The tool
Carnostic distills thousands of scattered auction results into a single, easy-to-read value range for any classic or enthusiast car you’re eyeing online. No more flipping through pages of “guidebook” averages or staring at "no lowballs, I know what I got" marketplace listings. Instead you open one report and see how comparable cars have actually sold, how your target’s mileage, paintwork, rust and modifications push the price up or down, and what that means for a fair bid today. The data for report is generated automatically but verified by a human expert, and every number can be traced back to a real sale or a visible detail in the photos, so nothing is hidden behind black-box jargon.
What makes us different?
Every time we bid on Bring a Trailer we opened ten tabs, guessed mileage penalties, guessed where the market is trending right now, tried to spot all potential mechanical issues and still worried we’d overpay. So we built a model that sees patterns we couldn’t.
- 40-Point Condition Audit – Every report grades paint, body, interior, drivetrain, chassis & more using a structured scoring matrix - not vague “good / fair / poor” labels. Condition & modifications scored photo-by-photo.
- Data-Backed Valuation – We benchmark each car against 200 000+ recent auction results and private-sale comps rather than guessing from guide-book averages.
- Dual Restoration Budgets – Side-by-side cost forecasts for a Daily-Driver refresh & Concours/Museum build, so you can plan realistically.
- Human Expertise + Machine Data – Vision models spot rust, VIN tags and mileage anomalies; a senior vehicle analyst sanity-checks and signs every report.
- Enthusiast-First Insights – We highlight desirability factors like racing pedigree, rare trims and drivetrain swaps—details generic history services ignore.
- Transparency & Proof – Each report links its photo evidence, comp sources and confidence band (± 15 %), so you can verify the numbers yourself.
- Fast Turnaround – Appraisals arrive while the listing is still live, helping you bid or negotiate in real time.
- Free During Beta – Early users pay nothing and shape the features we build next.
Carnostic is bootstrapped, ad-free and in open beta. Use it, break it, tell us what to fix — and you’ll shape the tool we all wanted years ago.
The team
We’re a small, fully remote team split between Miami and Paris. Half of us spend weekends under lifts tinkering with air-cooled BMWs and eighties Porsches; the other half writes the code that finds order in 200,000-plus auction archives. We started Carnostic because we kept second-guessing our own bids on Bring a Trailer and Cars & Bids. Building a model that could answer the “Is this price crazy?” question for ourselves quickly turned into a service we now share with the rest of the community.
Why trust Carnostic?
Carnostic is not a dealer, broker or reseller. We never hold inventory, never take consignments and never bid on the listings we analyze. Our income comes - now and in the future - only from selling reports, so whether a car hammers for more or less than our estimate doesn’t change what we earn. Every figure you see in this document is based on public sales going back to 2019 and on condition adjustments you can verify in the listing photos. If you think we missed something, tell us; we will re-run the model and update the number. Until then, consider this report an unbiased, data-driven second set of eyes before you click “Place Bid.”
