Carveat
Pricing

Free, and richer than their paid report

Every VIN check here costs nothing and needs no account: every recall with its remedy text, every defect investigation since 1972, every owner complaint with the mileage it failed at and the owner’s own words, crash-test ratings for the configuration NHTSA actually tested, and EPA running costs matched to the powertrain the VIN decodes to. BeSure AI charges $14.99 for a report whose published contents include none of those last four.

What their $14.99 does carry, and our free check does not, is title and accident history. That commercial layer is the only thing we sell — and the pipeline behind it is not connected yet, so nothing on this page can be bought today. There is no checkout on this site, and no form asking for your card or your email.

Free VIN check$0Unlimited, no account, no trial
AI contract scan$0Not built yet · they charge $6.99
Single report$8.99Not on sale yet
Cheapest per report$2.00Ten on the $19.99 Shopper Pass
Scan a VINSee a real report
The free tier

The free one is the headline

All of it comes from bulk federal downloads — NHTSA and the EPA — that we host ourselves, about 1.5 GB of Postgres. A lookup costs us nothing, which is why it costs you nothing, and why there is no trial period behind it that quietly ends.

In the free check8 items
  • Every recall campaign that applies to the vehicle, with the full remedy text
  • NHTSA’s “park it” and “park outside” advisories, called out as the stop-driving orders they are
  • Every defect investigation since 1972 — no public API exposes these
  • Every owner complaint on the exact configuration, with mileage at failure and the written narrative
  • Crash-test star ratings for the configuration NHTSA actually tested, with the crash-test photography
  • EPA fuel economy, CO₂ and annual running cost matched to the powertrain the VIN decodes to
  • The full specification decode — engine, drivetrain, restraints, assembly plant
  • A verdict with the reasoning, the dollar bands, and every gap in coverage stated as a gap
Not in the free check6 items
  • Title brands — salvage, junk, flood, fire, lemon, total loss
  • Accident and damage records, with severity
  • Odometer readings across time, and rollback detection
  • Auction sale prices, dates and damage codes
  • Lien and theft status
  • Prior use: fleet, rental, taxi, police

These come from commercial sources that charge us per report. They are exactly what the paid ladder below buys, and nothing more — a paid report is the free report with this layer folded into the same verdict.

Every product we sell

The whole ladder, on the page

Eight products, all eight of them here. The three that recur carry their renewal price, their renewal period and how to cancel on the card itself, not behind a link to terms. Reviewed 2026-08-01.

Free VIN Check

Live

$0

Unlimited, no account

The whole federal safety picture on any VIN: recalls, defect investigations, owner complaints, crash tests, fuel economy and the full specification decode.

  • Every recall campaign with the full remedy text and the park-it advisories
  • Every NHTSA defect investigation since 1972
  • Every owner complaint, with mileage at failure and the owner’s narrative
  • NCAP star ratings for the configuration NHTSA actually tested, with the match basis
  • EPA economy and running cost matched to your powertrain
  • A verdict over all of it, with the reasoning and the gaps shown

BeSure AI charges $14.99 for a report that carries none of the last four.

AI Contract Scan

Not built yet

$0

3 per month free, unlimited after any purchase

Photograph the purchase agreement in the finance office and get the fees classified line by line against your state’s statutory caps.

  • Every line item classified: legitimate, negotiable, refusable, or over your state’s cap
  • The payment-to-truth reverser — monthly quote back to a real out-the-door total
  • A sentence to say out loud for each finding

BeSure AI charges $6.99 for the equivalent scan.

Single Report

Not on sale yet

$8.99

$8.99 per report

One vehicle’s title, accident, odometer and auction record, folded into the verdict alongside everything the free check already found.

  • NMVTIS title brands: salvage, junk, flood, fire, lemon, total loss
  • Accident and damage records with severity
  • Odometer readings over time, with rollback detection
  • Auction sale prices, dates and damage codes
  • Lien and theft status; prior fleet, rental, taxi or police use

40% under BeSure AI’s $14.99, 10% under VinAudit’s $9.99, 82% under Carfax’s $49.99.

