Carova — the personal car garage app for tracking service history, mileage, maintenance schedules, and costs — is currently in closed beta. If you're deciding whether to request an invite, this post covers what you'd actually get, what "closed beta" means here, and honest answers to the questions early adopters rightly ask before trusting a new app with their records.
What "closed beta" means at Carova
Closed beta means two things: access is by invite, and the product is actively evolving with its early users. It does not mean a stripped-down preview. Every feature Carova has is switched on for beta drivers — there are no locked tiers, no trial countdown, and no card to enter. The beta is free, full stop, for as long as it runs.
The trade you're making is the classic early-adopter one: you get the full product at no cost and a real voice in its direction; in exchange, you're using software that's still being shaped, where things occasionally change under you (always announced first — more on that below).
What beta drivers get
Everything, currently. Concretely:
Unlimited cars and service records
Add every vehicle in the household. Each gets its own profile, service timeline with receipt attachments, mileage log, maintenance schedule, and cost history. Log as much as you like — there are no caps on cars or records in the beta.
Mileage tracking with trend predictions
Update your odometer by typing the number or photographing the dash — Carova reads the value from the photo. Your readings build a picture of how fast you actually drive — your real monthly mileage, computed for you.
Maintenance reminders tuned to how you drive
Set each service interval once — by mileage, by time, or whichever comes first — and Carova tracks every item's status (upcoming, due soon, overdue) against your last service and real driving rate.
Warning lights, explained in plain language
Puzzled by a lit icon? Ask your car's AI assistant and get the warning light explained in plain language, including how urgent it is.
The AI assistant, with your full car history
Each car has a chat that draws on everything you've logged — services, mileage, costs, schedule. "When was my last oil change?" and "how much have I spent on brakes?" get answers from your records, not generic guesses.
Your records, kept in one place
Everything you log — services, receipts, mileage, costs — stays organized in your account, during the beta and after it. Your records are yours.
How to get an invite
Go to the Carova site and hit Request an invite — it starts the registration flow, takes a minute, and requires no payment details. Invites are how we keep the beta at a size where feedback actually gets read and acted on, so the loop from "request" to "in" is kept as short as we can manage.
Once you're in, a genuinely useful first session looks like this:
Add your car (under a minute).
Log today's odometer reading.
Enter whatever recent service history you have — even three old receipts give your schedule real anchors. Photograph paper receipts as you go; thermal paper fades.
Set up maintenance schedules from your owner's manual.
From that point the app has enough to start doing its job: computing what's due, learning your driving rate, and giving the assistant real history to answer from.
The questions worth asking before joining any beta
Will my data survive the beta?
Yes. Keeping your records safe is the one job a records app doesn't get to fail at, beta or not — your full service history, mileage log, and costs stay in your account, in the beta and beyond.
What happens when the beta ends? Will I suddenly owe money?
Pricing after the beta is honestly not decided — there are no hidden tiers waiting behind a curtain, because we haven't settled on any. What we can commit to is process: any change lands on the public changelog before it reaches your account. You will not wake up to a surprise paywall between you and your records.
How do I find out what's changing?
Two public pages exist for exactly this: the changelog, where every shipped change is announced, and the roadmap, where you can see what's being considered and built. Beta software changes — the deal here is that it never changes silently.
Does my feedback actually go anywhere?
The feedback board is public, and it's the primary input to what gets built next. Feature requests, bug reports, and "this flow is awkward" posts all land in the same place, where you can see them triaged and other drivers can weigh in. A closed beta is small on purpose: at this size, individual feedback genuinely moves the roadmap. If something you need is missing, the single most effective thing you can do is post it.
What should I expect to be rough?
The honest answer for any beta: occasional rough edges, flows that will be redesigned, and features that ship in their first version rather than their best one. What you should not expect is data loss or silent changes — those are the lines a records app doesn't get to cross, beta or not.
Who the beta is for
The ideal beta driver is anyone who already feels the problem Carova solves: receipts scattering, service dates fuzzy, warning lights googled from a parking lot. If you own a car (or several), do at least some of your own upkeep decisions, and want your car's history to live somewhere better than a glovebox — you're the person this beta was opened for.
Request an invite, bring one car and a handful of receipts, and see whether "your car, explained" holds up. And when you find the thing we got wrong — tell us on the board. That's what the beta is for.