Cheapest vehicle history report in Europe: real prices compared

Two services now sell a report for under EUR 10: Automano at EUR 7.90 and Carlytics at EUR 8.90. Both publish honest prices, and both are cheaper than MrVIN. The lower price comes from leaving out the records that cost the most to buy: insurance damage records, photos of the car, local mileage and inspection readings, a theft check and the full factory equipment list.

By their own product pages, checked on 23 September 2026: Automano's Essentiel report carries UK MOT history, the DVLA record, recalls, the decoded specification and a value estimate, with no damage records, photos, theft check or equipment list. Carlytics lists mileage, damage and theft findings where available, but no damage or listing photos, no factory equipment list and no service history.

A MrVIN report includes all of them: damage records with photos, local mileage and inspection readings, a theft check, service history and the full factory equipment list. No report can show a record that was never made, which is why the free preview shows what was found for your car before you pay. To see everything a full report contains, open our sample report.

A vehicle history report is only cheap if it answers the questions that protect your money: odometer readings over time from official inspections and registrations, recorded damage and accidents, theft flags, and the car's import and registration trail. A bargain report that skips the cross border trail is expensive: around a third of used cars in Central Europe arrived from abroad, and the border crossing is precisely where mileage fraud hides.

Free VIN decoders are genuinely useful for confirming what the car claims to be, and dozens of sites offer them. None of them show mileage history, damage records or theft status; those records cost the services real money, which is why every honest "free report" stops where the report part begins.

Checking one car once: the lowest published single price here is Automoli's EUR 20.99, and the lowest risk is a free preview of the findings, which only MrVIN offers, because it means you spend nothing on a car whose records turn out thin. Checking a shortlist of three or more: autoDNA's package at EUR 16.66 per report is cheaper per car, if all three get used inside the validity window. Most private buyers check one or two cars, which is why the single report price and the preview matter most.

The first model is a flat public price. MrVIN, autoDNA, Automoli and HPI all publish the number on the page before you type anything, which makes them easy to compare and leaves nowhere for the price to hide. One difference to know before comparing: MrVIN shows its price excluding VAT and adds your country's VAT at checkout, while the others show a price with VAT already included.

The second model is country pricing wrapped in campaigns. carVertical shows its number only at checkout, varies it by where you are, and dresses it in discount timers that reset. None of that is illegal, but it means the banner price is not information; the only number worth writing down is the final checkout total for your country.

The third model is the volume pack: three reports from autoDNA or HPI, five from CARFAX. Packs are genuinely the cheapest route per report, with one catch that does the vendor's work for it: the honest price of a pack is the pack divided by the reports you will actually use before it expires, not by the number on the box. Two used slots out of five nearly triples the real per report price.

Most wasted report money does not go to overpriced services. It goes to reports that were never needed, in four repeatable ways.

1. Reporting the whole longlist. Buy a report on every car you glance at and the cheapest service on this page still gets expensive. Decode the VIN free to kill the mismatched listings first, and save the paid report for the car you are actually going to see.
2. Paying to learn there is nothing. A car with a thin record trail produces a thin report at every price, from every provider. Check what exists for the VIN before paying MrVIN shows the actual findings free, and several rivals at least show which record types were found.
3. Buying the same car twice. Running a second service on the same VIN in the hope of more data mostly re-buys the same registry records under a different logo. A second report earns its money only when it covers a specific gap the first one names, such as North American history.
4. The one euro trial. A report priced too low to be a price is a subscription, and the business is in the renewals, not the report. Before typing card details into any unusually cheap checker, find the renewal terms; if they take longer to find than the price did, that is the answer.

The pattern behind all four is the same: the cheapest way through is to spend once, late, on the right car. By that measure every service on this page is cheap, and the most expensive report in Europe is the one that was never needed.

We rank ourselves first on this page, and not because we are the lowest price: with VAT counted, Automoli's single report is. Treat the ranking as a claim you can check rather than a fact you must trust. The prices above come from each service's public price and product pages on the date shown at the top; CARFAX's numbers were read from its published European pricing on 2 September 2026.

To check them, take each service to checkout in your own country and stop before paying. Write down the total. Currency, VAT and whatever campaign is running that week all move the number, which is why the checkout total, not the homepage banner, is the only price that counts.

While you are at each checkout, note what the service shows you about your specific car before asking for money. That free step is the real cost control on this whole page: whichever provider you prefer, seeing the findings first is what keeps you from buying a report you did not need.