CarfaxGenie: Full CARFAX Vehicle History Reports at $7.50 — No Dealer Account Needed

CARFAX Vehicle History Reports are an essential tool for used car buyers, but direct consumer access is expensive and CARFAX's dealer API is not publicly accessible to individual buyers. Consumers had no affordable, programmatic way to get the same dealer-grade report data without paying premium prices through CARFAX's consumer portal. Building a viable resale platform required solving three things simultaneously: authenticated dealer API access, a cost-effective shared report cache, and a clean consumer billing experience without friction.

We built CarfaxGenie on Laravel 10 with Blade + Tailwind CSS for the frontend and MySQL for the database. The core VIN lookup flow makes an authenticated request to CARFAX's internal JSON dealer endpoint with a full Chrome browser-spoofing header set and a dealer Bearer JWT. The returned vhrHtml is loaded into PHP's DOMDocument, a JavaScript cleanup script is injected to remove three CARFAX branding elements (.advantage-dealer-badge, .report-provided-by, .name-in-lights-snackbar), and the processed report is saved to disk at public/pdf/{vin}.html. The VinList cache table means the second request for any VIN is served directly from disk — no API call, no cost. The credit system tracks balances in users.credit, with a two-table ledger: transaction_histories for financial events and credit_histories for per-action debit/credit records. Stripe Checkout Sessions handle both single-report purchases (including guest checkout with no account required) and bulk credit package purchases. The webhook success handler branches on metadata.type to either top up credits or grant report access. Admin-managed Package records let pricing and bundle sizes be changed without code deployments.

Laravel 10 (PHP) with Blade template engine. Tailwind CSS + Vite frontend build. MySQL database with users, vin_lists, user_vins, transaction_histories, credit_histories, and packages tables. Laravel Breeze for session auth. Laravel Sanctum for API tokens. Stripe Checkout Sessions + webhook handler. CARFAX Dealer API integration. PHP DOMDocument for server-side HTML manipulation. Static HTML file serving for processed reports.