Terms and conditions

Who you are dealing with

Caroat is operated by Internet Plus Services Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. In these terms, "we" and "us" mean Internet Plus Services Ltd. You can contact us at info@caroat.co.uk.

What Caroat is

Caroat is a UK vehicle check website. You look a vehicle up by its registration number. Some information is free, and the full history report is paid. There are no accounts: your email address is how we deliver what you buy and how you get it back later.

What we sell and the prices

• Single premium report: £6.99 for a full history check on one vehicle.
• Two-report bundle: £9.99 for two full history reports, which can be on two different vehicles.
• V5C logbook alerts: £1.99 for 3 months, £3.99 for 6 months, or £5.99 for 12 months, bought on their own or added to a report at checkout.

A premium report covers outstanding finance, write-off and damage categories, stolen markers, previous keepers, plate changes, import, export and scrap markers, the mileage pattern, VIN identity and a value guide, where those records exist for the vehicle. The premium report page lists the full contents.

Prices are in pounds sterling and are the total you pay. Every purchase is a one-off payment. There are no subscriptions and nothing renews. An offer price applies only while it is shown on the site at the time you pay.

Paying

Payments are taken by Stripe. You can pay by card or with a supported wallet such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, depending on your device. We never see or store your full card details. Your order is confirmed once the payment succeeds.

How you receive a report

When you enter a registration at checkout, your report is prepared straight after payment, shown on screen and sent as a secure link to the email address you gave at checkout.

On the two-report bundle you can also pay first with Apple Pay on a phone. In that case you choose both registrations after paying, on your reports page, and we email you a secure link to come back to it.

Paid reports stay available with no time limit. Anyone who has your report link can open the report, so keep the email private. If you lose it, request a new link on our help page with the email address you paid with. That link lasts about 30 minutes.

Bundles and unused reports

Any report on a bundle that you have not yet used on a registration is stored against your email address for 12 months from the purchase date, then it expires. To use it, open the link in your purchase email, or request a new link on our help page, and enter the registration on your reports page. Do not buy a new report at checkout to use it, as checkout always takes a new payment. Unused reports cannot be transferred or exchanged for cash.

V5C logbook alerts

We check the official DVLA record for the vehicle once a day during the period you paid for. If the date the latest V5C logbook was issued changes, we email the address you gave us. An email can therefore arrive up to about a day after the DVLA record changes, and later if the DVLA is slow to update its record.

The alerts stop automatically when the period ends. We are not responsible for delays in DVLA records or in email delivery outside our control.

Free checks and fair use

MOT status and history, tax status, recorded mileage and the vehicle specification are free on Caroat, with no account. We will never charge for the basic official checks.

To keep the free service fair for everyone, each visitor can look up to 20 different vehicles a day. Past that, you may see only information we already hold until the next day. Looking at the same vehicle again does not count twice.

Our free tools, such as the ULEZ checker, the car tax calculator and the number plate directory, give guidance based on published rules and records. Confirm anything important with the official source, such as Transport for London or the DVLA, before you rely on it.

What a report is and is not

A report brings together records held by the DVLA, the DVSA, insurance industry databases and our commercial data partners, as they stand when your report is prepared. Some records may have been fetched up to a few hours earlier. The report helps you decide whether to buy a vehicle. It is not a mechanical inspection, a warranty, a guarantee, or a formal valuation for insurance or finance.

The value guide is an estimate. A mileage warning means the recorded readings look inconsistent, not that the mileage has been proven false. A clear result means no adverse record was on the registers we check at that time. Keeper changes, plate transfers or insurance entries recorded after your report was prepared will not appear on it. Always inspect the vehicle and its V5C logbook in person.

We take reasonable care to present data accurately, but we do not create the underlying registers and cannot be responsible for errors, omissions or delays in them.

Cancelling

Reports and alerts are digital services that start as soon as you pay. By buying, you ask us to start straight away and agree that you lose the 14 day right to cancel under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 once supply has begun. This does not affect your rights if the service is faulty.

Refunds

We refund you in full if we fail to deliver your report, if a report is substantially wrong because of a technical fault on our side, or if you were charged more than once for the same order. To ask for a refund, email info@caroat.co.uk from, or quoting, the email address you paid with. Refunds go back to the original payment method.

We do not refund a report because it showed history you did not want to find, such as a write-off, high mileage or outstanding finance.

Using the site properly

You must not use automated scripts or scrapers to extract data, resell our reports, or try to get around our limits or payments. We may block access where we find misuse.

If you break these terms and it costs us money, you agree to cover that cost.

Our content

The Caroat site, reports and design belong to Internet Plus Services Ltd. You may not copy them without our permission.

Where our data comes from

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Your suggestions

If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them freely without paying you.

Availability

We aim to keep Caroat available at all times, but we cannot promise it will never be interrupted. If a data provider is unavailable, some free information may be missing for a while. A report you have paid for is always completed, even if that takes longer.

Other websites

We are not responsible for other websites we link to.

Our responsibility to you

We do not limit our responsibility for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything the law does not allow us to limit. Otherwise, our total liability for any claim arising from a report or alert is limited to the amount you paid for that service.

Changes

We may update these terms from time to time. The version that applies to your order is the one published when you placed it.

If a part does not apply

If a court finds part of these terms invalid, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce a term straight away, we can still enforce it later.

Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

See also our privacy policy.