3-Pack

Not on sale yet

$19.99

$6.66 per report

Three reports, no expiry, for the shortlist you have already narrowed down.

  • Three full paid reports
  • No expiry date
  • No subscription, no renewal

BeSure AI’s 2-pack is $24.99 — this is 50% more reports for 20% less money.

10-Pack

Not on sale yet

$49.99

$5.00 per report

Ten reports, no expiry, for a search that is going to run past one weekend.

  • Ten full paid reports
  • No expiry date
  • No subscription, no renewal

The same $49.99 BeSure AI charges for five.

Shopper Pass

Not on sale yet

$19.99/30 days

$2.00 per report at the full allowance

Ten reports, unlimited scans and recall monitoring for thirty days — priced for the month you are actually out looking at cars.

  • Ten full paid reports inside the 30 days
  • Unlimited VIN scans and contract scans
  • Recall monitoring on every vehicle you save

Renews at $19.99 every 30 days until cancelled. $19.99 today, then $19.99 on the same date every 30 days. Cancel in one tap from the receipt or from the subscription screen, at any time, without contacting support. Cancelling stops the next charge. Access and any unused reports run to the end of the period you already paid for.

BeSure AI’s 30-day Shopping Pass is also $19.99. It is not on their website, and the number of reports it includes is not published anywhere we could find.

Pro Annual

Not on sale yet

$89/yr

$2.23 per report at the full allowance

Forty reports a year, unlimited scans, and monitoring on ten saved vehicles — for someone who buys, flips or advises more than once a year.

  • Forty full paid reports across the year
  • Unlimited VIN scans and contract scans
  • Recall monitoring on ten saved vehicles

Renews at $89 every 12 months until cancelled. $89 today, then $89 on the same date every 12 months. Cancel in one tap from the receipt or from the subscription screen, at any time, without contacting support. Cancelling stops the next charge. Access and any unused reports run to the end of the year you already paid for.

Above BeSure AI’s $79.99 Annual Pro — and unlike theirs, the report allowance is a published number rather than an unstated one.

Dealer / API

Not on sale yet

$149/mo

$1.49 per report, then $1.29 each over the allowance

A hundred reports a month over REST and bulk CSV, with a white-label PDF. Priced for volume, not for margin.

  • One hundred reports a month, $1.29 each beyond that
  • REST API and bulk CSV
  • White-label PDF output

Renews at $149 every month until cancelled. $149 today, then $149 on the same date every month. Cancel in one tap from the receipt or from the subscription screen, at any time, without contacting support. Cancelling stops the next charge. API access runs to the end of the month you already paid for.

ClearVin is $20/mo plus $2.50 a report; VinAudit is $50/mo plus $1.00 a report.

They advertise three of eight

BeSure AI sells eight in-app purchases. Their website shows three. Among the five it does not show is a $19.99 30-day Shopping Pass — the one SKU that would make checking a real shortlist cheap.

So a shopper arrives, reads $14.99 a report, multiplies it by the eight cars they intend to look at, and leaves. The product that would have saved them money is invisible until after they install. Ours is one section up this page, with its renewal terms attached to it.

On their website

  • $14.99 — single report
  • $24.99 — 2-pack of reports
  • $49.99 — 5-pack of reports

Only after you install

  • $6.99 — single contract scan
  • $34.99 — 3-pack of reports
  • $9.99/mo — Pro
  • $19.99 — 30-day Shopping Pass
  • $79.99/yr — Annual Pro

BeSure AI advertises “67% cheaper than Carfax”, anchored to a $44.99 Carfax price. Carfax is $49.99. Their own llms.txt also cites a Carfax “6-pack for $99.99” that does not exist. All eight purchases and both website ladders were read on 29 July 2026.

Do the arithmetic

How many cars are you actually going to check?

Almost nobody buys the first car they look at. The number you pick changes which product is cheapest — sometimes ours, sometimes not — so here is the multiplication done in the open, with every rung of every ladder visible.

Over what window

The Shopper Pass runs thirty days, so it is only offered against a search that finishes inside one. Packs never expire and never renew.

