autobook.io vs CARVID (2026): Price, Account Custody, and Who Posts What

Short answer: CARVID publishes $249, $499 and $799 a month, plus a $99–$499 AI inbox add-on. autobook.io — ours — starts at $99, posts from the browser you're already signed into, and sets no daily cap; CARVID's site caps posting at 10 a day. Buy ours unless you need the AI inbox.

Disclosure: autobook.io is one of the two products on this page, so read the verdict with that in mind. Every CARVID figure below comes from CARVID's own site, checked August 2026. Where they publish nothing, this page says "not published" instead of guessing.

Who are these two, in one paragraph each?

CARVID sells to the store. Reps connect their Facebook accounts to CARVID's mobile-app platform, inventory flows in, and the vendor's system posts. Background removal is included. An AI inbox that answers buyers is sold separately at $99 to $499 a month. Their site cites 73+ dealerships and claims DMS connections. It reads as store-level infrastructure — a general manager buys it once and rolls it out to the floor, which is a legitimate thing to want.

autobook.io sells to the rep. It's a Chrome extension plus a web platform, built in Chicago in 2024 on a simple bet: the free selling channels were being ignored while stores poured money into paid portals. You paste your dealership's website URL, it imports the inventory, writes descriptions, optionally re-renders the photos, and then posts from the browser you're already logged into. It renews listings, cross-posts to the Facebook groups you pick once, and when you mark a listing sold inside Facebook, it works out whether we drove that sale. It doesn't answer a single buyer message for you. United States only.

What does each one publish?

Which decision actually matters here?

Two of them, and they point the same way: who holds your Facebook session, and what you pay per unit posted.

Start with custody. On CARVID a rep connects their Facebook account to the vendor's platform, and the platform does the work. Nothing to keep open on a desktop, and it runs from a phone. Our extension posts inside Chrome on the rep's own machine, in the session they're already signed into, from their own IP address. Nothing posts from our servers because there's no path for it to.

That's not a safety guarantee and we will not sell it as one. Neither approach is officially sanctioned by Facebook, ours included — the safety deep-dive walks through each architecture without the marketing. What custody buys you is narrower and more practical: if you ever stop paying, change tools, or want to check what was posted under your name, the account was never anywhere but on your desk. What it costs you is real too. Chrome has to be open and the machine awake while a batch runs. A rep whose entire working day happens on a phone will find that annoying, and for that rep CARVID's model is genuinely more convenient.

Then price. The published entry gap is $150 a month, which is $1,800 over a year. Add CARVID's AI inbox at its published floor and the gap becomes $249 a month, or $2,988 a year. On a $400 to $600 average commission — a conservative floor, not a ceiling, and plenty of reps do better than that — $2,988 is five to seven commission checks a year, before anyone has posted a single vehicle.

What does each one cost per unit posted?

Ours runs on credits: 2 to import a vehicle, 1 to post it, 1 for an AI description, 2 per AI image. Pro is $99 a month with 300 credits, so at 3 credits a vehicle, import plus post covers 100 vehicles a month. Add a written description to each and it's 4 credits, or 75 vehicles. Top-ups run $20 for 100 credits, $45 for 250, $80 for 500. Pro holds up to 100 active listings, Elite 235, Ultimate unlimited.

On the CARVID side, the honest answer is that we can only price what they publish: three tiers, an add-on range, and a 10-a-day cap. What separates $249 from $799 isn't something we will invent for you. Ask them, in writing, how many vehicles each tier posts a month and what the inbox add-on costs at your rep count. Those two answers change the comparison more than anything on this page.

Is 10 posts a day really Facebook's limit?

No, and this is the claim worth pausing on before you buy either product.

CARVID's site presents 10 posts a day as Facebook's safe limit, and 10 a day is also the cap built into their product. Facebook publishes no daily Marketplace listing limit — there's no document to cite, from them or from anyone else. Other vendors in this category publish 5, 20, 25, 30 and 40 a day for the same platform. Those numbers cannot all be Facebook's rule. They're product settings.

