Version 2026-08-04 · Effective August 4, 2026
The terms, written to be read.
These terms are the agreement between VIN Index and the dealership that signs up. They apply when you create an account, connect an inventory feed, or use any surface we publish on your behalf.
They are written in plain language on purpose. Everything a dealer would want to know before handing over an inventory feed is stated here rather than buried, including the parts that are limits on us.
If you are a car shopper rather than a dealer, these terms are not your agreement. The dealership whose listing you are looking at is the party you are dealing with. How your information is handled is set out in our privacy policy.
Contents
- 1. Your account
- 2. Your inventory feed, and the authorization you give us
- 3. What we publish, and where
- 4. Your price is the all-in price
- 5. Syndication authorization
- 6. Market Hub inclusion
- 7. The AI-Ready badge
- 8. Leads are yours
- 9. The one-time read of your public website
- 10. Plans, billing, and the founder cohort
- 11. What you agree not to do
- 12. What we do not promise
- 13. Suspension and ending the agreement
- 14. Changes to these terms
- 15. General
1. Your account
You need an account to list with us. You are responsible for keeping its credentials secret and for everything done through it. Tell us promptly if you believe it has been compromised.
You confirm that you are authorized to act for the dealership you sign up, that the business details you give us are accurate, and that you will keep them current. Where a dealer licence or registration number is required in your jurisdiction, you confirm it is valid and that you will tell us if it lapses.
One account covers one dealer group. Additional rooftops are added inside your account and are billed per rooftop.
2. Your inventory feed, and the authorization you give us
We publish only what your feed sends us. You authorize us to connect to the inventory source you nominate and to read your inventory from it on a recurring basis. That source is one of: an SFTP feed we pull, an HTTP endpoint you authorize, or an export key you mint from your BKD CRM tenant.
We do not scrape your inventory, and there is no fallback source. If your feed stops, your listings stop. This is a design rule, not a policy we may quietly relax.
You confirm that you own or are licensed to publish everything in the feed, including vehicle photographs, and that publishing it does not breach an agreement you have with a website provider, a photographer, or anyone else.
- We ingest, normalize, and validate each vehicle, decode the VIN against public and licensed data sources, and re-host your photographs so they load fast and stay available.
- Feed sync runs on every plan, including Free. It is a condition of listing, not a feature you can turn off: a page showing a sold car or a stale price is an advertising problem, and no plan may be configured to produce one.
- A vehicle leaves your live inventory because it left your feed. Its page then winds down on a fixed schedule (marked sold, then removed from the sitemap, then retired) so that search engines and AI crawlers are not handed a wall of dead links.
- The accuracy of the feed is yours. We normalize and we validate what we can mechanically, and we will tell you when a feed looks wrong, but we do not verify the truth of what your feed states about a vehicle.
3. What we publish, and where
When your feed is connected we publish your inventory as a set of surfaces: a listing page per vehicle, an endpoint that AI agents can query, category pages for the questions shoppers actually ask, and, on paid plans, outbound feeds to AI shopping platforms.
Your listing pages are served on a vinindex.ai subdomain by default, or on your own domain if your plan includes that and you choose it. The canonical address for your inventory is decided once, at onboarding, and is not migrated afterwards, because moving it throws away the search authority those pages have built.
Written listing copy on paid plans is generated from verified facts in your feed, the VIN decode, and licensed market data. It cannot state a specification, a history, a price, or a market figure that those sources do not support, and it is barred from stating a monthly payment, a term, or a down payment amount in generated prose. Payment figures shown anywhere on the platform are arithmetic, not model output, and their assumptions are displayed alongside them.
4. Your price is the all-in price
At signup you attest that the price in your feed is the all-in price a buyer pays, excluding only tax and government fees. That single number is what we publish as structured data on every surface, without adjustment.
This attestation is the basis of a public claim we make on our compliance page, so it is a hard requirement and not a formality. If your feed price stops being the all-in price, tell us and stop the feed. Advertising a price that omits a mandatory charge is the practice regulators on both sides of the border have moved against most directly.
Advertising law compliance for your listings remains yours. The platform enforces mechanical guardrails, and those guardrails are described in detail on our compliance page, but we are not your lawyer and we do not review your inventory for legal sufficiency.
5. Syndication authorization
By listing with VIN Index, you authorize VIN Index to syndicate your vehicle inventory to AI shopping platforms including Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google, and other AI discovery surfaces on your behalf.
Syndicated records carry your dealership as the seller and link back to your own vehicle page. We do not present your inventory under our brand on those platforms, and we do not syndicate it to a party that would resell it as a lead.
Syndication is included on paid plans. You can ask us to stop syndicating your inventory at any time, and we will stop.
6. Market Hub inclusion
You authorize us to include your listings on the VIN Index Market Hub, the cross-dealer pages on vinindex.ai that answer market-level questions such as what a buyer can get in a metro for a given monthly payment.
The Hub exists under published rules, and those rules are part of this agreement because they are what make inclusion safe for you:
- Rows state facts. There are no deal ratings, no editorial commentary on your pricing, and no scoring of one dealer against another.
- Ordering is published on the page and is the same in the markup and in the answer an agent gets. AI-Ready Verified listings group first, and inside each group the sort is mechanical on that page's own dimension, such as lowest payment.
- No position on the Hub is for sale. Nothing is auctioned, bid on, featured, or promoted by hand, and money never moves a row inside its group. Verified is a stated, checkable property of a listing that any dealer can meet, not a purchased slot.
