The car image API for marketplaces, wrap shops and dealer tools.
Studio-quality, transparent-background renders of any vehicle in the catalog. Pick the angle, paint and size. One API call, one credit.
No card required. No watermark.
- 42,294
- models in the catalog
- 8
- camera angles
- Any color
- hex or 15 named presets
- 1 credit
- per image
Use cases
What customers build
Most customer renders end up on one of these three screens.
- Used cars near youSUVs and sedans, any year
Studio image
Studio image
Marketplaces and catalogs
A studio image on every listing
The exact car before the seller's photos, framed the same across the catalog.
GET /api/v1/images/car?vehicle=veh_…&view=sideHow catalogs fill every listing - Wrap quote #4471 · 2022 BMW M3
BeforeWrap, tint and PPF shops
Their car in any wrap color
Their exact model year in any film color, by hex. Only the paint changes.
GET /api/v1/images/car?vehicle=veh_…&color=0e7c7bHow shops preview a wrap - Inventory · Stock #P2418In transit
Dealer, import and VIN tools
A photo on every stock record
Decode the VIN for free, keep the vehicle id, and show the car until the lot photos arrive.
GET /api/v1/vin/{vin} → vehicle.image_pathHow dealer tools do it
Integrate in a minute
Pick your client
The same request to the car images API from a shell, a server, a notebook or the CLI. Keys live in headers or your environment — never in URLs.
Guides for React & Next.js, Shopify and WordPress.
curl --fail-with-body \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $CAR_IMAGE_API_KEY" \
"https://carimage.dev/api/v1/images/car?make=porsche&model=911&year=2024&view=front-3-4&color=red" \
--output porsche-911.pngFor agents
Let an agent fetch the car
The same catalog, credits and errors over MCP.
https://carimage.dev/api/mcpPricing
Plans sized by images and vehicles
Pick the plan that covers the images you serve each month and the different vehicles they show; paid plans carry the commercial license. Extra images are $1 per 100 on any plan.
$29/mo
Pro: 25,000 images a month
Up to 2,500 different vehicles a month, with the commercial license, which the renders keep after the plan ends. Business is $99/mo for 150,000 images of up to 15,000 vehicles.
100
free images on signup
Full quality, no watermark, no card. Enough to wire up an integration end to end.
$1
per 100 extra images
On any plan, cold render or CDN hit, and they never expire. For steady volume a plan costs less.
FAQ
Good to know before you build
Price, coverage, image quality and licensing. Find more answers in the docs.
You can start free: a new account gets 100 images once at signup, with no card and no watermark, to evaluate the API or for personal projects. After that each image is one credit, and credits cost $1 per 100 on every plan ($0.01 an image), in packs that never expire. Pro is $29 a month for 25,000 images a month and adds the commercial license; Business is $99 a month for 150,000. VIN decoding and catalog lookups are free. See pricing.
Saved images skip generation, and cacheable signed URLs can be delivered from the global CDN. A new vehicle, color and angle takes about 20 seconds to render.
Anything in the open-source @meterapp/vehicle-db catalog: 1,608 makes and 42,294 models across 1990–2027. Despite its name, Car Image API is a vehicle image API: motorcycles, trucks and buses are covered as well as cars. Every make, model and year has a stable id (veh_…) you can store and send as vehicle= instead of three names. Requests outside the catalog return 404 instead of inventing a vehicle. Missing one? Add it to vehicle-db and it becomes available to every customer.
No. They are studio renders bounded to a real catalog entry — consistent framing, transparent background, no license plates. They are ideal for listings, comparison tables and agents that need a picture of “a 2022 BMW M3 in blue”, but they are not OEM photography and can contain visual inaccuracies. Rate any image through the feedback endpoint or the MCP tool.
Commercially, yes, on a paid plan: Pro, Business and Enterprise carry a commercial license to use renders and 3D models in any product you build, with no attribution, and to keep copies on your own servers or CDN to serve that product. What a paid plan delivers keeps that license after the plan ends; an active plan is what lets you add new vehicles, colors and views and have us serve the URLs. Free is for evaluating the API and personal projects. What you get is a license, not ownership: the renders stay ours, so you cannot claim rights in them or offer them as a standalone image library, asset pack or dataset. A bulk export or a copy of part of the catalog needs an Enterprise agreement: email us. The full text is in the terms.
Yes. Ask POST /api/v1/image-urls for signed URLs (default TTL one hour, up to seven days, optional use cap). They contain no key, are billed once at creation and can be cached publicly within their TTL. See Signed URLs.