Ten a day is a perfectly sensible pace for an account that has never listed on Marketplace. Our own guidance for that account is two to five. But a rep who has posted on Marketplace before, even by hand, can generally run 10 to 15 from the first day, and an established account that has used a posting tool can sit at 15 to 30. That's operating experience across our user base, not a study, and we say so. Around 50 a day is excessive and doesn't look natural. The full breakdown of daily limits takes it apart properly.

The practical consequence is arithmetic. A 10-a-day cap is about 300 posts in a 30-day month, for a rep who never misses a day. If your own history supports 15 to 30, the cap is the thing limiting you, not your account. Whether the higher tiers lift it's not something CARVID's site says — that's a question for them.

Which of us shows the number that matters?

Every vendor in this market sells posting. The only number a salesperson cares about is units. The loudest complaint we hear from people switching off other tools is exactly that gap: it posted the inventory and no sales came out.

CARVID's published proof is 73+ dealerships. That's a customer count. It's a real thing to publish and plenty of vendors publish less, but it tells you how many stores bought, not how many vehicles sold.

Scroll to the band below this article. Four numbers come out of our production database and refresh automatically: how many dealers and salespeople are on the platform, how many vehicles have been posted, how many sold, and the ratio between the last two. That ratio sits near 11%, so roughly one posted vehicle in nine sells.

It's not a perfect number and we would rather explain it than dress it up. It counts sales that sellers report back, and plenty never bother, which pushes the true figure up rather than down. It's a platform-wide average across every kind of store, not a forecast for yours. Our own analysis found that who posts the vehicle — and how consistently — predicts speed to sale far better than what the vehicle is. A number that moves every day is still a different category of evidence from a static customer count.

One more set of numbers nobody else in this category publishes: import quality. Across 25,817 vehicles imported in 90 days, a typical import brought in the VIN 99.5% of the time, mileage 98.2%, trim 97.8%, a real price 97.7%, and photos 94.3% — a median of 20 photos per vehicle. That leaves about 6% of vehicles arriving without photos and about 2% without a usable price, usually from hidden-price dealer sites, and those need a hand. A 100-vehicle store takes five to ten minutes to import, sometimes longer.

Where CARVID is the better buy

Three situations where we would tell you to write them the check.

• You want buyer messages handled by software. We have nothing here. No inbox, no CRM, no templates, no AI replies, no notifications. Our users work Facebook Messenger themselves, roughly 40 minutes a day. CARVID sells an AI inbox. If replying is the bottleneck you're actually trying to fix, that's a genuine advantage and we will not talk you out of it. One caution before automating replies anywhere: since March 2026 Meta's own assistant auto-answers "is this still available?" on Marketplace, so a bot replying "yes, it's available" now reads exactly like a bot.
• Your floor works from phones. Reps with no desktop, or who will not install anything, are a bad fit for an extension and a good fit for a mobile platform. That's architecture, not opinion.
• Your DMS is your only accurate inventory source. CARVID claims DMS connections. We have none — we read your website and the portals your inventory already sits on. If your website feed is stale or incomplete, that's a real gap on our side. If it's current, you skip an integration contract and an IT ticket.

Where autobook.io is the better buy

For everyone else, which is most readers of this page.

You get more capability per dollar at $99 than at $249, and the capability isn't padding. Imports run from most dealership website platforms — Dealer.com, DealerOn, Dealer Inspire, DealerCenter, Dealer eProcess, CarsForSale, DriveCentric, GetMyAuto among them, plus CarGurus, Cars.com and AutoTrader and a generic crawler for anything else. If your site isn't supported, tell us and it's usually added within 24 hours.

