Don't buy someone else's problem. Any UK plate gives you an AI vehicle report in 30 seconds: Health Score 0-100, reliability ranking, defect and mileage analysis, stolen/finance/write-off checks, market valuation. Critical Issues Forecast predicts what fails next. Upload photos for AI damage analysis. Higgy, our AI assistant, explains anything in plain English. Built on 261M MOT records, 18.9M UK vehicles. From 20p, about a third the cost of HPI. iOS and Android. Free to try.
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Hi Product Hunt 👋
Mike here, founder of PlateInsight.
What inspired this: I spent 20 years in analytics across retail, e-commerce and financial services. About 18 months ago I started wondering why nobody was applying the same kind of risk modelling that finance firms use to one of the highest-stakes purchases most UK families ever make. Buying a used car.
The problem: The data to make better used-car decisions has always existed. The UK government publishes every MOT test result freely under the Open Government Licence. 261 million records, 18.9 million unique vehicles. The dataset is unwieldy and nobody outside the trade actually reads it properly. Meanwhile, ordinary used-car buyers rely on owner surveys, dealer claims and gut feel.
What I built: PlateInsight. Type any UK number plate, get an AI vehicle report in under a minute:
AI-powered Health Score (0 to 100) benchmarked against thousands of similar cars
Critical Issues Forecast: predicts which components are statistically likely to fail next
Stolen, finance and write-off check (the big 3 every used buyer wants)
Market valuation with high/low range
AI photo damage analysis
Higgy, our AI assistant in a Union Jack cap, who explains anything in plain English
How the process evolved: Started as a one-person Python script processing the DVSA data dumps. Became a Cloudflare D1 + R2 architecture serving 18.9M vehicle configs, then a React Native + Expo app on iOS, then Android. The hardest part was getting the Health Score to feel trustworthy rather than arbitrary. Six weighted categories, benchmark-relative, transparent methodology published at plateinsight.co.uk/guides/how-our-reliability-scores-work.
We launched on iOS in April. Android dropped this week. Hence today.
Pricing: 5 free credits on signup, then packs from £2.99 (about 20p a search at the best-value pack). Roughly a third the cost of HPI Check.
For non-UK users: Vehicle Explorer is free and works without a plate. Browse UK reliability data by make, model and year. Every model gets a Reliability Score out of 1,000 based on real MOT outcomes, not owner surveys. Anyone can use it. The plate lookup features are UK-only because the data is UK-only by design.
What I'd love feedback on:
The Health Score logic, does it explain itself clearly enough?
Higgy, more useful than gimmicky, or vice versa? Honest answers please
Anything obviously missing for non-UK users
Thanks for taking a look 🚗