About

Cars & Bids is an online auction marketplace for buying and selling modern enthusiast cars. Founded in 2020 by automotive YouTuber Doug DeMuro, the platform focuses on unique and interesting vehicles, catering to car enthusiasts – and that means pretty much anything that’s cool from the 1980s to today.

Cars & Bids offers sellers the ability to sell their modern enthusiast car, truck, or SUV for free while generating revenue through a buyer’s fee (a percentage of the final sale price) charged to the winning bidder. Since founding, they have completed 24.5k auctions, sold $550M worth of cars, and registered 685k+ members.

As a go-to platform for modern collectible cars, Cars & Bids has transformed how users interact with one another and make informed decisions through its community-driven approach.

How they use Cloudflare

The platform faced challenges while using Amazon S3 for storing high-resolution photos of cars, requiring at least 50+ images per listing. This led to high egress costs, prompting the team to implement image resizing and caching strategies to mitigate expenses. Upon discovering Cloudflare R2, the team realized they could save substantial money. By simply pointing their DNS from the S3 bucket to the R2 bucket and utilizing Sippy. they incrementally added images to R2 when they were requested for an easy migration process.

The on-demand migration approach was effective because uploads were directed straight to the R2 bucket. Previously, uploads went from the browser to S3, which meant that for dual uploads, a middle layer or additional code would have been needed in the browser to intercept requests for R2 storage. They later used Super Slurper to migrate over the remaining photos that Sippy hadn't. Super Slurper's ability to detect and not transfer duplicates meant each photo was migrated to R2 just once, saving on S3 egress costs.

One of Cars & Bids top priorities was to ensure that their website performs quickly and responsively. They implemented Cloudflare Images specifically for image resizing and fast image delivery for the large volumes of photos uploaded by users.
An in-house analytics pipeline was developed using the Workers Analytics Engine to manage data internally, eliminating the need for external solutions.

Why Cloudflare?

“Using Cloudflare’s on-demand migration service, we were able to reduce the amount of time needed to move images to R2 and didn’t need to build an internal tool to intercept the request, saving us time and money.“