5 vehicles · paid layer
$19.99$4.00 per vehicle

Shopper Pass. The federal safety check on all 5 is free either way.

Renews at $19.99 every 30 days until cancelled. Ten reports inside the period; unused reports do not carry over.

Our other routes to the same 5
  • Packs3-Pack + Single Report × 2$37.97
  • Pro AnnualPro Annual$89.00
The same 5 elsewhere
  • BeSure AI — what their website shows5-pack · $10.00 each$49.99
  • BeSure AI — every report SKU they sell5-pack · $10.00 each$49.99
  • VinAudit5-pack · $4.00 each$19.99
  • Carfax4-pack + single report · $32.00 each$159.98

Competitor prices verified 29 July 2026 — the prices, not the contents of anyone’s report. Those figures buy that vendor’s whole report; ours buys the title, accident, odometer and auction layer on top of a free check built from the full federal safety record. Nothing on this page is on sale yet.

Verified 29 July 2026

Against the market

Every figure here was read off a live checkout or Apple’s own listing data, then re-checked by a second pass that assumed the first researcher had made it up. That pass killed a Carfax “$44.99”, an AutoCheck “$2.00 a report” and a VinAudit “$3–4 API rate”, all of which trace to affiliate blogs rather than to a vendor. None of them appear below. Where we did not check something, the cell says so instead of guessing.

Prices in USD, verified 29 July 2026
What is being comparedCarveatBeSure AICarfaxVinAudit
One report1$8.99not on sale yet$14.99$49.99$9.99
Cheapest per report2$2.0010 reports on the $19.99 Shopper Pass$10.005 for $49.99$27.504 for $109.99$3.0010 for $29.99
30-day pass3$19.99 · 10 reportsallowance published, renewal disclosed$19.99 · allowance unpublishednot shown on their websiteNo such SKUNo such SKU
SKUs sold vs SKUs published48 of 8the whole ladder is on this page3 of 8five are invisible until after you install3 of 33 of 3
Auto-renewal disclosed on the purchase screen5Yes — price, period and cancellationpublished here before anything is on saleNone across four subscription SKUsNo subscription SKU foundNo subscription SKU found
Where you buy6Webno app-store commissionIn-app onlyApple and Google take 15–30%WebWeb
Free tier7Full federal safety reportunlimited, no accountFree VIN lookuplead magnetNot verifiedNot verified
What the output is8A verdict, with the reasoningA reportA reportA report
  1. Carveat from docs/UNIT-ECONOMICS.md. Carfax and VinAudit from their live checkouts. BeSure from Apple’s in-app purchase listing.
  2. Lowest published bundle price divided by the number of reports the bundle states.
  3. BeSure’s pass is one of the five in-app purchases absent from besureai.app. Carfax’s and VinAudit’s checkouts list no subscription product.
  4. BeSure: eight in-app purchases verified against Apple’s listing, three published on their website. Carfax and VinAudit: every SKU found at checkout is also advertised.
  5. BeSure’s published terms were read in full and contain no renewal disclosure for any of their four recurring purchases.
  6. BeSure ships iOS and Android only; every purchase is an in-app purchase.
  7. We did not test whether Carfax or VinAudit offer a free lookup, so those two cells are a gap in our checking rather than a finding against them.
  8. Every product in the category outputs a document and leaves the synthesis to the buyer. That is the difference the rest of this site is about.
The wider market
Everything else we priced, and how good the source was
ProductVerified priceSource
Carfax$49.99 · $69.99 for 2 · $109.99 for 4Live checkout, headless browser
AutoCheck$24.99–$29.99 · 5 for $59.99Disputed between verifiers, JavaScript-gated — we do not cost against it
BeSure AI$14.99 · $24.99 for 2 · $34.99 for 3 · $49.99 for 5All eight in-app purchases verified from Apple’s listing data
VinAudit$9.99 · $19.99 for 5 · $29.99 for 10Live site
EpicVIN$5.40 · $1 trial then $49.99/moLive site
Checkthatvin$3.50Live site
VinDatafrom $3.49Live site
Negative option

Every renewal, disclosed before the sale

Three of the eight products recur. Each one’s renewal price, renewal period and cancellation route sits on its own card above and again in full here. BeSure AI’s published terms carry no auto-renewal disclosure across four subscription SKUs. We are not copying that, and we are publishing ours before anything is on sale rather than after.

