Impound lot and lien deadline tracker for towing companies

The idea

Lien law gives a towing company its only path to recovering money on an abandoned vehicle, and it is strictly procedural: notice letters by certified mail on statutory clocks, or the company loses the right to sell and simply eats months of storage, often one to three thousand dollars per vehicle. Companies run these clocks on whiteboards and memory. Towbook and the other towing platforms are dispatch products; the lien paperwork side is thin or absent, and it is where the money leaks.

The wedge is the deadline-sorted lot list: every vehicle ordered by days until its next statutory action, with the correct state-specific letter one click away. State rules as data, not code, makes expanding coverage a research task that also builds the moat.

Who pays

The towing company owner pays 69 dollars a month, trivially justified against one saved lien sale. Companies with impound lots (police rotation, private property towing) are the target, reachable through state towing associations, tow-industry Facebook groups, and trade publications; associations actively educate members on lien compliance and make natural partners. Per-state landing pages (‘Texas storage lien process’) capture high-intent search.

MVP scope

• Vehicle intake with state-specific computed deadline schedule
• Dashboard sorted by days remaining to next deadline, with accrued fees
• Generated owner and lienholder notice letters ready for certified mail
• Certified-mail tracking numbers logged against each notice
• Per-vehicle evidence timeline
• Skip for v1: dispatch and driver management, payment processing at vehicle release, DMV/title API integrations, auction listing

Build LienClock, a lien deadline tracker for towing companies running impound lots. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (auth and Postgres), server-side PDF generation for notice letters.

Core flow: on intake, staff enter a vehicle: VIN, plate, year/make/model, tow date and reason, storage rate per day, and the company's state. A state-rules table (start with 5 launch states, e.g. Texas, California, Florida, Ohio, Georgia, stored as data: days until first notice, notice method, days until lien sale eligibility, required recipients) drives a computed deadline schedule for that vehicle: first notice due date, lienholder notification date, earliest sale date. The dashboard is a single sorted list of every vehicle on the lot ordered by days remaining to its next deadline, red under 3 days, with accrued storage fees ticking per vehicle.

When a notice is due, staff enter owner and lienholder details (from the state title lookup they run separately) and generate the letter: a state-specific templated PDF with vehicle details, itemised charges to date, statutory language from the rules table, and the response deadline, formatted for certified mail with a fold-line for windowed envelopes. Recording the certified mail tracking number against the notice moves the vehicle to its next stage. Every action logs to a per-vehicle timeline usable as evidence in a dispute.

Pages: /dashboard (deadline-sorted lot list), /vehicles/new (intake), /vehicles/[id] (timeline, fees, notices), /settings (rates, company details, state).

Pricing: 69 dollars/month per company. 14-day trial.