<p>Our platform decodes any VIN, flags open recalls, and shows what that exact car is actually selling for on the US market.</p><p>Most of the niche sells history reports. This site owns the free layer above them: decoding, recalls, safety, specs, real market prices and window stickers. That audience is people about to spend money on a car, which is why the advertising monetises at $12.50 RPM.</p><p><b>The asset: data nobody else has</b></p><p>490,913 live US vehicle listings with price, mileage, VIN, condition, seller type and location. Collected by our own crawler across 237 US cities every 15 minutes, growing by 13,000 records a day. Half a million records built in two months of continuous collection.</p><p>Competitors either license aggregated estimates or don't show real prices at all. Their valuations are guesses. Ours come from what cars are actually listed at, today.</p><p><b>Layered on top, all parsed in house from official free sources:</b></p><ul> <li>69,978 real repair costs extracted from raw NHTSA complaint text, median $1,000, 11% above $5,000. Everyone has access to the same complaints. Nobody else pulls out the dollar figures owners actually paid.</li> <li>1.1 million NHTSA complaint records mapped to models</li> <li>IIHS crash-test ratings across 5,991 pages, including small-overlap and headlight tests NHTSA doesn't run</li> <li>Insurance loss data (HLDI + NAIC) for 645 models across all 52 states</li> <li>EPA fuel economy, 26,248 dealer locations, a 2,603-model catalogue</li> </ul> <p>Original factory window stickers. For GM (Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Cadillac) and Stellantis (Jeep, Ram, Dodge, Chrysler, Fiat, Alfa Romeo) the site retrieves the manufacturer's own Monroney PDF live, free. Nearly every competitor charges for this. For other makes the label is rebuilt from EPA and NHTSA data.</p><p>No licence fees, no API contracts, no vendor who can raise prices or cut access.</p><p><b>Traffic</b></p><ul> <li>23,690 visits a month, almost entirely organic</li> <li>Bing: average position 4.3, 4.4% CTR, around 915 clicks a day. Twelve months ago the same channel produced 2 clicks a day.</li> <li>22% of page views now come from AI assistants, real people clicking through from ChatGPT and Copilot answers</li> <li>70% United States, followed by Canada</li> <li>408 registered users, 9 new every day, with zero acquisition spend, ever</li> </ul> <p><b>Google is the untapped half</b></p><p>The site holds top-5 on Bing, while Google still serves it at average position 74.9 from 3,795 daily impressions. That channel has not started contributing.</p><p>The cause is known and being fixed: the site once carried 319,000 thin auto-generated pages, which damaged domain trust. They were retired with HTTP 410, and Google is clearing them out now. Googlebot crawl volume has tripled since early August. A buyer steps in while that process is underway, not before it.</p><p><b>Revenue</b></p><p>August closes near $1,345, the best month so far. July $1,089. December $156. Revenue over the last six months is up 190% against the prior six.</p><ul> <li>AdSense on US insurance and vehicle-valuation traffic, among the highest-CPC verticals on the network, at $12.50 RPM. Scales linearly with traffic, no sales cycle.</li> <li>EpicVIN affiliate, $614 over the past year, tracked with our own click attribution because the partner panel only reports truncated referrers.</li> <li>Subscriptions through Lemon Squeezy: Pro $29/mo and Dealer $99/mo, live since 4 July 2026, converting from organic traffic with no marketing behind them.</li> </ul> <p><b>Operating cost is $70 a year: hosting and the domain.</b></p><p>Built but not switched on: paid PDF exports, commercial API tiers, embeddable widget licensing, expansion to UK, EU and Canadian data.</p><p><b>It runs itself</b></p><p>More than 25 cron jobs. Nothing in daily operations needs a person:</p><ul> <li>Data: crawler every 15 minutes, listing enrichment every 10, valuation rebuild every 6 hours, nightly full rebuild, monthly insurance refresh</li> <li>Content: 5 articles, 4 videos and 25 social posts published daily across 5 networks, all automatic. 170 articles live, 113 more written and queued.</li> <li>Customers: email queue, bounce and reply handling, recall alerts, price alerts, monthly digest</li> <li>Search: daily IndexNow submission, 21 sitemaps rebuilt, Search Console and Bing Webmaster ingestion</li> <li>Monitoring: a watchdog checks the crawler twice daily and sends a Telegram alert if data stops flowing. The crawler has three independent failure safeguards.