// about carscout

Built by a student.
For serious car hunters.

CarScout started as a side project to solve a real problem — finding genuinely underpriced cars before flippers and dealers snap them up. It's now a fully automated deal-detection engine scanning thousands of listings every 30 minutes.

// the builder
Zack Bouargan
Student & developer — Montreal, QC, Canada
↗ LinkedIn ✉ z.bouargan@aui.ma

I built CarScout because I was frustrated. Every time I found a good deal on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, it was already gone. The good listings — the ones priced $3,000 below market — sell within hours of being posted. By the time a regular person sees them, they're gone.

So I built a scraper. Then a price analyzer. Then email alerts. Then a dashboard. What started as a weekend Python script turned into a full-stack application running on AWS, scanning Craigslist, AutoTrader, and Facebook Marketplace every 30 minutes and flagging deals using statistical analysis.

CarScout is built for two types of people: casual buyers who want to find a good deal on their next car, and serious flippers who need to act fast. If you've ever missed a great listing, this tool is for you.

// how it works

From listing to deal alert
in under 35 minutes.

A fully automated pipeline runs around the clock. Here's exactly what happens under the hood.

01
🔍
Scrape
Every 30 minutes, CarScout crawls three major marketplaces across 9 cities — collecting prices, mileage, VINs, title status, and listing descriptions.
Craigslist — Montreal, Toronto, NYC, LA, Chicago
AutoTrader Canada — private sellers only
Facebook Marketplace — Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary
02
📊
Analyze
Listings are grouped by make, model, and mileage tier. The analyzer computes the median market price for each group and flags any car priced more than 1.5 standard deviations below it.
Median pricing — resistant to scam bait clusters
Mileage bucketing — compares apples to apples
Deal Score 0–100 combining discount, keywords, mileage, title
03
🏷️
Tag & Filter
Each listing is automatically tagged with title status (clean/salvage), VIN-decoded specs, and a Non-Op flag if the listing indicates the car isn't running or is parts-only.
VIN decoding via NHTSA API
Non-Op detection from listing text
Salvage/clean title parsing
04
⚡
Alert
Newly flagged deals trigger instant email alerts to users whose filter rules match. Set your own thresholds for discount %, ROI, profit, price, makes, and cities.
Instant alerts — fires the moment a deal is flagged
Daily digest — one email with top deals of the day
Fully customizable rules per user
05
🧹
Clean
A daily staleness checker revisits flagged listings and removes any that have been deleted or sold — keeping the dashboard clean and accurate.
Runs once per day automatically
Listings expire after 30 days via DynamoDB TTL
06
🧮
Flip Calculator
For serious flippers — estimate your ROI before you buy. Input purchase price, repairs, and expected resale to calculate profit and return on investment.
Pre-filled from any dashboard listing
Save analyses to your account
3K+
Listings tracked
3
Sources scraped
9
Cities covered
30m
Refresh interval
// tech stack

Built on AWS.
Fully serverless.

CarScout runs on a lean, cost-efficient serverless stack — no servers to manage, no downtime.

Scraping
Python + Selenium
Analysis
AWS Lambda
Database
DynamoDB
API
API Gateway
Frontend
S3 + CloudFront
Email
Resend
Scheduling
EventBridge
IaC
Terraform

Ready to find your next deal?

Live deals updated every 30 minutes. No sign up required.

Open Dashboard ↗