the honest answer is “no”, the three-year cost calculator takes your own monthly figure and puts it beside a page paid for once — including the cases where the monthly plan wins, which are the cases where you need the shop, the blog or the booking calendar.

Doing it in an afternoon

1. Write the four lines, with the scope on each. Take the numbers from the last three invoices you wrote for that job, not from a wish. The floor should be a figure you have actually charged this month.
2. Write the not-included list. Six lines, in the order they appear on your invoice. This is the part that saves the argument, and it takes ten minutes.
3. Publish the page and keep the address short. Six to ten characters after /s/ is plenty; on a custom domain, fewer bytes still means bigger modules.
4. Print one counter card and one A4 poster at 100%, on matte paper. Not a batch — one of each.
5. Scan both at the counter, at the hour you open, with two phones. Fluorescent light and a plastic sleeve are the two conditions that break a code; test in them, not on a desk.
6. Put the card in the stand and the poster where the queue forms — not everywhere at once. Watch whether the questions at the counter change before you print the rest.

That is the whole job: four lines, one scope list, one address, two pieces of paper and a habit of editing the price when the price changes. Nothing in it is clever, and none of it needs a monthly bill. It is the answer to “how much for brakes” written down in the one place a customer looks before they ever pick up the phone — which is the only place it can be answered without a conversation.

Questions that come up

Related reading: the millimetres guide for the arithmetic behind every size above, the hair salon price list for a four-column list in a trade that sells time, the market stall's price board for a list that changes weekly, and what a POS contract actually commits you to if a supplier has offered to “put the price list online for you”. A shop with no tables is the eight-file kit described above.

Or make the page first — thirty seconds, free, no account, and it stays free:

Create a page — free   See three live samples   Three-year calculator

Sources, read on 14 November 2026. Repair prices are the national estimator figures on RepairPal's own estimator pages, last updated 3 September 2026 and quoted before tax and without location adjustment: oil change $160–$188, brake pad replacement $335–$394, brake rotor replacement $574–$698; the model ranges quoted in the FAQ and the table are the figures on RepairPal's Civic, Corolla, Camry, Accord, Silverado 1500, F-150 and Altima estimator pages. Oil change ranges — $35–$75 conventional and $65–$125 synthetic blend or full synthetic — are Valvoline's own published cost page. Tyre installation — “starts at just $18 per tyre” — is Walmart's Marketplace newsroom announcement of its installation package (published April 2024, and still the figure on its published tyre-service menu); $30 per tyre including balancing and valve stems or a TPMS service kit is the installation figure stated in Pep Boys' own current coupon terms. Builder prices — Linktree Pro $14 a month billed annually ($17 monthly), Wix Light $17 on a yearly plan, Squarespace Basic $19 annual ($25 monthly) — are list prices on each vendor's own pricing page, before tax; the MapToSite tiers are this site's own published prices (Card $0, Board $6.99 a month, Sign $13.99 a month, printed kit $49 / $89 / $149 once). Print geometry — the 93.0 × 126.5 mm four-up card, its 42 mm stated code and 33.83 mm printed black square, the A4 poster's 126 mm stated code and 101.44 mm black square, the 20 mm footer code measuring 16.12 mm, the 10.6 pt item line and 8.4 pt description on the print price list — was measured in the PDFs generated by this site's print kit (work/tools/en_print_kit.py and work/tools/auto_deliver_en.py, error correction M, four-module margin), not estimated. Module counts for the 44-, 39-, 85- and 117-byte payloads were produced by running the same QR call the kit makes, at error correction M. A3 and the 250 mm wall code are the A-series ratio applied to the measured 126 mm code, labelled as arithmetic. The printer floor of about 0.17 mm per module, the four-printer-dots-per-module recommendation (0.33 mm at 300 dpi) and the four-module margin are from Denso Wave's QR FAQ; the quiet zone as four times the X-dimension also appears in GS1's 2D Barcodes at Retail Point-of-Sale Implementation Guideline (release 1.1.0, ratified December 2025). The 1:10 code-size-to-scan-distance figure is an industry rule of thumb, not part of ISO/IEC 18004. Shop practice — seized fasteners, rust pricing, shop supplies, the diagnostic fee credited against the repair, the counter question at four in the afternoon — is described as practice rather than as a dated statistic, because no survey is being quoted for it; a shop should print its own figures and its own rules.