A car deal finder that read number plates.
AutoAlert scanned private car ads in Denmark, read each car's plate, estimated what it was really worth and told you if the price was a good deal. It ran at autoalert.app from 2025 to 2026.
2019 Skoda Octavia Combi 1.5 TSI
Asking 128.500 kr
How it worked
From an ad to a verdict in four steps.
01
Collect listings
Pull new car ads for a saved search: price, photos, text and location.
02
Read the plate
Find the plate in the ad text, or run plate OCR on the photos.
03
Value it
Pull registry data for the plate, then let an AI model estimate what the car is really worth.
04
Rate and alert
Under the band is amazing, inside fair, above overpriced. Saved searches re-ran hourly.
Timeline
Thirteen months, start to finish.
Sep 2025
First commit
Work starts on the scraper and the plate reader.
Apr 2026
Last release
Deal ratings, saved alerts and paid plans in place.
Jun 2026
Shelved
No sustainable data source, so no way forward.
Sep 2026
Taken offline
The server was shut down and the site switched off.
Oct 2026
This showcase
Same client, synthetic data, no backend.
Why it was retired
The data source wasn't sustainable.
The product only worked as long as it could read someone else's listings. That wasn't allowed, and there was no cheap way around it.
- Listings
Scraped from Facebook Marketplace
Needed logged-in accounts, broke when the page changed, and went against the platform's terms.
- The fix
A licensed feed
Would have meant rebuilding most of the backend.
Stack
What it ran on.
Client
React 19, CRA, Tailwind, Radix
Server
Node, Express 5, node-cron, Puppeteer
AI
Plate OCR and AI value estimates
Data
Supabase (Postgres + Auth), Backblaze B2
Payments
Stripe subscriptions
Hosting
One small VPS, nginx + pm2, Cloudflare
What you're looking at
The original React client, restyled and built as a static site. Listings, plates, sellers and prices are generated in your browser. Stars and alerts stay in local storage. No API keys, no scraping code, no tracking.