Questions we keep getting.

AutoLens is a CRM for independent and powersports dealers. It gets your inventory onto Facebook Marketplace, from your website or your inventory feed, then an AI Responder texts every buyer back within seconds and your team tracks each deal through a nine-stage pipeline.

Independent used-car lots running 5 to 200 vehicles, powersports dealers with mixed inventory (motorcycles, ATVs, side-by-sides, snowmobiles), and mid-size operators with one to three rooftops who need real BDC tooling but don't want a six-month VinSolutions implementation. If your team still retypes every vehicle into Marketplace by hand, that's the work AutoLens is designed to take off the desk.

See who AutoLens is built for →

No. The Chrome extension reads your dealer site's vehicle pages directly, so there's no DMS connection, no IT ticket and nothing to install on your website. If your DMS or website provider can export an inventory feed, you can also connect it in Settings and it syncs every hour.

Sign up, install the Chrome extension, capture your first vehicle. Most dealers are running on real inventory within thirty minutes. Turning on the AI Responder is one extra step: setting up a local Canadian texting number takes about five minutes.

Capture and posting run in the Chrome or Edge extension, so they need a desktop browser. The rest of the dashboard (inbox, pipeline, tasks) works in any modern browser, including on a phone. A dedicated mobile app is in development and not released yet.

See the mobile app scope →

Pricing is published, no quote calls: an Extension tier for the Marketplace tools, Starter for the full CRM, and Enterprise quoted for dealer groups. Plans are month-to-month, and Starter includes a 7-day free trial. Founding-dealer pricing applies during early access; we grandfather first-cohort dealers at general availability.

See the full pricing breakdown →

Every CRM plan includes a 7-day free trial with full feature access at your tier. A credit card is required to start the trial — you won't be charged until day 7, and you can cancel anytime before then with no charge. The extension-only plan is billed from day one — no trial.

Month-to-month, billed via Stripe, cancel from the customer portal at any time. No onboarding fees, no annual commitments, no early-termination charges. Messaging and ad spend pass through at cost — there's no markup hidden in the per-message fee.

On the Dealer Groups plan, a dealer group can be billed once while each rooftop runs as its own account. There is no single login that switches between rooftops yet. Annual billing with a discount is on the roadmap; we'd rather get the monthly experience right first. Email support@autolenstudios.com if you have an unusual structure.

Open a vehicle's product page on your website, click the AutoLens extension icon, and the title, price, mileage, VIN, and photos pull into a draft listing. Repeat for each vehicle you want to post. It reads the page you're looking at, so there's nothing to connect. Rather have it happen on its own? Connect an inventory feed instead.

Motorcycles, ATVs, side-by-sides, snowmobiles, used cars, trucks. Whatever fields your product page exposes is what the extension captures. The extension doesn't care whether the unit is a pickup or a jet-ski — it reads what's there and you edit anything that needs cleanup before posting.

Every vehicle can be edited in AutoLens before it posts (title, price, description, photos), and you can put one on hold. Whether posting stops for a person is a dealership setting. With auto-publish on, the extension fills in the Facebook form and publishes. In review mode it fills everything in and stops, so someone can check it and press Publish.

Capture the product page again after the price change, or edit the price in the dashboard. A listing already live on Facebook is not edited for you, so update or re-post it there. When you lower a price, leads who asked about that vehicle can get a price-drop text, subject to their consent and manager approval for large drops.

Text messaging, by design. Buyers text the number on your Facebook Marketplace listing and the AI Responder answers in seconds. One channel done right, instead of five done halfway.

See the line-by-line competitor comparison →

When a buyer texts in, AutoLens reads the conversation, the buyer's details, the vehicle they asked about and similar units you have in stock, then replies, usually within seconds. Your tone settings set the voice: three sliders plus a short “about us”.

When a lead asks for a person, starts negotiating, wants a trade-in value, wants to apply for credit, complains, or signals frustration. Opt-out keywords never reach the AI at all. A financing question is not a handoff by itself: the AI invites the buyer in to go over the numbers with your finance team. Once a human replies in the thread the AI pauses, and if nobody follows up within thirty minutes it resumes with a context-aware bridge message.

Every conversation has an AI-enabled toggle and every lead has a hard AI-disabled switch. Flip either and the AI never replies to that thread again. The conversation stays in the inbox; it just becomes human-only. Useful for VIPs, sensitive accounts, or anyone who has specifically asked to talk to a person.

Every outbound message passes through a five-step gate: suppression list, consent check (express for promotional, implied for transactional), quiet hours (9am–9pm in the recipient's time zone, worked out from their area code), an identification footer on promotions and on texts your dealership starts, and an audit log. STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, ARRÊT, and DÉSABONNER are honoured instantly, before the AI ever sees the message. We can't tell you that you are compliant, because that depends on how your team captures consent, but these are the tools to do it properly. General information, not legal advice.

French opt-out and help keywords (ARRÊT, DÉSABONNER, AIDE) are recognized, and a customer who texts one gets the confirmation back in French; INFO returns a bilingual reply. That is live. There is no French template library and no automatic per-contact language routing for AI replies yet, so your outbound French copy is still yours to write. On Law 25: the audit trail and the data-subject request workflow (access / correction / deletion) are built in. Breach notification and naming a privacy officer are obligations your dealership holds — we do not run those workflows for you.

Railway's default Postgres region is US-East today. For Quebec and PIPEDA-sensitive dealers this is disclosed upfront; we're investigating Railway's Canadian region and will publish a migration date when it's locked. Our sub-processors — Anthropic, Stripe, Twilio, Postmark, Meta, Railway, Vercel, Pusher, Cloudflare, Sentry, and the calendar provider you connect — are listed in the privacy policy with what each one receives. If you need a signed DPA, ask and we will put one in front of you before you sign.

Per-lead data export returns every message, interaction, consent record, and profile field in JSON. Per-lead cascading delete removes the lead plus all associated messages, interactions, and tasks. That covers the right of access and the right to erasure under PIPEDA. Consent change records are retained indefinitely for audit, unless the erasure request explicitly covers them.

Only two people at AutoLens have database access, and only when investigating an issue you've reported. Every dealership's data is kept separate, every request is checked against the account making it, and changes to CRM records are written to an audit log.

The mobile app is in build — iOS and Android via Expo. Early-access members get it first and get a direct line to report issues before general release. Launch scope is intentionally narrow: inbox, active pipeline, and push notifications. Inventory editing, ad management, and full reports stay on desktop until they actually feel right on a phone.

See the mobile launch scope →

The mobile app will read and write the same database as your desktop account, with no separate data layer and no nightly sync. It is not released yet. Until it is, the web dashboard works in a phone browser.

Voice AI, dynamic Facebook carousel ads, and a feature-complete mobile app are on our roadmap, not in today's product. We'd rather ship a focused SMS tool that works than a sprawling one that doesn't.

See the honest comparison against the incumbents →

Leads come from the Facebook Marketplace listings you post with the AutoLens extension — your number rides in the description, so buyers text you directly and the AI Responder takes it from there. Website-form leads can also come in through a secure webhook.