How a Car Leasing Comparison Site Uses AI to Check Code, Not Read Prices

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A developer team built an automated nightly repricing agent for Plinkie, a car leasing comparison platform, designed to expose the hidden conditions behind advertised prices. The system runs on Google Cloud at 02:00 CET, scraping offer pages, storing verified snapshots, and completing a full data refresh across four sources in roughly 24 minutes. Crucially, the three AI model calls made each night are used only for code verification, deduplication, and parsing terms-and-conditions — never for extracting prices directly. The pricing engine itself contains no AI model, and the calculation formula is published on the site with a versioned changelog so users can verify results manually. The entire nightly pipeline, including model usage, costs under $2 by leveraging batch processing and scale-to-zero Cloud Run Jobs.

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