CarEdge AI Buying Agent, Tropic and Pactum: how AI negotiation agents email car dealers and suppliers for out-the-door prices against a dealer finance office making $2,891 per car

ISSUE 08 · 8 MIN

CarEdge's AI Buying Agent emails dealers on a buyer's behalf, asks each for an out-the-door price, and keeps replying until one meets the buyer's number, for a flat $49.99 per car search. Zach Shefska is its chief executive, Ray Shefska its spokesperson, and the site's counter read 151,408 negotiations and $58.6 million saved when we checked. The terrain is the dealer's finance office, which AutoNation says makes $2,891 per car, more than the car itself, open because no buyer had the hours to argue with every dealer at once.

Buying a car used to include a job nobody wanted: writing to every dealership within driving distance, asking each for the full price with taxes and fees included, then comparing the quotes for days until one store stopped adding things. CarEdge's AI Buying Agent does that job. The buyer names the model and trim, pays $49.99 once (a beta price, down from $149 on the pricing page), and the agent writes to dealers from CarEdge's own email and phone identity, so the buyer's number never reaches a salesperson. It asks for an out-the-door price, pushes back on add-ons and fees, and keeps several dealer conversations going in parallel until the buyer has a number they like. The site's report page says the agent sends 9.3 messages per negotiation, that 74% of emailed dealers reply, and that the typical dealer takes 22 hours to answer, which is why the same job took a human buyer days.

Zach Shefska is the chief executive, and Ray Shefska is the face of the company's videos; the press page lists a social following of 1.3 million, and that audience is the distribution. What the buyer sees is a thread of dealer replies with a running best offer. On the $49.99 tier, approving each offer is optional; on the $999 Concierge tier, a person does the work, and the buyer approves every step. The refund rule is simple: cancel anytime before the search starts; nothing back once the agent has begun writing to dealers.

The toll on a car purchase isn't collected at the sticker price. It is collected in the finance office, after the buyer has agreed on the car, when the loan rate and the add-ons are presented by a person who does this all day. AutoNation reported finance and insurance gross profit of $2,891 per vehicle retailed in the fourth quarter of 2025, against $2,398 of gross profit on the new vehicle itself; finance and insurance was 30.4% of the company's gross profit that quarter. Lithia booked $1,869 per unit in the same office and Group 1 $2,079. Part of it is the loan markup the CFPB describes, a costlier rate on the contract than the rate the lender gave the dealer, and the rest is add-on products.

The toll existed because the buyer negotiated alone, and once. Ayres and Siegelman sent more than three hundred paired testers into dealerships with identical scripts and found white men were quoted a final markup of $564 over dealer cost while Black men were quoted $1,665, a $1,100 gap, because the dealer could see who walked in. An NBER study of early online buyers found they paid about 2% less, roughly $450, because the request arrived by email. The FTC, in its 2024 rule on up-front pricing, estimated that buyers would save 2.05 hours per transaction across 34,986,253 transactions a year, and that the rule would move $3.4 billion a year from dealers to consumers, about $97 per car.

What changed is that a model now writes, sends, reads, and answers emails in parallel for a few cents. A buyer who once negotiated with one dealer now negotiates with all of them at the same time, and CarEdge's report says persistence is most of the gain: agents that went four or more rounds saved $3,113 on average against $1,308 for two.

The incumbent answered through its trade group. NADA sued to stop the FTC rule and won: the Fifth Circuit vacated it on January 27, 2025, on procedural grounds, and the FTC formally withdrew the rule on February 12, 2026. Because the regulator could not impose the disclosure, an agent now extracts one dealer at a time. Cox Automotive closed its purchase of Fullpath, a dealer customer data platform, on June 1, 2026, and its August 11, 2026 tracker found 63% of shoppers plan to use AI on their next purchase while 29% of dealers have started adjusting. The price advantage sits between the sticker and the out-the-door number, in the fees and add-ons that pay for the finance office's $2,891 per car, and an agent that asks every dealer for that number at once takes it before the buyer sits in the office.

A mention here is listed, never sold.

LISTED · CAR PRICE NEGOTIATION AGENT

CarEdge AI Buying Agent

Software that emails and texts dealers on the buyer's behalf, asks for out-the-door pricing, pushes fees and add-ons out, and keeps going across several stores in parallel, for a flat $49.99 per car search (a beta price, down from $149). The site's counters read 151,408 negotiations, $58.6 million saved, $2,668 average per winning negotiation, 1,409,772 agent messages sent, and 69% of dealers responding in some form when we checked. Fortune reported 2,000+ paying customers within two months of the July 2025 launch. Zach Shefska is chief executive; the company was founded in 2019.

Reach them · @shefska · @mycaredge · caredge.com

LISTED · SOFTWARE RENEWAL NEGOTIATION

Tropic

Tropic negotiates software renewals for finance and procurement teams, using price data from the contracts already on its platform. Its first quarter 2026 release reported $20 billion of spend under management (the software budgets it oversees for customers), more than $15 million of customer savings in the quarter, 44,808 hours returned to customers' teams, and a single Palo Alto Networks renewal cut by $2.98 million; the homepage claims $425 million plus saved to date at an average of 21%. David Campbell and Justin Etkin founded it. The toll here is the renewal increase that goes unfought because nobody on the finance team has the hours.

