Who we are · Birmingham, Alabama
This started at our kitchen table in Birmingham, the way most things in this family do: over supper, with everybody talking at once. One of us had a brand-new licence, a list of cars, and a phone full of listings from people we had never met. The other had spent twenty-five years watching what happens when good people hand money to strangers, and a strong preference for not doing it in a gas-station parking lot off Highway 280.
Down here a first car is a family occasion. Somebody’s grandmother has an opinion. Somebody’s uncle knows a man with a truck. And the whole thing gets decided on a Saturday, in a driveway, with the hood up and the family standing around it. We wanted a website that worked the way that Saturday works: the kid picks, the parent checks, everybody goes to look together, and nobody sends a message to a stranger at eleven at night.
It didn’t exist. So the son decided to build it, and the father agreed to be the grown-up on the paperwork. That is still the arrangement.
The son
Richard Frankowski, III. Still in high school, raised right, which around here means he says yes ma’am to the sellers and reads every listing himself before it goes up. Runs this from his phone in the minutes between classes, answers the questions the AI hands him, and knows more about a GT-R than is strictly healthy. The idea was his. So was the insistence that the kid gets to pick.
The father
Richard S. Frankowski. Alabama-educated, Birmingham lawyer, and a man who has spent his career on one side of one argument: ordinary people against the people who took their money. Hundreds of them, all over the country, and two books on how not to get fleeced. He is the reason there is a real office address at the bottom of every page, the reason we will never hold your money, and the reason we suggest meeting a seller somewhere with witnesses. A church parking lot on a Saturday morning is his recommendation.
The house rules
How the AI works
Every listing carries a short read written by our AI from the listing and its photos — what is missing, what to ask, and whether it would buy this one for a first car. The seller does not write it, cannot edit it, and nothing they pay for changes a word of it. The same read is shown to everyone. It can say no. We think that is the only kind of advice worth having on a site like this, and it is the one thing the big sites cannot offer, because their AI is paid by the dealer.
What we promise
We never hold your money.
We never take a cut of the sale.
We never publish a listing nobody has read.
We never let a sixteen-year-old message a stranger without a parent’s say-so.
We never let the seller edit what the AI says about their car.
If you are the parent: we know. If you are the kid: so does he.
Y’all come see us. The Ask button on every car page reaches a person, usually Trip, usually between classes.