About TowFi

Roadside assistance, impound release, and vehicle service financing — in one platform.

TowFi connects customers who need help with the tow companies, impound yards, body shops, and mechanic shops that serve them. Every call, every payment, every vehicle release runs through a single mobile platform — no dispatching boards, no phone tag, no cash at the gate.

2
Native iOS Apps
4
Service Verticals
0%
Third-Party Dependencies

The Platform

Two apps, four service types, one integrated system. Every interaction — from the first call to the final payment — happens inside TowFi.

Towing

Customer calls a provider through the app with real-time VoIP. The dispatcher quotes, assigns a driver, and tracks the tow live. Payment by card-on-file or Affirm financing, released when the driver enters the customer's 6-digit code.

Impound Release

Customer finds their vehicle by plate or VIN. Daily storage, admin fees, and release charges accrue automatically from the yard's rate card. Pay by card or finance through Affirm. The yard redeems with a 9-digit code at the gate.

Body Shop

Shop enters the repair estimate, insurance-approved amount, and deductible. The customer's gap — deductible plus any overage — is financed or charged through TowFi. The shop redeems a G-number at vehicle pickup.

Mechanic Shop

Same gap financing model as body shops, adapted for warranty deductibles and above-approval overages. Line-item estimates, labor and parts, warranty tracking. G-number redeems at the shop counter.

Roles

The provider app adapts to who's using it. A fleet owner sees the dispatch board, accounting, and driver management. A dispatcher sees incoming calls and job assignment. A driver sees the active job, turn-by-turn navigation, and the customer call button. A shop operator sees intake forms, the payment board, and the redeem terminal. A solo operator sees everything.

Payments

Two payment methods, one graduated fee schedule. Card-on-file charges 2.9% on the first $1,000 and steps down to 1.9% above $2,000 — the provider's payout grows as the job size grows. Affirm financing starts at 19.9% for small balances and graduates to 2.9% above $30,000. Every dollar figure the customer sees is computed identically on the client and the server — no rounding disagreement, no surprise at checkout.

Completion Codes

Every payment produces a code — 6 digits for tows, 9 digits prefixed with "G-" for body shops and mechanic shops. The code is the handoff: the customer shows it, the provider enters it, and the money releases. Server-issued, cryptographically random, uniqueness enforced by database constraint, never reused. A wrong code locks the terminal after five attempts in fifteen minutes.

Infrastructure

TowFi owns its entire stack. No third-party mapping APIs, no external routing services, no dependency on any vendor's uptime for core functionality.

Self-hosted tile server (PMTiles) Self-hosted OSRM routing Self-hosted Nominatim geocoding WebRTC VoIP (peer-to-peer) WebSocket real-time signaling Node.js / Express API PostgreSQL Stripe Connect Affirm / BNPL AVSpeech voice guidance APNs / VoIP push DigitalOcean

Maps render from TowFi's own tile server at towfimaps.com — no Google Maps, no Mapbox, no per-request billing. Turn-by-turn routing runs through a self-hosted OSRM instance at gps.gpstowfi.com. Geocoding uses a self-hosted Nominatim deployment at geocode.gpstowfi.com. Every call between customer and provider is WebRTC peer-to-peer audio, relayed through TowFi's own signaling server — no Twilio, no Vonage, no per-minute charges.

The result is a platform whose marginal cost per transaction is near zero. Adding a thousand providers doesn't trigger a mapping bill. A busy Saturday night doesn't generate a telephony invoice. The economics are Stripe's processing fee and the server itself.

Founders

TowFi was built by two people — one from the towing industry, one from technology — who understood the same problem from opposite sides.

Mark Byron Lane, PhD
Co-Founder & CEO — Syncteq Inc, Boerne, Texas
PhD in Chemical Engineering and Nanotechnology. Built TowFi's entire technology stack — both iOS applications, the real-time WebSocket server, the payment infrastructure, the self-hosted mapping and routing systems, and the VoIP calling layer. Responsible for architecture, development, and operations.
Freeman Belmont
Co-Founder — Budget Towing And Recovery LLC, Camas, Washington
Owner and operator of Budget Towing And Recovery LLC, a full-service towing company in the Pacific Northwest. Brought the operational reality of the towing business to TowFi's design — dispatch workflows, driver management, impound operations, and the payment friction that the industry runs on. The platform was built around his shop and battle-tested on his fleet.

Timeline

Early 2025
Development begins. Core architecture: SwiftUI apps, WebSocket signaling server, PostgreSQL, self-hosted mapping infrastructure.
Mid 2025
Towing goes live. Customer-to-provider VoIP calling, real-time GPS tracking, card-on-file payments with 6-digit completion codes.
Late 2025
Affirm financing launches. Customers can finance tow charges through Affirm via Stripe Checkout. Graduated fee schedule replaces flat 20%.
Early 2026
Impound release. Plate and VIN lookup, automated daily accrual from yard rate cards, card and Affirm payment, 9-digit redeem codes.
Q2 2026
Dispatch and fleet management. Multi-role provider app: dispatcher, driver, and fleet owner views. Job handoff, driver GPS tracking, internal team calls.
Aug 2026
Body shop and mechanic shop services. Estimate intake, deductible and overage gap financing, shop boards, G-number redeem with brute-force protection and shop binding. First impound financing transaction processes live.

Get in Touch

TowFi is a product of Syncteq Inc, based in Boerne, Texas. For partnership inquiries, provider onboarding, or press:

contact@towfiapp.com