What is my car worth by VIN?

Enter the VIN and Values returns five numbers from live market data — retail, private-party, trade-in, wholesale, and auction — and each one carries the source it was drawn from, the moment it was pulled, and the live listings (the comps) behind it. The base number is free with no account. There is no single "what it's worth" figure, because the same car is worth five different amounts depending on who is buying and how; Values shows all five for your exact VIN and trim rather than the one number a desk would choose to quote you.

Why five numbers and not one

A used car has no single price. It has a spread, and the position on that spread depends entirely on the transaction:

• Retail — what a dealer asks when selling the car to a consumer, reconditioned and on the lot with a warranty behind it. The top of the range.
• Private-party — what another person pays you directly, buyer to seller, with no dealer in between.
• Trade-in — what a dealer pays to take the car in against a purchase. The bottom of the consumer-facing bands, because the dealer has to recondition, floor, and resell it.
• Wholesale — the dealer-to-dealer number, the price a store pays to acquire inventory from another store.
• Auction — what the car clears for at a wholesale auction lane, the rawest liquidation figure of the set.

The distance between these is not decoration. It is the negotiation. When the desk quotes trade money from one book and retail from another, the spread between the two is where the margin lives — and it lives there precisely because you only saw one number at a time. Values shows the whole spread on one screen so the spread stops being a secret.

Where the numbers come from

Each band is grounded in a live comp set — the current for-sale listings and recent market data for cars like yours. That is what "shown with its source and timestamp" means in practice: the number is not a year-old book average carried forward, it is drawn from what comparable cars are actually transacting at now, and the moment of the pull travels with it. If you claim a car is priced $450 under book, the book is attached and you can check the claim.

The honest limit is stated too. When a band does not have a verified comp set behind it — a thin configuration, a rare trim, a market with few recent sales — Values does not fabricate confidence. It marks the value "Reported, not yet verified," so you know the difference between a number the market supports and a number that is merely an estimate. A missing comp set is a stated result, not a blank.

The precision ladder

Values is deliberately built as a ladder, and where it sits on that ladder is quotable:

1. Anonymous gets the base number, free, no account — the answer to "what is it worth" for every one of the five bands.
2. An account (through auth.vin) adds the range and its confidence around each band, and unlocks the full comp table — every row behind every number — free at login for humans, forever, along with per-comp detail and cost-to-own depth.
3. Paid adds build-level accuracy, resolving the value to exactly how the car was optioned and overlaying the licensed book values (KBB, Black Book, J.D. Power) — the real-money data that is licensed per pull and therefore priced through, never given away.

The ladder is the honest version of "free": the own-data answer that costs nothing to produce is free, and only the licensed data that costs real money to source is priced. You are never quietly charged for VIN's own market model, and you are never handed licensed book values as if they were free.

The five-year number, before the price

Value answers "what is it worth" today. The cost of owning it is a different question, and it sits one tab over: tco.vin reads the same VIN and returns the five-year ownership cost — depreciation, fuel, insurance, and maintenance — so you can weigh the cost of owning before the cost of buying. Free, no account.

After the number

Values is where the number is read, not where the deal closes. Two doors take it from here:

• To see why a car is priced where it is — accidents, title brands, odometer history, the record that explains the discount or the premium — check its history at vhr.vin.
• To see what is actually for sale at these numbers, or to shop a specific configuration across dealers, auctions, and private sellers, search listings.vin — the live corpus the comps are drawn from in the first place.

Paste the VIN, read five, take one. The value is free; the doors it opens name their own cost the same clear way.