About Motorly
Why this exists and who built it
I’m Fox. I built Motorly because I spent 4 months trying to buy a used car in Ireland and got burned three times.
Not dramatically burned — no one stole my money. Just the quieter, more frustrating kind. A car listed for three weeks that the dealer kept “refreshing” so it always appeared as new. A price that looked fair until I dug around and found the same spec selling for €2,000 less two counties over. A mileage that didn’t match the NCT history if you knew where to look. None of the platforms told me any of this. They weren’t designed to.
DoneDeal, Carzone, and CarsIreland make money from dealers paying to list. That creates a simple incentive problem: the more friction there is for buyers, the more dealers need to pay for premium placement to cut through it. Hidden information isn’t a bug in those platforms — it’s close to a business model. Platform fees get baked into asking prices. Listings get refreshed to game the “newest first” sort. Prices stay high because there’s no easy way to see what the same car actually sold for last month.
Motorly is the thing I wanted when I was buying. It aggregates 280,000+ live listings from across Ireland (and the UK, for imports), refreshed every 6 hours from 7 sources. For every car you look at, we show you where its price sits against the real market — not the asking price average, but the distribution of what’s actually out there right now. We flag mileage anomalies. We show you how long a listing has actually been live, regardless of how many times it’s been refreshed. We surface price drops. We tell you when something looks like a deal and when it doesn’t.
We don’t charge buyers anything, ever. We don’t take a cut of sales. The listings tool, the price checker, the history view — all free, no account required.
Fox (John Fox)— developer, based in Ireland. Previously built software in fintech and data. Now doing this full time. Motorly is a one-person project for now, though not forever.
The site is still early. There are features missing, edge cases I haven’t handled, data gaps for certain makes and older models. I’m working through the list. What exists now is already more useful than anything else for a buyer trying to figure out if they’re being played.
Built by one person. If you have feedback or spot something wrong, email hello@motorly.ie — I read everything.