Rebuilding Hungary's verified car marketplace, from search to back office
With BPDATA, Jóautók:
- 2024Replaced a legacy system spread across five databases with one TypeScript platform, and switched over in June 2024 with its listing IDs and URLs preserved
- 50Runs its entire operation from more than 50 admin screens, from moderation and condition reports to billing, analytics, and a complete audit trail
- 360Makes trust visible on every listing, with odometer history checked against official records, 360-point condition reports, and a trust score that orders search results
- 85%Has received 85 percent of its listings automatically, through six dealer XML feed formats and a partner API, kept in order by more than 20 scheduled jobs
- Uses AI on uploads and descriptions: Google Gemini sorts photos, pre-fills up to nine vehicle fields, and flags risky descriptions with a verbatim quote
- 2026Develops in an AI-native model: since June 2026, 94 percent of code changes have been built with Claude Code, while automated tests nearly doubled
The challenge
Jóautók is Hungary's marketplace for verified used and new cars, and it competes on trust: dealers are vetted, listings are moderated, and the odometer readings of Hungarian-registered cars are checked against official records. By 2023 the software behind those promises had grown in layers since 2017. Listings, dealers, the user portal, and the vehicle catalogue lived in separate MySQL databases, the curated cars in a WordPress database, and media on a host of its own, so every new capability had to be threaded through all of them. Vehicle data had to be aligned with the Eurotax catalogue, dealer stock arrived in several feed formats, and more than 80,000 listings had to move across without the business stopping or a single indexed URL breaking.
The solution
BPDATA rebuilt Jóautók as one TypeScript platform: a Nuxt 3 frontend on Vercel that combines server rendering and incremental static regeneration with edge caching, and an Express and PostgreSQL API with a separate Eurotax reference database and media on Google Cloud Storage behind a CDN. The switchover ran as a project of its own. A public beta ran beside the legacy system with a daily re-sync, legacy listing IDs became the new IDs, and old URLs were redirected, so the platform went live on 10 June 2024 without breaking the links buyers and search engines relied on.
Buyers search with 24 filters across 123 makes, nearly 2,000 models, and more than 3,100 towns, and every listing page brings together odometer history, condition reports, warranty options, and a leasing calculator. Sellers list through a nine-step wizard built on more than 118,000 Eurotax vehicle types, and dealers see views, phone reveals, and market demand for every car they list.
Behind the marketplace sits a back office of more than 50 screens. Moderators work from a board with 21 filters, bulk actions, and a field-level view of what changed since the last review, while alerts flag suspicious descriptions, expired inspections, and dealers posing as private sellers. Surveyors record 360-point condition reports and issue them as PDFs in the dealer's own branding, and every change lands in an audit log from which even a deleted listing can be restored. More than 20 scheduled jobs import dealer feeds, refresh the Eurotax data every month, precompute financing offers overnight, and sync analytics.
AI is part of the product rather than bolted on. At upload, Google Gemini sorts photos into 16 angles and 11 document types and extracts nine vehicle fields for the seller to confirm. In descriptions it flags hidden prices and condition issues, and every finding must quote the text word for word, so the model cannot invent problems. Since mid-2026 the development itself has run on Claude Code, with project-specific skills, specialised coding agents, read-only production access, and changes only through pull requests.
The outcome
More than 310,000 listings have passed through the platform, over 228,000 of them created on the new system, and 85 percent of all listings arrived automatically.
On 29 September 2026 the marketplace carried 18,268 active listings with close to 210,000 photos from 261 active dealers, surveyors had recorded more than 5,000 condition reports, and the audit log held close to 5 million events. The rebuild was the starting point, not the finish line: more than 1,700 of the roughly 3,100 code changes shipped after go-live, and moderation, verification, billing, and reporting now happen in one system.
Looking ahead
The platform keeps growing on the same foundations.
Weekly analytics reports for dealers are being rolled out, the data from more than 5,000 condition reports is being turned into market insight, and the AI checks in moderation are being extended step by step. With an AI-native delivery model in place, a small team can develop the marketplace, the dealer tools, and the back office in parallel.
Delivered by BPDATA Kft.