// about carscout

Built by a Data Engineer.
For serious car hunters.

CarScout was built to solve a real problem: genuinely underpriced cars get bought before most people ever see them. It's now a fully automated deal-detection engine that scans thousands of listings across Canada every 30 minutes.

Zack Bouargan
Founder & Data Engineer · Montreal, QC, Canada
↗ LinkedIn ✉ z.bouargan@aui.ma

CarScout exists to solve a simple, persistent problem: the best-priced used cars in Canada rarely stay listed for long. Cars priced meaningfully below market value are often gone within hours, long before most buyers ever see them.

CarScout was built to close that gap. It runs a fully automated pipeline on AWS that scans Kijiji, AutoTrader, Facebook Marketplace, and Craigslist every 30 minutes, applies statistical analysis to identify listings priced well below fair market value, and alerts buyers the moment a deal appears.

CarScout serves two kinds of buyers: everyday car shoppers looking for a fair deal, and dealers or resellers who need to move quickly on inventory. If you've ever missed a great listing because someone else saw it first, CarScout is built for exactly that problem.

// 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 four major marketplaces, collecting prices, mileage, VINs, title status, and listing descriptions.
Kijiji: national coverage
AutoTrader Canada: private sellers only
Facebook Marketplace: Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary
Craigslist: Montreal
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
4
Sources scraped
22+
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 ↗