I send it a nameplate photo most days now, from under the machine, and I check its answer before I order.
Claude is a chat program. You type to it, talk to it, or show it a photo, and it writes back in plain words. On a computer it’s at claude.ai. On a phone it’s the Claude app from the App Store or Google Play, or the same website in your browser. Either way, you’re having a conversation, not running a program with menus and buttons to memorize.
Here’s how I actually use it, every day, on real jobs. It helps me diagnose. It helps me look up parts. It finds the published average labor for a repair so I can sanity-check my own rate. It prices the part the way I price parts, retail plus tax plus fifteen dollars shipping, rounded to the nearest five, because that’s my markup and I told it so once. Then it writes the two lines I put on the ticket: a labor line that describes the whole repair in plain words the customer can read, and a part line with the part number and the price. I read both, fix anything that isn’t how I’d say it, and paste them in.
It will do whatever you tell it to do. If you mark up from wholesale instead, or you follow a chart for your markup like a lot of shops do, it will follow the chart. You just have to let it know what it needs to do, once, in plain words.
One rule I don’t bend: I don’t order off its part number. I take the number it gives me to a parts website and check it against the real listing first, because it can be wrong, and a wrong part costs me a wasted trip. That check takes two minutes.
As of September 2026, Claude has three plans. Free costs $0 and includes connectors (more on those in chapter 3), but not Claude Code. Pro is $20 a month, or $17 a month if you pay for the year up front. Max starts at $100 a month. For everything in this chapter, the free plan does the job.
Time cost: about ten minutes to sign up, and each of the three jobs below takes less time than it would to look the answer up yourself.
I run an appliance repair shop. When I give you a nameplate photo and a symptom, do these in order:
1. Tell me the model and what part most likely failed, and say how sure you are.
2. Give me the part number and tell me to verify it on a parts website before I order.
3. Find a current retail price for that part and the published average labor for this repair, and say where each number came from.
4. Price the part my way: retail plus [YOUR TAX RATE]% tax plus $15 shipping, rounded to the nearest $5. My labor for this kind of repair is $[YOUR RATE].
5. Write two line items for my ticket. Line one, labor: describe the whole repair in plain words a customer can read, with the diagnosis. Line two, the part: part number, what it is, and the price.
Never invent a price or a part number. If you can't find one, say so.
In my shop it goes one step further: it writes those lines straight into Housecall Pro for me, on the job, and I never paste anything. That takes Claude Code, a paid plan, and a key from Housecall Pro. That’s chapter 5.
Step 4 taught one chat how you price. The next time you open Claude and start a new chat, that chat has never met you. It doesn’t know your tax rate, your labor rate, or that you run an appliance repair shop, and it will happily price a job some other way. Claude does keep a memory of you now, and it helps, but it’s a summary, and it won’t go read your old chats unless you ask it to (and searching old chats is a paid-plan feature anyway). Don’t lean on it for your pricing rules. Put them where every chat reads them before you type a word.
Do this once. It takes two minutes.
One step further, and it’s on the free plan too: Claude has Projects, up to five on a free account. A project is a folder of chats that all share the same instructions and the same files. Make one with your shop’s name on it. On the left side of the screen tap Projects, then “+ New Project,” then “Set project instructions,” paste the same prompt, and save. Start every shop chat inside that project. The one thing a project won’t do is carry a conversation across chats: what you told one chat inside the project, the next chat inside it hasn’t heard, unless you saved it to the project’s knowledge. So a rate you typed into a message is gone tomorrow. A rate you typed into the instructions is there every time. If “Set project instructions” is not offered on the free plan when you look, it has moved behind the paid plan; the shop instructions from the settings step above do the same job for a single chat.
And in the middle of a job, stay in the chat you started. Don’t open a new one for your second question about the same machine. The new one hasn’t seen the photo.
Start with the nameplate photo. It costs nothing to try, and you’ll know inside a minute whether it’s useful to you. Do the check-the-part-number step every single time for the first month, even when you’re sure, until it’s automatic. Once that’s a habit, decide for yourself whether the $20-a-month plan is worth it. I wouldn’t pay for anything on day one.