Reach them · @david_tropic · tropicapp.io

LISTED · PROCUREMENT NEGOTIATION AGENT

Pactum

Pactum's agents negotiate supplier terms for large companies, on the long list of vendors a human buyer never gets to. The company says more than 50 Global 2000 organizations use it and that customers typically see 3 to 10% savings on negotiated spend, and on August 19, 2026, it reported that its agent for reviewing purchase requests had passed 1 million of them, cutting a 30 to 60 minute manual check to about 75 seconds. Kaspar Korjus is chief executive and co-founder, with Kristjan Korjus as chief scientist.

Reach them · @kasparkorjus · pactum.com

Take one CarEdge search. The buyer pays $49.99 up front, and on the site's averages, the agent sends 9.3 messages, reads 9.4 dealer replies, and, when it wins, saves $2,668. The first term is take rate, the share of the value moving through a product that the product keeps as revenue: $49.99 against $2,668 is a take rate of 1.9%, and against the $43,582 average amount financed on a new car in the fourth quarter of 2025 (NADA) it is about a tenth of one percent. The $999 Concierge tier, where a person does the work, takes 37% of the same average win.

Cost to serve is what it costs to deliver one unit of the product after the sale. Assume $0.05 per agent message for the model and email sending, including reading the reply. This is our assumption, not CarEdge's: 9.3 messages cost $0.47. Assume card processing of $1.75 on a $49.99 sale and $5 of human support and refund handling per search, both assumptions. Cost to serve is $7.22, leaving $42.77 of gross profit on each search and a gross margin (revenue minus the direct cost of delivering it, divided by revenue) of 86%. CarEdge charged $40 a month at launch, Fortune reported. Its flat per-search fee means it pays for every negotiation, whether it wins or not.

The dealer's version runs the other way. AutoNation makes $2,891 in the finance office on a new car whose own gross profit is $2,398, so the office is 55% of the $5,289 the store earns on that sale, and the agent's average win of $2,668 is half of it. Every dollar the agent negotiates out of fees and add-ons comes from that line, not the car.

At scale, the win rate has to hold. The site's total saved divided by its average per win implies about 21,964 winning negotiations, 14.5% of the 151,408 started, if the two counters define a negotiation the same way. At a flat $49.99, CarEdge is paid on all 151,408, so a falling win rate reaches the buyer before it reaches CarEdge, and the risk is that buyers who paid and did not win stop telling anyone. The 1.3 million social following that replaces paid acquisition is the one asset a builder without the Shefskas' audience has to buy.

The narrowest wedge is one metro and one popular used model, say a used RAV4 within 50 miles, because the dealers are the same ten stores every week and the agent's messages improve with every reply it has seen. Build it as an email agent, not a chatbot: the buyer fills in model, trim, budget, and zip, the agent sends an out-the-door request to every matching listing from a mailbox you control, then reads the replies every fifteen minutes and answers each dealer with the best competing number. The one integration that matters is the mailbox: a Gmail API send-as alias or an inbound address at a transactional email provider, so every dealer reply lands in a thread the agent can read without the buyer forwarding anything. Charge $29 per search, flat, up front, refundable until the first email goes out, which is CarEdge's rule at a lower price; at a $2,668 average win that is a 1.1% take rate. The rail is a card checkout, because there is no reason to make a buyer learn anything new for $29. The first customer is the person in your group chat who posted a dealer's quote and asked if it was good. Post the agent's first three replies to the thread and let them watch.

DaizeDong/buy-me-a-car. A Claude Code plugin with 16 skills that scrapes 9 car listing sites in parallel, mass-emails dealers for out-the-door quotes, drafts counter-offers with three anchor prices on a 15-minute Gmail sweep, computes the out-the-door number with fee data for all 50 states, and keeps a buyer dossier. 5 stars, MIT license, last commit September 4, 2026. Worth an hour because it is the Steal This above, already written, by one person. Read the email skill and the fee tables; the rest is scaffolding you would have built anyway. If you want to score your agent's bargaining before pointing it at a real dealer, vinid/NegotiationArena (84 stars) is the code behind the paper that found a model can raise its payoff by 20% by claiming to be desperate.

The agent works by email, and email is where the fraud comes in. Every dealer in range learns that a specific person wants a specific car this week, and the replies come back from whoever holds the dealer's mailbox, or claims to. The takeover is a reply that reads like a dealer: this is your price, hold it with a deposit, or send your license to close today. An agent that treats dealer replies as instructions passes that along as the best offer, and the buyer follows it. The second version targets the model: text inside a dealer's reply that tells the model to accept the next number it sees. The one control is a hard rule that an offer is a price and nothing else. The agent never relays a payment link, a deposit request, or a document request, and it treats any reply from a domain that does not match the dealership's website as unverified. Money and paperwork move only after a person checks who is asking.

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The dealer's finance office makes $2,891 per car. This agent saves buyers $2,668.

CarEdge AI Buying Agent

Tropic

Pactum

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