nspiration Several of us know people around us — rizq chasers in our own community — who buy used cars in Quebec and export them to West and North Africa to resell, often as a side hustle to build an honest income. We kept hearing the same story: they'd lose hundreds or thousands of dollars because they didn't see a hidden customs fee coming, misjudged the exchange rate, or found out too late that a law had changed and their car could no longer even be legally imported. We focused on Morocco and Senegal because they're two of the biggest hubs for this trade route out of Quebec — and because getting this right felt like a direct way to help our community earn fairly here while stimulating the economy in two Muslim-majority countries on the other end.
What it does AutoTransat QC takes a used car's purchase price and turns it into an honest, all-in picture: currency conversion spread, bank transfer fees, inland and ocean transport, customs duties and taxes (with the real legal rules for Senegal and Morocco built in), and a suggested resale price with expected profit, benchmarked against real local market listings. It also flags whether the car is even legally importable before the user spends a cent.
How we built it React + Vite + TypeScript frontend with TailwindCSS, designed for a less tech-comfortable audience (large fonts, high contrast, one idea per screen); a stateless calculation engine covering 11+ cost categories, an FX sensitivity simulator, and a container batch-cost optimizer; a FastAPI backend for supporting services; and a Chrome/Edge browser extension that reads car listings directly off Facebook Marketplace and shows an instant cost estimate inline.
Challenges we ran into
Customs rules for Senegal and Morocco are complex and actively changing (Senegal just raised its vehicle age limit from 8 to 10 years in October 2025), so the rules had to be built as editable data, not hardcoded logic. There's no free, reliable, real-time API for used-car freight rates on this specific corridor, so we currently rely on a maintained reference table instead of live quotes. Designing for a 45+, less tech-savvy audience meant constantly stripping out jargon and flows that felt intuitive to us as developers but not to our actual users.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A fully working, tested calculation engine (26/26 tests passing), stateless and deterministic. Legal compliance checks that cite the actual decree/regime instead of a generic "check with customs" disclaimer. A browser extension that turns any Facebook Marketplace listing into an instant cost estimate without leaving the page.
What we learned
How fragmented and undocumented the real customs and freight data landscape actually is for this specific trade corridor. That accessibility for an older, less tech-comfortable audience is its own design discipline, not an afterthought.
What's next for AutoTransat QC
A repair-cost estimator: for damaged cars bought to be fixed and resold, estimating repair costs and the resulting expected profit before purchase. More accurate data by integrating real freight-company APIs we've identified, to centralize live transport rates instead of relying solely on our reference tables.
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