About us
A category that burned the trust of the people using it.
vincode starts from an uncomfortable observation: the vehicle history report is a very good idea, sold badly almost everywhere.
The thesis
The product is good. The way it is sold is what ruined it.
Someone buying a used car has a real, well-defined problem: they cannot verify what the seller is telling them. A vehicle history report solves part of that problem and, when it works, is worth many times what it costs.
The way it gets sold, though, has eroded the very trust the product rests on. "We check over 100 databases" — and then the report comes back with four fields filled in. A EUR 2.90 trial that turns into a monthly charge, with the Italian competition authority opening proceedings over it. Empty sections presented as "no problems found", which is about as close to a lie as you can get without technically telling one.
The result is predictable. Anyone who used one of these services once and felt taken for a ride does not buy a second, and tells everyone who asks. The category poisoned itself.
The founding choice
Hence this product's founding choice: to say "we could not check" out loud. It is a sentence that dampens the excitement of a single sale, and it is the only thing capable of making a second one credible.
The principles
How that shows up in the product
These are not values on a wall: each one maps to a technical decision you can verify by using the service.
"No data" is an answer, not a gap
It has a colour, an icon and a label that look nothing like "No problems". We never fill an empty section with generic text to make the report look meatier.
We tell you what we can check before you pay
The free preview shows real coverage for that VIN. If it is thin, you see that first and you do not buy. We lose the odd sale and keep the customer.
One payment, and that is the end of it
No subscription, no auto-renewal, no payment method kept on file for future charges. There is nothing to cancel because there is nothing recurring.
The score is a subtraction with the working shown
Every deduction has a name, a value and the section it came from. And when there is not enough material we give no number at all: we return "Unrated".
We do not count databases
We publish the kinds of source we query and the limits of each. A database count is the easiest metric in this industry to inflate, which is exactly why everyone uses it.
We say what we cannot do
There is a whole page about what a report cannot tell you. That is an asset, not a weakness: people who expect the right thing stay customers.
Project status
Where we are today
vincode is a new project. We have no decade-long history to tell, we publish no customer counts, and you will find no award logos or anonymous testimonials on this page: they would be invented, and inventing them here would contradict the one thing we are trying to build.
What we can tell you is where we stand. Italy is the launch market. The product works from the VIN. Data provider agreements are going live progressively, market by market, and every section of the report states openly whether we can fill it today.
As each source comes online the coverage of that section changes, and you see it in the free preview without us having to announce it.
What you will not find on this site
- A counter of satisfied customers.
- Reviews with no name and no date.
- The number of databases we query.
- A promise that the report is complete for every vehicle.
- A trial price that becomes a monthly fee.
The best way to judge us
It is not reading this page. It is entering a VIN and seeing what we are willing to admit we do not know.