- Every row clicks through to your own vehicle page. There is no lead form on vinindex.ai and no lead is ever captured away from you there.
- We never charge you per lead or per handoff, on the Hub or anywhere else.
7. The AI-Ready badge
Every plan carries a badge: AI-Ready Score on Free, AI-Ready Verified on paid plans. You agree to install the badge snippet on your own website where your site lets you add it. On the Free plan this is a condition of the plan, and it is what a Free account gives in place of money.
The badge is served live by us and reflects your current status. You may not host a static copy of it, alter it, or keep displaying it after your account ends. If your listings, your feed, or your endpoint stop meeting the stated requirements, the badge changes by itself to a neutral re-verify state. That is deliberate: a badge that keeps asserting something untrue is our problem before it is yours.
We understand that some website providers will not let you add a snippet. Where installation is genuinely not possible, tell us and it is not held against you.
8. Leads are yours
A buyer who contacts you through a page we publish is your customer. We deliver that inquiry to the destination you configure, by email or to your CRM, with the attribution data attached.
We do not broker, resell, share, or syndicate your leads. We do not send one dealer's inquiry to another dealer. We do not charge per lead or per handoff, and we will not introduce such a charge under another name.
You are the party responsible for the buyer information you receive. Contacting a buyer is governed by the anti-spam and telemarketing rules that apply to you, and following them is yours to do. Our respective roles in handling that information are set out in the privacy policy.
9. The one-time read of your public website
When you sign up we read your public website once to prefill your dealership profile: your blurb, hours, address, phone, and logo. This is a convenience so you are not retyping what your own site already says.
We read profile information only. We never read your inventory from your website, at signup or afterwards. Inventory comes from an authorized feed or it does not come at all.
10. Plans, billing, and the founder cohort
Plans are priced per rooftop, at one flat price at any lot size, billed monthly or annually. There are no lot-size bands and no per-vehicle charges. An annual plan is advertised as an effective monthly rate and is charged once a year at twelve times that rate.
You are billed in the currency of the country on your dealer record. Payments are processed by Stripe; we do not store your card details.
Founder pricing is open for a fixed window that starts on a dated announcement. Checking out in the first 45 days locks that rate for 24 months; checking out in days 46 through 90 locks it for 12 months. The window is fixed by the date you check out, resolved on our side and recorded on your account. When the lock ends, your plan moves to standing pricing. That is disclosed on the plan card when you buy and emailed to you 30 days before it happens. There is no lifetime lock.
Cancel whenever you like. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for, and we do not prorate a partial period. Fees already paid are not refundable except where the law requires it. If we change standing prices we will give you at least 30 days notice before it affects you.
11. What you agree not to do
The value of this platform to a dealer depends on agents being able to trust what it says. These limits protect that.
- Do not send us inventory you do not have, cannot sell, or have already sold, and do not send prices you will not honour.
- Do not send us fabricated vehicle facts, including history, condition, or specification claims your own records do not support.
- Do not resell, sublicense, or provide third parties with access to your agent endpoint or your syndication feeds.
- Do not attempt to interfere with, overload, reverse engineer, or gain unauthorized access to the platform or to another dealer's data.
- Do not use the platform to advertise in a way that breaks the advertising rules that apply to you.
12. What we do not promise
We cannot promise that any AI assistant will cite you, name you, rank you, or send you a buyer. No one can. What we do is publish your inventory in the form those systems can read, put it where they look, and show you what actually happened. Whether a given engine cites you on a given day is not ours to control, and any claim otherwise from anyone in this market is worth distrusting.
We do not sell position. No dealer can pay to outrank another dealer on any surface we run. That neutrality is a constraint on our revenue, and it is deliberate, because it is what keeps the endpoint worth routing through.
The service is provided as is. We aim for continuous availability and we do not guarantee it. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties, and our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before it arose. Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profits or lost sales.
13. Suspension and ending the agreement
You can close your account at any time. We can suspend or close an account for non-payment, for a breach of section 11, or where a feed is publishing prices or availability we have told you are wrong and the problem is not fixed.
When an account ends, we stop publishing your inventory and your pages wind down on the same staged schedule a sold vehicle follows, so the retirement is clean rather than a sudden wall of dead links. Your badge stops being served. You can ask us for an export of your dealer record and your lead history, and you can ask us to delete them, as described in the privacy policy.
14. Changes to these terms
These terms carry a version. When we make a substantive change we publish a new version and ask you to accept it; we do not treat continued use as silent agreement to a material change. Corrections that do not change what either of us has agreed to may be made without a new version.
The version you accepted, and when you accepted it, is recorded on your dealer record.
15. General
This agreement is governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable in it, and the courts there have jurisdiction over any dispute, without limiting any right you have to bring a claim where you are located if the law gives you one.
If a provision turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing something once does not waive it. You may not assign this agreement without our consent; we may assign it as part of a sale or reorganization of the business.
These terms, together with the privacy policy and the plan you selected at checkout, are the whole agreement between us about the service.
Questions about these terms
Write to hello@vinindex.ai. For anything about how information is handled, the privacy policy is the more useful document, and privacy requests go to the same address.
This page describes our agreement with you. It is not legal advice, and it does not tell you whether your own advertising meets the rules that apply to your dealership.
Version 2026-08-04 · Effective August 4, 2026