Five days ago we sent 8 used-car dealers a private link. The offer was the same one that's now sitting on the homepage: $99 once, CarCast Pro forever. Twenty-five seats. No subscription. Done.
That cohort produced zero clicks. Not zero sales — zero clicks. Five days, eight emails, nothing.
Today we opened it to anyone reading this.
What changed
Nothing about the offer changed. The $99 price is the same. The 25-seat cap is the same. The Pro feature set is the same. What changed is who gets to see it.
The private cohort was a hypothesis: targeted outreach to the highest-fit buyers — small independent dealers — would convert better than a public price drop. The hypothesis was wrong. Either we misjudged the channel (email got buried in inbox noise), or we misjudged who the natural buyer is for this product. Either way, five days at $0 from a controlled test tells us to stop testing and just let the market self-select.
If you trade cars, watch used-car pricing, or run a small lot, the door is open. That's it.
The offer, plainly
$99 one-time. CarCast Pro for life. Capped at 25 buyers. Once 25 sell, we're back to $149/month for new Pro signups.
What "Pro for life" includes:
- 30 and 60-day AI price forecasts on every used-vehicle segment we track (798 as of this morning)
- Best-time-to-buy/sell alerts on the segments you watch
- Pro-only market reports delivered weekly
- Every Pro feature we ship from now on — included, no upcharge, no "loyalty tier" reshuffle later
The Pro plan is normally $149/month. If you use CarCast for more than 8 weeks, lifetime pays back. If you trade more than a few cars a year and one of them ends up better-priced because of a forecast you'd otherwise miss, lifetime pays back in a single transaction.
We don't think this offer is generous. We think it's fair priced for the stage we're at — five weeks into being live, $0 in ARR, building in public, looking for 25 buyers who will tell us what to fix next.
Why we're capping it at 25
Two reasons.
One: twenty-five is enough to validate that this product clears the bar for actual professional users. If twenty-five people pay us $99 each because the forecasting is good enough to bet on, that's a signal we can build on. If twenty-five never sell, that's a signal too — different one, but still informative.
Two: unlimited lifetime offers stop being interesting after they stop being scarce. We'd rather close it cleanly than drag it out and dilute it.
After the twenty-five sell — or after the cap window closes if they don't — pricing reverts to $149/month for Pro. No "extending the deal because the first round didn't move." No grandfathered second cohort at $129. The thing you're buying is the version of this product the first twenty-five buyers help shape.
The refund and the boring fine print
- 30-day refund. If CarCast isn't a fit for what you do, email us inside 30 days. Full refund, no friction, no "are you sure" loop.
- Lifetime means lifetime of the product, not lifetime of you. If CarCast stops existing, the access stops. We don't think that's likely — the unit economics are simple and the data pipeline is small — but we're not going to pretend the word means more than it does.
- No team seats at this tier. Lifetime is a single-user license. If you want team or agency access, that's the Agency plan and it stays priced as a subscription.
How to buy it
carcast.ai/lifetime. Sign in, pay $99, you're done. Polar handles the checkout, we handle everything else.
If you want to talk to the founder before buying — book a 15-minute call. I'll walk you through how the forecasting model works, what data it sees, where it's strong and where it's still developing.
If you want to watch the offer counter, the /lifetime page shows live remaining seats. We're not going to play the "almost gone" game — when it sells out, the page will say sold out, and the offer will be done.
That's the whole pitch.
— Rick, founder