$22,740 in. $250,000 out.
AutoEngage costs $1,895 per rooftop per month — a published base subscription, no per-conversation fees, no advisor seats. That's $22,740 a year per rooftop. The 11× claim is what the average deployed rooftop returns on top of that cost in incremental service revenue.
AutoEngage annual subscription per rooftop. The number we charge.
Average incremental service revenue per rooftop per year. Subscription × 11.
At a nationwide-average customer-pay RO of around $300, AutoEngage covers its full annual cost on the first ~76 incremental ROs a year — about 6.3 ROs per rooftop per month. Every booked appointment after that is contribution.
What it looks like in production.
These are real production numbers from an 11-store regional dealer group running AutoEngage, pulled from the operational reporting band the team publishes internally. Every booking in the funnel below happened inside the SMS conversation itself — no advisor handoff, no BDC fallback. They're the conversion funnel, end to end:
Customers contacted by Lisa across every retention category.
Customer response rate. Two-way SMS conversations, not one-way blasts.
Service appointments booked into the DMS.
Contact-to-booked conversion — fully AI-driven, no advisor or BDC in the loop. Industry BDC averages with a human team typically run a fraction of this.
Multiply 844 booked ROs by an average customer-pay value and the per-rooftop incremental revenue lands inside the $250K range that produces the 11× headline. The conversion math isn't exotic — it's just sustained conversation at a volume no BDC team can match, running 24/7 without breaks, without turnover, and without scaling cost per additional motion.
Seven retention categories. One conversation thread.
The 11× isn’t driven by a single program. It’s the sum of seven retention categories running in parallel — each closing a small fraction of a leak that, untreated, sums to the under-2-year defection cliff Cox documented in 2025.
- Scheduled service. The OEM-scheduled and steady-state intervals — the cheapest, easiest visits to convert, and the highest-leverage retention moments in the lifecycle. Lisa books them directly into the DMS.
- Pre-paid & OEM benefits. Already-paid revenue and complimentary maintenance programs that don’t get used unless someone surfaces them before benefits lapse.
- Declined services. The $50K+/month of deferred work sitting in the DMS — worked patiently inside the same Lisa thread, with price-match leverage when the objection is cost.
- Recalls. Open OEM safety campaigns named explicitly, the actual risk explained in plain language, customer-pay bundling at check-in when the visit makes sense.
- Telematics. OEM connected-car alerts — same-day, same-thread bookings where speed decides who keeps the customer.
- State inspections. Fixed-deadline outreach paced ahead of the renewal window, before a competing shop sees the customer.
- Inbound channels. Website service questions, missed-and-dropped calls, and schedule-via-text from your IVR — every inbound surface Lisa absorbs without adding a BDC seat.
Every category writes back to the DMS on the same thread. The conversion math isn’t exotic; it’s sustained conversation at a volume no BDC team can match, running across categories that most stores work in isolation if they work them at all.
Five years of training data that nobody else has.
The 11× isn't a debut number. It's what shows up after AutoEngage has been continuously deployed at a top 5 auto group for five-plus years — a longer continuous deployment than most of the AI-for-dealers category has existed as a company.
Across that footprint, AutoEngage has handled north of 23.2M customer conversations with show rates between 84 and 88% on booked appointments. That matters because the 11× ratio depends on the conversion rate, and the conversion rate depends on Lisa knowing what works — when to pivot, when to wait, what tone to match. That's training data, accumulated. New entrants ship a model. Lisa ships a model that's spent five years in production at scale, on the exact problem.
Lisa gets sharper the longer she's live. Dealers in the 2021–22 AutoEngage cohort run 31% higher service retention after 12 months than non-adopters. That gap widens, not narrows.
11× on service. More on the next sale.
The published 11× is a fixed-ops claim — incremental service revenue per dollar of subscription. What it doesn't include is the compounding effect on the next vehicle sale. Cox's 2025 study quantifies that gap: 74% of customers who returned for service in the past 12 months are likely to repurchase from the same dealer, versus 44% of customers who lapsed.
A 30-point spread on the same scale. At even a modest front-end gross plus F&I per unit, that's a second layer of return that doesn't appear on the fixed-ops P&L but does appear on the dealer principal's monthly. Which is why deployed groups stay deployed — the math gets stronger over the customer lifecycle, not weaker.
What the 11× looks like at your volume.
The 11× is an average. Your number depends on your OEM mix, your average customer-pay RO, your new-vehicle volume, and your current retention performance. The first three you can plug into the calculator on this site; the fourth gets measured once integration is live.
The ROI & first-2-year recapture calculator runs both halves of the math: a straight break-even on the $1,895/mo subscription, and the size of the under-2-year recapture opportunity using Cox's 46% defection baseline. Plug in your inputs and the calculator shows where the 11× lands at your scale.