Why Kamochi

I was 17, and the quote was most of the car.

Kameron Seabrook

Founder, Obai · ten years an auto appraiser

The shop wasn't making things up. What they found did need fixing. It just wasn't the reason my car was overheating, and I had no way to tell the difference.

I bought my first car at seventeen. Eight hundred dollars, a 1998 Honda Accord, the same age I was. My soccer teammate's dad sold it to me. He took pity on a kid and gave me a deal.

I paid for it with my own money. My mom put in a hundred or so, but it was mine, and I have never been prouder of anything I've owned.

It was an old car, so it had old-car problems. One day it started overheating and I had no idea why.

I took it to a chain repair shop. They looked it over and told me six hundred dollars.

I was seventeen. I did not have six hundred dollars. I had just spent eight hundred on the whole car.

Then a family friend spent ten minutes under the hood and found a vacuum hose with a hole in it. Ten-dollar part. Ten-minute fix.

In the shop's defense

I want to be fair about this part, because it's the part that matters. They weren't inventing a problem. What they found genuinely needed fixing at some point. It just wasn't the reason my car was overheating that week, and it wasn't the thing that was in my interest to spend money on.

So the problem was never really dishonesty. The problem was that a seventeen-year-old standing in a waiting room holding a piece of paper with a number on it has no way to check the number.

You can't tell if it's fair. That's the whole thing. That's always been the whole thing.

Most of us own one car. Maybe two.

When it breaks, it isn't just a repair bill. The week comes apart. You're late, you're stranded, you're borrowing a ride, you're guessing at a number you can't verify, and the whole thing sits on your mood until it's sorted.

I've spent the eleven years since that Accord on this one problem, pivoting, learning, adapting, and eventually becoming a software engineer so I could build the thing I needed at seventeen.

So that's what Kamochi is

It hears the noise and looks at the car. It finds the part and what the part should cost. It tells you what a shop usually charges for the job, and shows you where that number came from. It calls local shops for you. It books the appointment. It remembers your car, and every other car you own.

It never spends your money or books anything without asking you first. The card in your pocket is the key, and nothing happens without it.

It's on your side. Not the shop's, not the dealer's, not your insurer's. That isn't a feature, it's the entire reason it exists.

The question it was built to answer is the one printed on the front of the card. The one I couldn't answer at seventeen.

Is this price fair?

Kam Seabrook, founder, Obai