What you are buying, and what it can and cannot tell you.

What this service is

WrenchReport reads public federal vehicle records — owner complaints, recall campaigns, defect investigations, crash ratings and fuel-economy data published by NHTSA and the EPA — and summarizes them for one specific vehicle build (identified by its 17-character VIN), in plain English, with realistic repair-cost ranges.

A report is delivered as a web page at a permanent link, immediately after payment. Reports for vehicles with too thin a federal record to say anything useful are not sold: you are told for free and nothing is charged.

Using this site, and buying a report, means you accept these terms and our privacy policy. If you do not accept them, do not buy a report.

What a report is not — please read this part

A WrenchReport is information, not an inspection. We have never seen, touched, or test-driven your car. The report describes documented failure patterns for a vehicle build; it cannot tell you that this particular vehicle is damaged, well-kept, or anything in between.

It is not a vehicle history report. Title brands, accidents, salvage status, odometer records and ownership history are not included. The official federal title check is free at vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov.

It is not professional advice. For any purchase you are unsure about, have the vehicle inspected by a qualified mechanic. Repair-cost ranges are estimates drawn from public complaint records to help you negotiate, not quotes, and actual repairs vary by region, shop, and parts availability.

What a report says about failure risk is a pattern across similar vehicles, not a prediction about yours, and not a guarantee. Nothing in a report is a promise that a part will or will not fail.

Data in a report can be incomplete, delayed, revised, or contain errors at its source. Federal complaint databases depend on owners voluntarily reporting problems, so absence of complaints is not proof a vehicle is reliable. Decoding a VIN against public federal data can also misidentify trim or equipment.

You should verify anything that matters to you before relying on it — including by having the vehicle inspected. A decision to buy, sell, price, or repair a vehicle remains yours.

Payment and refunds

One report costs $5.99 and a 5-report pack costs $25, paid once through Stripe-run checkout. There is no subscription and no account. Your card number never reaches us — card details are entered on Stripe, and we cannot see them.

If a report you paid for never unlocks, or it comes back for the wrong vehicle, we refund you in full — no questions. Because a report is delivered instantly as content, we do not refund “I changed my mind”. Nothing else is promised here that is not promised on our refund policy; if the two ever disagree, the Help page wins.

If you think a charge is wrong, email us before you ask your bank to reverse it. We answer fast and we refund the cases above without argument, which is almost always quicker than a chargeback. We may dispute a chargeback we believe is mistaken, and we may pause access for an account with an unresolved one — but we will never add a fee or a penalty for filing one.

Acceptable use and what you may do with a report

Buy reports for vehicles you are actually considering. Do not scrape, automate, or resell the reports or the site, and do not attempt to access more than you paid for.

Buying a report gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to read it and use it for your own vehicle decisions. Reselling, republishing, redistributing or building a competing product out of our reports is not licensed.

The underlying federal data is public and in the public domain — we claim no ownership of it, and neither can anyone else. What we own is our own selection, wording, formatting and analysis of it.

If your use of the site breaks these rules — reselling, scraping, or abusing access — and that causes a third-party claim against us, you agree to cover the reasonable costs we incur because of it.

No affiliation; trademarks

WrenchReport is an independent business, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any government agency, automaker, or history-report provider. All trademarks belong to their owners.

Copyright complaints

If you believe something on this site infringes your copyright, email owner@wrenchdecode.com with the work you own, the exact URL, your contact details, and a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized. We review takedown notices promptly and will remove or disable anything infringing.

Limitation of liability

The reports and the site are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement, to the maximum extent the law allows. Some states do not allow certain warranties to be excluded, so part of this may not apply to you.

To the maximum extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim connected to a report or this site is limited to the amount you actually paid us for it. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost savings — including any decision you make about buying, selling, pricing or repairing a vehicle.

Some states do not allow these limits to be applied to certain claims. Where that is the case, the limits apply as far as that state permits and no further.

If we disagree

Email us first. Tell us the problem and what would fix it, and give us 30 days to put it right. Most complaints about a $5.99 report are a refund and an apology, and we would rather send both than argue.

If 30 days pass and we have not sorted it out, you are free to take the matter to court, including small claims court, which is the right size of forum for a dispute this size. We have deliberately not put an arbitration clause or a class-action waiver in these terms: at this price, arbitration costs both of us more than the dispute is worth.

WrenchReport is owned and operated as a sole proprietorship based in Missouri, United States, and Missouri law governs these terms. If a dispute does reach a courtroom, it can be our county or yours — your choice.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service changes; the current version is always this page and the date below moves when it changes. Continued use after a change means you accept it.

A change never applies backwards. Whatever these terms said on the day you bought a report is what governs that purchase and any dispute that had already come up.

Contact

Questions: owner@wrenchdecode.com. A human reads it.