</li> </ul> <p>Owner time is 2 to 4 hours a week, mostly reading dashboards. No employees, no contractors, no support queue.</p><p><b>What's included</b></p><ul> <li>Domain and full codebase, PHP 8.2 with vanilla JavaScript</li> <li>Complete MySQL database, 75 tables</li> <li>The crawler and every parsing pipeline, with monitoring</li> <li>283 articles (170 published, 113 queued), 615 images, RSS feeds</li> <li>167 videos and the generation pipeline behind them</li> <li>Admin console, 18 modules, including an internal link graph of 283,363 edges with PageRank, and a search query engine ingesting 36,207 daily rows</li> <li>Public REST API with keys, rate limits and webhooks</li> <li>Embeddable chart widget for backlink distribution</li> <li>Email list of 4,274 contacts with full sending infrastructure</li> <li>7 brand social accounts on a single handle</li> <li>Analytics: GA4, Search Console, Bing Webmaster</li> <li>Affiliate partnership and click-tracking system</li> <li>Written documentation plus 30 days of post-sale support.</li> </ul> <p><b>Tech stack</b></p><p>PHP 8.2, MySQL 8.0, vanilla JavaScript, Nginx, Linux. Cloudflare in front. Python and FFmpeg drive the video pipeline. Lemon Squeezy for payments.</p><p>No framework, no build step, no npm dependency chain. Deliberate: nothing breaks when a package maintainer abandons a library, and any LAMP developer can take it over without learning a bespoke framework. Runs on a single VPS.</p><p><b>Why it's defensible</b></p><p>The code isn't the barrier, the data collection is. Anyone can build a VIN decoder on free government APIs in a week. What takes time is the market data: crawling 237 cities every 15 minutes, deduplicating, normalising makes and models, and running it long enough for price history to exist.</p><p>The parsing pipelines are the second layer: extracting repair costs from unstructured complaint text, matching IIHS and insurance data to models.</p><p>The third is search position. Top-5 on Bing took a year and can't be bought.</p><p><b>Growth levers</b></p><ul> <li>Google. Position 74.9 against top-5 on Bing. The largest lever in the business, and it needs no new content.</li> <li>One-time purchase tier. Subscribers cancel after one cycle because they wanted a single lookup and were offered a monthly plan. The demand is proven, people paid $29 for one vehicle. This is a pricing change, not development.</li> <li>Dealers. Bulk valuation, fleet monitoring and the API are built and have never been marketed. That audience checks cars daily, which fits subscriptions far better than consumer traffic.</li> <li>Dormant products. Paid PDFs, commercial API tiers, widget licensing: configuration, not development.</li> <li>Geography. Architecture supports UK, EU and Canadian data.</li> </ul> <p><b>Why I'm selling</b></p><p>I've launched other projects that take my time and capital now. The business isn't in decline and doesn't need rescuing: traffic, registrations and revenue grew every month this year, and August is the best month on record.</p><p>What it needs is exactly what I can't give it: a push on Google, and a commercial focus on the dealer audience the tooling already serves. Everything runs on automation, so the buyer inherits a working system rather than a repair job.</p><p><b>Straight answers</b></p><p>"Most traffic is Bing, not Google." Correct, and stated openly. Bing has rewarded this site for twelve months with an average position of 4.3. Google isn't declining; it hasn't engaged, and the crawl data shows that turning.</p><p>"AdSense accounts don't transfer." True of every ad-funded site. What transfers is everything that produces the revenue: traffic, templates, placements, the vertical, ads.txt. The buyer connects their own account.</p><p>"The domain is from 2017 but the site is a year old." Right. The domain held a placeholder until August 2025. Clean history, no penalties, no spam legacy. The search performance comes from the past year of work, not from domain age.</p><p>"How much work is it weekly?" The pipelines are automated end-to-end and alert on failure. The real work is deciding what to build next, not keeping it alive.</p><p>✅ $5,361 TTM revenue</p><p>✅ 416 customers</p><p>✅ Business model: Affiliate+Ads+SaaS</p><p>✅ Built with JavaScript, PHP, Python</p>