Straight answers.

Yes. Keel is free to use during the beta. You do not need an account to start — you can set your priorities and run the numbers right in your browser. If you want your work to sync across devices, you can add an email later.

Right now, we don't — Keel is free while we build it out, and we earn nothing from any link you follow out of it. We haven't figured out how Keel will make money yet, and when we do, we'll tell you first, here. What we will never do is sell your personal information or take money from a dealer to promote a listing. (One honest carve-out, disclosed from day one: we may share or sell aggregated, de-identified market insights — see "Do you sell my data?" below.) If we ever do earn something from an outbound link, the disclosure will sit on that link where you can see it, not in a footnote. That would break the one thing Keel is for.

No. Keel is buyer-side. We do not take dealer money, and no dealer can pay to have their listings ranked higher or shown more often. We pull from live inventory so you can see what is genuinely for sale near you, but our loyalty is to you, not to the lot. If you decide to contact a dealer about a specific car, that is your choice and you start it.

Those sites are very good at surfacing listings — and most of them earn their money from the dealers who list on them. Keel is not a listings site; it starts where they stop. It takes the cars you care about and does the decision math over them: the true out-the-door price for your ZIP, financing with the terms attached, cost of ownership, and a plain side-by-side comparison weighted to your priorities. They help you find cars. Keel helps you decide between them — including deciding not to buy one at all.

It is where the car you already own becomes a real option instead of a trade-in line item. Add it — a VIN is enough to start — and Keel builds a working twin of it: what has been serviced and what is coming due, how the mileage is trending, its major systems laid out in 3D so you can see what you are dealing with, and what it actually costs you to run. That car then sits in your comparisons alongside everything you are shopping. Quite often the honest answer is "keep it another year", and a tool funded by dealers is never going to say that to you.

Yes, and it is built for how that actually goes. You each get a private view and share a common one. When you pass on a car, that is recorded as your vote — it does not vanish from your partner's list. The shared list has a state for "you both like this", one for "one of you is in, one of you is out", and one for "still waiting on a vote", so a disagreement becomes a conversation instead of a car that quietly disappeared. Every hide is reversible, by either of you.

It depends on the number, and Keel tells you which is which. Some things it knows: the advertised price, the listed mileage, the published EPA range. Others it works out from assumptions — sales tax from a table for your ZIP, dealer fees, insurance, what the car will cost to run — and those appear as estimates with the arithmetic reachable, not as flat facts. Financing is the one to watch: unless you have entered a rate you were actually approved for, the APR is our assumption and every payment built on it is labelled assumed. Treat all of it as a way to compare cars fairly, not as a quote. The dealer's paperwork is the real number.

Paste the listing URL into Keel. It reads the car's details, runs the out-the-door and cost-of-ownership math, and scores it against your priorities — the same as anything it found for you. You can then line it up next to other options and see whether the car you like is also the deal you think it is. Some dealer sites block automated readers; when that happens Keel takes what it can from the link and tells you what it could not get, rather than filling the gaps with guesses.

No. We don't sell your personal information and won't — no names, contact info, VINs, or individual profiles. We also don't share your data for targeted advertising or build ad profiles of you. The one thing we're upfront about from day one: we may share or sell aggregated, de-identified insights — broad patterns in what shoppers as a group prefer and how they behave — with partners like dealers and manufacturers, to help them understand the market. These can't be traced back to you: they're drawn from enough people that no individual is identifiable. We're telling you now, before we do it, so it's never a surprise. The full details are in our Privacy Policy.

As little as we can. If you use Keel without an account, we keep your preferences and saved cars tied to an anonymous ID on your device. If you add an email to sync, we store that email. We use your IP address only to protect the service from abuse. We do not collect payment information, government ID, or track you across other websites. The complete list is in our Privacy Policy, and you can export or delete everything at any time.

We thought hard about that one, because a tool that shows a salesperson your maximum would be worse than no tool at all. Turn on lot mode and Keel hides your budget, your hard cap, your down payment and your trade in one tap. It leaves the fit score, the specs, the service history and the asking price on screen, because those are the things you brought with you to use. It does not switch itself back on.

No, and we would rather say so. Keel is in open beta — you can use it today at the app, free, no account required. We are still adding features and smoothing rough edges, and some of the data we depend on is patchier than we would like. There is no mailing list to join — if you want to tell us what is missing, or hear when something lands, email hello@drivekeel.com.