Every salvage auction lot.
One REST endpoint.
Stop maintaining scrapers. Search live IAA, Copart and GovDeals inventory across seven sources on two continents, receive HMAC-signed webhooks when lots match, and put clean auction data in your product the same day.
No credit card. Production pricing after signup. Built for your own backend.
Coverage
Seven sources, four currencies, two continents
Hi-res photos — exclusive
Every IAA lot photo, not just the listing thumbnail
IAA's listing page shows one image per lot. We expose the full hi-res gallery — up to 100 photos per lot — either as a URL list or as a single-call ZIP download.
- Full resolution up to 1600×1200 (override with width/height).
- Preserves historical batches when a lot is re-photographed.
- Server-side parallel fetch — the archive lands in seconds.
GET /v1/lots/{source}/{lot_key}/images
4 credits per call — IAA US and Canada only.
GET /v1/lots/{source}/{lot_key}/images.zip
8 credits per call — IAA US and Canada only.
# List every full-res photo IAA exposes for the lot
curl https://salvagealert.com/api/v1/lots/iaai_us/50567636/images \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SALVAGEALERT_KEY"
# Or grab them all in one ZIP
curl -O -J https://salvagealert.com/api/v1/lots/iaai_us/50567636/images.zip \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SALVAGEALERT_KEY"Vehicle intelligence
Enrich every lot with vehicle data
Decode any VIN, surface open safety recalls and crash-test ratings, and pull fuel-economy figures — plus live reference exchange rates to price lots in any currency. All under one key.
- Full VIN decode: trim, body, engine, drivetrain and plant.
- Open recalls and crash-test ratings by year, make and model.
- EPA fuel economy and daily reference FX rates.
GET /v1/vehicles/vin/{vin}GET /v1/vehicles/safetyGET /v1/vehicles/fuel-economyGET /v1/fxPublic inventory
Mirror our entire archive onto your own site
GovDeals government-surplus stock and every other crawled source are continuously archived into one public index. Page through it over the API to power your own listings, dashboards or price models — no live scrape, no per-source plumbing.
- GovDeals plus IAA and Copart across the US, Canada, UK and Germany.
- Filter by source, make, model, year and mileage; sort and paginate.
- Each lot carries a canonical listing_url back to SalvageAlert.
GET /v1/inventoryGET /v1/inventory/sourcescurl "https://salvagealert.com/api/v1/inventory?source=govdeals_us" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SALVAGEALERT_KEY"60 seconds to first lot
One HTTP call. Real data back.
Use one secret key and a normalized schema for VIN, year, make, model, title, damage, odometer, bid, buy-now price, seller, yard, ACV and photos. The Lot shape stays consistent across sources.
- Cache hits cost 0 credits; fresh source fetches cost 1 credit.
- Filters run server-side for year, make, model, title, location, buy-now and price where the source supports it.
- Currency stays native: USD, CAD, GBP or EUR depending on the auction source.
curl https://salvagealert.com/api/v1/lots/search \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SALVAGEALERT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"source": "copart_de",
"makes": ["MERCEDES-BENZ"],
"year_min": 2020,
"title_types": ["salvage"],
"page_size": 10
}'What you can build
Anything that needs live salvage data
Bidding tools for buyers
Aggregate matching lots into one bid sheet and alert buyers the moment a watch hits.
Parts and recycler marketplaces
Route damaged inventory by VIN, make, model, damage code, odometer band and title status.
Insurance and subrogation
Track total-loss flow into auction and pull comparable sale data across sources.
Cross-border arbitrage
Compare the same model across regions in native currencies and catch listing moments via webhook.
ML and pricing models
Turn structured lot fields into features, backfill by pagination, then train on webhook events.
Mobile apps
Ship VIN, photos, damage, location and bid data without building auction integrations first.
Why this API
Built for shipping fast
Seven sources, one schema
IAA US/CA, Copart US/CA/UK/DE and GovDeals US return the same normalized Lot object.
Sub-second cached search
Shared cache keeps common searches fast and costs 0 credits on cache hits.
50+ fields per lot
VIN, drivetrain, title, odometer, damage, bid, sale date, yard, seller, photos and more.
HMAC-signed webhooks
Subscribe to lot.matched, lot.updated and lot.sold with retry and delivery logs.
Filters that push down
Make, model, year, location, title, buy-now, price, bid, odometer, damage and text filters.
Stripe-style keys
sa_live_* keys, hash-only storage, rotation and per-key rate limits.
SSRF-hardened delivery
Webhook URLs are checked before delivery and unsafe response bodies are never exposed.
OpenAPI 3.0 spec
Generate clients, import Postman collections or wire it into your own SDK pipeline.
Honest pricing
Free credits to test, then credit packs sized to your real volume.
Build vs buy
You could scrape it yourself. You probably should not.
We handle the source quirks, anti-bot churn, normalization and webhook delivery so your team can build the actual product.
Roll your own scraper
- Fight DataDome, Incapsula, browser fingerprints and proxy churn.
- Repeat source-specific parsing for IAA, Copart and GovDeals.
- Normalize currencies, odometers, titles, locations and sale statuses yourself.
- Build retry queues, logs and signature verification for webhooks.
- Maintain everything each time auction sites change their frontends.
Use this API
- One HTTP call with the same shape across every source.
- We absorb anti-bot changes and source drift.
- Cache hits are free and fresh fetch costs are explicit.
- HMAC webhooks, delivery logs and retries are included.
- OpenAPI, rotatable keys and dashboard controls are ready on day one.
Ready to skip the scrapers?
Create an account, mint a key, call /v1/me, then search live lots. You will know in one request whether it fits your stack.