rebVIN

What it does: rebVIN gives rebuilders one place to manage a damaged vehicle. You can track parts, tasks, costs, receipts, and photos as the work moves along. Profit Guard updates the projected profit when an estimate becomes a real expense. Risk Assessment can flag things in vehicle photos that are worth a closer look, while leaving the decisions to the person doing the rebuild. How we built it: We built rebVIN with Next.js and Supabase. Supabase handles sign-in, vehicle records, and private file storage. Our server routes validate requests and check who owns each project. We use GPT-6 Luna for photo review, then show its suggestions for a person to review before anything is added to their project. Challenges we ran into: Getting all the pieces to work together took more time than we expected. We had to make sure records survived a refresh, files stayed private, and changing a part’s estimated cost to its actual cost didn’t count both amounts. We also had to make the photo review useful without presenting a guess as a confirmed repair. Accomplishments that we’re proud of: The vehicle workspace now keeps the rebuild details together, and our demo seed can be run again without duplicating records. We’re especially proud of Profit Guard: changing a headlight from a $450 estimate to an $825 actual cost immediately changes projected profit from $4,000 to $3,625. What we learned: A useful rebuild tool needs reliable records before it needs flashy predictions. We also learned to treat AI suggestions as prompts to inspect something, not as diagnoses or guaranteed parts matches. What’s next for rebVIN: We want to make rebVIN easier to use on a phone so individual car owners can document a project as they work. We’d also like to explore VIN-based parts suggestions and price estimates once we can verify fitment and find a dependable source for pricing.