Why we are building Autonio, a Swiss car marketplace

We wanted to sell a car. So we compared where you can list one in Switzerland and what it costs. Afterwards we had two questions. Why is it so expensive? And why are so few of these platforms made for people who like cars?

The three of us, Silvan Gehrig, Denis Fazlija and Patrik Nue, are car enthusiasts ourselves. That one sale turned into Autonio, our Swiss car marketplace.

It started with selling a car

The cost bothered us most. On top of that, the platforms leave little room for what enthusiasts care about. If you have looked after a car, you want to describe it properly and talk to buyers who are serious.

One sale of our own is no reason to build a new marketplace, though. So we talked to people who sell cars for a living.

What we heard from garages

The garages and dealers we spoke with kept naming the same issues. Listings and subscriptions cost a lot. Some did not get the help they needed from support. Others are tired of phone calls trying to sell them one more add-on package.

These are voices from individual conversations. They matched what we had experienced ourselves.

So Autonio has to be cheaper, and feedback from garages helps decide what we build next. Since then we have put a lot of work into listings, search and the tools sellers use.

Catching fraud before money moves

A car sale quickly involves several thousand francs. Scammers know that too. A common trick is a link to a fake payment page that looks like the marketplace’s own.

Autonio never sends payment or verification links. A link that pretends to be Autonio is therefore always a warning sign. The same goes for shortened links that hide where they lead.

Autonio checks every chat message before it is delivered. A small AI model reads it together with the latest messages in the conversation. If it finds the message suspicious, a larger model reads it again. Depending on the result, the recipient sees a warning or Autonio holds the message back. Autonio locks an account only if both models reach the same verdict, and even then only for 72 hours.

If an account keeps raising flags, the larger model reads every message it sends. Autonio checks listings as well, but the system never takes a listing offline on its own. Our team makes that decision.

A model will sometimes flag an honest seller too. That is why our team can review and correct automated decisions. The check cannot stop every scam. Its job is to recognise known tricks before anyone transfers money.

How we are building Autonio

We build the website with SvelteKit and the API with TypeScript and Effect. Both run on Cloudflare Workers and talk to each other over a private connection. PostgreSQL stores listings, accounts and conversations. Vehicle photos live separately in R2 object storage.

Open chats run on WebSockets and Durable Objects, so new messages appear without anyone reloading the page. PostgreSQL stores every message. If the connection drops, the chat fetches missed messages from there.

Emails and other notifications go through a queue. Someone sending a message does not wait for the email to go out. If the email provider goes down, listings still save and messages still send.

Garages can help shape Autonio now

Autonio is still young, so feedback changes a lot right now. If a step in creating a listing wastes time, we want to know before we build more on top of it.

Do you run a garage or sell cars for a living? Then take a look at Autonio and tell us what is missing. Which details do you miss in a listing? What takes up most of your time today? What would a new platform need to do to make switching worth it for you?

Write to us at info@autonio.ch. We read every message ourselves. We are looking for garages that want to be involved from the start.