The photo work is the part that is hard to copy. It's a paid, opt-in step at 2 credits per image, applied to the units worth it, not a switch that runs on everything. It replaces the background with a studio scene, removes the plate and the plate frame, adds reflections and shadows, and re-renders that vehicle, aftermarket wheels, lifts and body kits included, rather than a stock silhouette of the same model. A classifier sorts interior shots from exterior ones and leaves interiors completely alone, on purpose: buyers are meticulous about the space they will sit in, and untouched detail is what they want to see.

Then the operational pieces: renewing live listings from the extension, group cross-posting you configure once, cars, trucks, RVs, trailers and motorcycles, a 50-vehicle batch you start and walk away from, a default 30-second delay between posts, and a Standard posting speed described in the product as the most human-like pacing. On a Facebook error the batch skips that vehicle and keeps going. The batch cap is 50, and our own guidance calls about 50 a day excessive, so running the batch to the top every day is not the goal. No autobook.io customer has had their Facebook account banned — that is our record so far, not a promise about decisions Facebook has yet to make.

What we do not do, stated plainly so nobody buys the wrong thing: no buyer messaging of any kind, no auto-removal of sold listings, no price syncing on live listings, no DMS, no free trial, US only. Setting a custom description tone once and having it apply everywhere is gated to higher plans; on Pro you edit descriptions one vehicle at a time.

So which one should you buy?

Buy autobook.io unless you specifically need the AI inbox or your reps have no computer. That is the honest shape of it. At $99 you get imports from most dealership website platforms, studio photo work at 2 credits an image, renewals, sale attribution, no vendor-imposed daily cap, and a Facebook session that never leaves your own machine — for less than half CARVID's published entry price, and under a third of it once their inbox add-on is on the bill.

If buyer replies are the job you are hiring software to do, CARVID does that and we do not. Pay them. Just do not let the 10-a-day framing decide your posting volume for you, whichever tool you end up with.

You're responsible for the accuracy of your listings and for following Facebook's Commerce Policies and your local dealer-advertising rules. autobook.io prepares and posts listings from your own account — the listings, and the compliance, are yours. One real person, one real account: multiple accounts violate Facebook's rules and are the fastest way to get restricted.

Common questions

Is CARVID's 10 posts a day actually Facebook's rule?

Facebook publishes no daily Marketplace listing limit. The number appears on CARVID's site, where it is also the cap on their product. Other vendors publish 5, 20, 25, 30 and 40 for the same platform, which is the clearest sign that these are product settings rather than platform rules. Match volume to your account's history instead: how many vehicles you can actually post.

Which costs less once everything is added up?

Ours, at published prices. $99 a month against $249, or $348 once CARVID's inbox add-on starts at its floor. Our credits are consumed by descriptions and photo work too, so a rep running AI images on every vehicle covers fewer units per month — the table above shows the range. Yearly, Pro is $990 and Elite $1,990; Ultimate's annual price is level with monthly, so there is no discount there and we will not pretend otherwise.

Can autobook.io answer buyer messages for me?

No. There is no inbox, no CRM, no reply templates and no AI replies in the product today. You answer buyers in Facebook Messenger yourself, which is about 40 minutes of a working day. The software removes the grind — importing, writing, photo work, posting, renewing — not the job. CARVID sells AI replies as an add-on, and that is a straight advantage for them.

Do I need a DMS connection for either one?

CARVID's site claims DMS connections. autobook.io has none by design: you paste your dealership's website URL and it reads the inventory from there, or from CarGurus, Cars.com and AutoTrader. Your public website is usually the freshest view of what is actually for sale, and it needs no integration contract. If your site feed is the unreliable part of your operation, that flips in CARVID's favor.

What happens to my Facebook account if I stop using either tool?

With an extension, nothing changes — the listings were posted from your own account and session, and uninstalling Chrome extensions is a two-click job. With any platform you connect an account to, ask the vendor directly what happens to that connection and to the listings when you stop paying. Get it in writing before the first invoice, not after.

Still shortlisting? The nine posting tools compared covers every vendor in this category at the price they publish themselves. For the wider picture on what Marketplace is worth to a store, start with the complete dealer guide.