Shopper Passevery 30 days
Renews at
$19.99 every 30 days
Charges
$19.99 today, then $19.99 on the same date every 30 days.
Cancel
Cancel in one tap from the receipt or from the subscription screen, at any time, without contacting support.
On cancel
Cancelling stops the next charge. Access and any unused reports run to the end of the period you already paid for.
Pro Annualevery 12 months
Renews at
$89 every 12 months
Charges
$89 today, then $89 on the same date every 12 months.
Cancel
Cancel in one tap from the receipt or from the subscription screen, at any time, without contacting support.
On cancel
Cancelling stops the next charge. Access and any unused reports run to the end of the year you already paid for.
Dealer / APIevery month
Renews at
$149 every month
Charges
$149 today, then $149 on the same date every month.
Cancel
Cancel in one tap from the receipt or from the subscription screen, at any time, without contacting support.
On cancel
Cancelling stops the next charge. API access runs to the end of the month you already paid for.
What you would be buying

Where the paid data comes from

Two of these rows are commercial feeds we pay for per report; one is a federal system reached through an approved provider; one is a pile of government files sitting on our own disk. They are not interchangeable, and this page will not blur them together.

Title brands, salvage, total loss, odometer

Brand records reported by state motor vehicle agencies, insurers and salvage operators.

NMVTIS — the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System, run by the US Department of Justice — reached through an AAMVA-approved data provider.

Charged to us per report, which is why this layer is the thing we sell.

Accident and damage records

Collision and damage events with a severity, where one was reported.

The same commercial vehicle-history feed, alongside the NMVTIS layer.

Charged per report.

Auction records

Sale price, sale date, odometer at sale and damage codes.

A commercial auction-history feed. It is not NMVTIS and will never be labelled as NMVTIS on this site.

Charged per credit, and only pulled when the VIN is likely to hit.

Everything in the free check

Recalls, defect investigations, complaints, crash tests, fuel economy, the full decode.

Recalls, investigations, complaints and economy come from bulk federal downloads loaded into our own Postgres and refreshed on a schedule. The VIN decode and the crash-test ratings are live requests to NHTSA on each lookup — the decode sends the VIN — and serving those from our own tables is not done yet.

$0.00 per lookup. That is the entire reason it is free rather than a trial.

What a paid report will never contain
  • Owner names, owner addresses, or lienholder identities — the consumer NMVTIS product is free of them by regulation, and we will not source them elsewhere
  • Plate-to-VIN lookups, which is how identity gets attached to a vehicle by the back door
  • People-search, address history, criminal or identity data of any kind
  • Any claim that a specific recall was or was not remedied on a specific vehicle — that status is not obtainable, and we say so instead of guessing
NMVTIS Consumer Access Product Disclaimer · Rev. September 2022Launch blocker

Required verbatim on this page before any paid sale. Every paid SKU on this page — all of them carry NMVTIS title data. Reproduced verbatim, unedited, on this page and on every report, before the first NMVTIS-sourced sale.

We do not hold the official text in this repository and will not paraphrase it. Paid sales are blocked until it is here, word for word.

Official text not present
Launch status

None of this is on sale yet

Working todayfree
  • The free VIN check, unlimited, with no account
  • The verdict engine over federal safety data
  • On-device VIN scanning from the camera
Not connectedno checkout exists
  • Checkout — there is no payment integration and no card form on this site
  • Accounts — nothing here can be bought, so there is nothing to sign in to
  • The title, accident, odometer and auction layer every paid SKU above describes
  • The AI contract scan

We are not collecting email addresses either. There is nowhere to put one and no date to promise you, and a signup form that goes nowhere is exactly the sort of thing this product exists to catch.

The prices above are published now because they are decided now, and because a person deserves to know what a thing will cost before they invest any time in it. When the paid layer is live, this page gains a checkout and nothing else on it changes.

Check a VIN for nothing