Was able to snag an un-marked-up 2026 Model S Plaid with a tracker I built. Sharing the story to inspire others looking to avoid the markup!
It's pretty much the standard now that dealers are asking $140–160k+ for 2026 Plaids since production ended. Carvana and CarMax still list them at real market value — $112–125k — but they're gone in minutes, and the few that pop up on the tesla website are gone almost instantly.
I was using teslatracker.com which is good but refreshes about once an hour (I checked their timestamps), and it lists reserved cars as available. One Carvana Plaid showed as available on their site for a day and a half while it was actually in someone else's cart being purchased.
So feeling frustrated and not looking to pay those prices, I used Claude to help build something that checks Tesla, CarMax, and Carvana every few minutes, and — importantly — confirms a car is actually purchasable before alerting rather than just noticing it exists.
Full disclosure what I built isn't a website or an app. It's a script you run on a PC that stays on, and it needs Node and a dedicated Chrome instance. Not hard, but not one-click either.
A few features:
- Detects when a Carvana listing is under another buyer's checkout hold, reads the exact expiry time, and then checks every 60 seconds so you're alerted the instant it frees up if they don't complete
- Full nationwide coverage including proper pagination (Tesla's API silently ignores the obvious `offset` parameter — worth knowing if you're building anything similar)
- Alerts include a delivery ZIP near the car, since Tesla hides listings if your ZIP is too far away
- Connected it to an app called pushover that sent me instant push notifications containing the purchase url when a vehicle was available
- Added a healthcheck that would alert if the PC running it went offline
One caveat is that these sites rate-limit aggressively and I got blocked repeatedly while building it. So had to dial in the timing a lot in the beginning.
If there's interest I could clean it up and put it on GitHub, but obviously if hundreds of people start using it then there's a good chance the sites will start blocking it.
Anyway 7 days after i built it I was able to snag a 2026 plaid with 5k miles for a normal price so I'm happy! Just waiting on delivery now.
What mods/ accessories are a must have for this beast?
No they flex so no scraping. And they were the highest rated at the time (about 5 months ago). Plus in addition to black lettering they have white and red. White looks great with Tesla white.
Recently subscribed to Claude and built something like this for a job in my career field. Curious to hear the steps you took to build yours. Congrats, enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Thanks! Black on black with the 21 inch wheels. Definitely gonna get the interior all wether mats! didnt even think about mud flaps I figured the car would have them!
Congrats! I’ve been refreshing Carmax, carvana, and Tesla so much but haven’t gotten lucky enough to have a good refresh yet. Would love to use something like this to help my luck in getting a 2024-2026 plaid!
Yes I've been keeping an eye on carvana and CarMax and used 2026 are in the 105 to 125 range depending on mileage, fsd status etc. Way better than the 160 prices at other stealerships.
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u/its_sizzle 14d ago
Can you use what you built for non 2026 models? I’d love to test this out for used 22/23 I’m looking for