Kelley Blue Book vs ProblemsByVin

Kelley Blue Book's Cox Automotive-run API program (IDWS, Advertising Data, Instant Cash Offer, and Batch VIN) provides vehicle valuation, pricing, and configuration data behind an approval-gated API key, per developer.kbb.com's own access instructions. Its legacy Swagger doc-viewer content pages (/content/data/*.html) now 404 into the site's SPA shell — orphaned — but the surrounding portal, the key-request process, and Cox Automotive's successor developer platforms (developer.coxautoinc.com, coxautoinc.mashery.com) all remain live over HTTPS, confirming https true and that the program has moved rather than gone dead; cors could not be re-probed live since no public endpoint or key is available. Access requires Cox Automotive approval with no public self-serve signup — paid.

ProblemsByVin's Data Center publishes derived, CC BY 4.0-licensed datasets built from NHTSA's owner-complaint and recall record — a reliability scorecard, failure-mileage quartiles, and post-warranty failure patterns — as weekly-refreshed CSV and JSON downloads plus a machine-readable /data/catalog.json manifest. A live GET against both the docs page and the catalog endpoint returned access-control-allow-origin: *, reconfirming cors "yes"; no key was required, reconfirming auth "None" over HTTPS. The datasets are free to use, republish, and remix with attribution — free.