What we do, and what we do not do yet
Most of a used bike marketplace is easy to fake. It is easy to imply you have more bikes than you do, that a check proves more than it proves, and that everything on the roadmap is nearly finished. We would rather write down what is actually true, including the parts that are not flattering, and let you decide.
Reviewed .
Working today
Things you can use right now, for free.
- Free stolen-bike check
- Type a frame number and we check it against a stolen-bike registry and against theft reports riders have filed with us. No account and no payment. There is a fair-use cap per hour so nobody can scrape it, and ordinary use will never reach it.
- Checks run before a listing goes live
- When a seller gives us a frame number, that check happens before the bike appears, not after someone has driven across the country to see it. The result is shown on the listing.
- Free valuations from real market prices
- What comparable bikes actually list and sell for in the UK. Because we never buy bikes, a valuation has no reason to come in low.
- Frame-number guides for every major brand
- Where the number is stamped, what the prefixes mean, and what to do if you cannot find one. Written because most owners have never looked.
- A directory of UK bike shops
- Built from public map data so you can find a shop near you. We have no relationship with any of them and the pages say so.
- Free to list, and you keep the full sale price
- No commission, now or later. When listing stops being free it will be a flat fee stated up front, tiered by asking price.
Being built
Started, unfinished, and each with the reason it is not done yet. Where one of these appears on the site it is greyed out rather than hidden, so you can put your name down and we will tell you when it opens.
- Offers from bike shops on your valuation
- Run a valuation, and instead of only being able to advertise the bike yourself, send it to shops near you and let them make an offer. The blocker is honest and boring: no shop is set up to make offers yet, so there is nobody to make one. You can register on the valuation page and we will tell you when that changes.
- Letting a shop claim its own page
- Every shop page is built from public map data, which means some of it is out of date and none of it is the shop’s own words. There is no way for an owner to correct it, add their used stock, or take the page down. Building that is next. Each shop page carries a button to register interest.
- More bikes, in more places
- The honest gap. Most categories and most towns have very few bikes, and no amount of design fixes that. It is the thing we work on most and the thing that takes longest.
Things we have decided not to do
The commitments, and they are commitments rather than current circumstances.
- We will never buy or resell your bike
- Buying used stock, refurbishing it and reselling it is the model that has bankrupted the best-funded companies in used cars and used bikes alike. It also puts us on the other side of the table from you: a company that buys your bike has a reason to value it low. We are a marketplace and we intend to stay one.
- We will never take a commission on a sale
- You keep what you sell it for. A percentage of the sale price is a tax on the thing we are asking you to do, and it grows exactly as the bike gets more valuable.
- We will not print a number we cannot stand behind
- If there are not enough comparable sales to value a bike, you get a sentence explaining that rather than a confident figure. The same applies to how long something takes to sell: most of the time we do not know, and we say so.
- We will not claim checks we have not done
- There is no bicycle equivalent of a car history check in the UK. No mileage record, no write-off register, no ownership document. We check what can genuinely be checked and we do not dress it up as more than that.
Gaps we have not solved
The limits of what we can tell you, written down so you do not have to discover them the hard way.
- A frame number does not prove ownership
- A clear check means the number does not appear on the registries we can see. It does not mean the seller owns the bike, and it cannot: nothing in the UK records who owns a bicycle. Meet in person, ask for a receipt, and be careful.
- Most bikes have no frame number recorded anywhere
- Registration is voluntary and rare, so a check against a registry is only as good as what owners have put in it. The more people who register, the better this gets for everyone, which is why it is free.
- Thin coverage outside the big categories
- Road, mountain and hybrid bikes are the deepest. Electric, gravel, kids’, cargo and specialist categories are very thin or empty, and a filter that returns three results is not a marketplace yet.