About Check Before You Buy

Short answer: Check Before You Buy is a YouTube channel and website that teaches used-car buyers one simple order of operations: run the free checks first, then a full history report, then a mechanic's inspection — before money changes hands.

Who runs this site

This site is run by the team behind the Check Before You Buy YouTube channel (@CheckBeforeYouBuyChannel), where we run the checks on camera: free VIN checks, title brands, flood and salvage signs, odometer rollback, recalls, and full history report walkthroughs. Every guide on this site pairs with a video on the channel, so you can read the steps here and watch them done there.

What we do

• Teach the free checks first. NICB VINCheck and the NHTSA recall lookup are free and official — every buyer should run them before spending anything.
• Explain what the free checks miss. Accident depth, liens, odometer history, and title washing are where buyers lose money, and none of them are in the free databases.
• Show the full report honestly. What it finds, what it can't find, and when it's worth paying for.

How this site is funded (affiliate disclosure)

Some links on this site are affiliate links. When we link to a full history report, that link is an affiliate link for VINCheckup: if you buy a report through it, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That is how the channel and this site stay free to use. We disclose it here and under every affiliate link, and the disclosure never changes the method we teach: free checks first, one paid report on the finalist, and an independent mechanic's inspection before you buy.

We do not sell your data, and this site has no account system. Links to NICB and NHTSA are not affiliate links — those are free public tools.

Contact

The fastest way to reach us is through the comments on the Check Before You Buy YouTube channel — questions there regularly become future videos and guides.