Is There an Otomoto API? What Developers Need to Know
Yes, Otomoto has an official API — but it is an ad-posting interface for car dealers, not a market-data API. Access is limited to holders of an Otomoto Business account (and IT firms integrating on their behalf), it requires an approval process via a registration form, and the documentation is published primarily in Polish. It lets a dealer create, edit, activate, and delete their own listings; it does not expose price statistics, search results, or other sellers' data. Developers who need Polish car market data programmatically — valuations, price history, liquidity — typically use an independent source such as the CarDossier Market API, which serves aggregated statistics from a database of 1.4M+ Polish market listings across 5 endpoints, with 5 free keyless demo calls per IP per day.
Data: CarDossier database, 1.4M+ Polish market listings, updated daily · Last updated: July 2026
Yes, Otomoto has an official API — built for posting ads
Otomoto is Poland's largest automotive classifieds platform, and it does operate an official API. Based on Otomoto's own public API documentation and help pages, here is what it actually is:
- Who it's for: clients with an Otomoto Business account (professional sellers and dealerships), plus IT service companies that build listing-management software for those Business clients.
- What it does: listing lifecycle management — creating adverts (e.g.
POST /api/open/account/adverts), retrieving, editing, activating, and deleting a dealer's own ads, and uploading photo collections. There is also dedicated support for the parts category. - Authentication: OAuth-style token authorization (
POST /api/open/oauth/token/), with responses in JSON. A Postman collection is available for testing. - How you get access: you submit a registration form and wait for approval; each application receives a single API key regardless of how many dealer clients it serves. A Business account (or a contract to serve Business clients) is a prerequisite.
- Documentation: hosted on otomoto.pl and written primarily in Polish. English-language material about the official API is scarce, which is one reason this question gets asked so often outside Poland.
In short: the official Otomoto API is a real, functioning product — a write-oriented integration channel between dealer inventory systems and the Otomoto marketplace.
The distinction that matters: ad-posting API vs. market-data API
Most developers who search for an "Otomoto API" are not dealers trying to syndicate inventory. They want to read the market: what a 2019 BMW 3 Series sells for in Poland, how prices have moved over the past year, how long cars sit before selling. The official API does not do any of that.
Nothing in Otomoto's published API function overview indicates read access to other sellers' listings, marketplace search, price statistics, or historical data of any kind. The API is scoped to your own account's adverts. So even if you qualify for a key — which requires a dealer-side Business relationship — it will not give you market data. This is not unusual: classifieds platforms across Europe (marketplace giants included) generally treat listing data as a core commercial asset and do not offer public read APIs for it.
If your goal is analytics rather than ad publishing, an official Otomoto API key is the wrong tool regardless of whether you can obtain one.
What developers actually want when they search "otomoto api"
Across the projects we see hitting our own endpoints, the demand behind this search term clusters into a few use cases:
- Valuation: "What is this make/model/year worth on the Polish market right now?" — for trade-in tools, insurance underwriting, loan collateral checks, or buy-side sourcing.
- Price trends: monthly price movement for a model over 12–24 months, to time purchases or detect market shifts.
- Liquidity: average days-on-market — how fast a given car actually sells, which matters more than price for dealers managing floor-plan costs.
- Regional pricing: price differences across Poland's 16 voivodeships, useful for cross-region arbitrage and logistics decisions.
- Value factors: how import status, transmission, or fuel type shifts a car's price relative to the segment baseline.
None of this requires posting ads. All of it requires aggregated, statistically meaningful listing data.
Why scraping it yourself is harder than it looks
The common fallback is to build a scraper. As a neutral engineering observation: large classifieds sites change their markup frequently, render listings through JavaScript frameworks, and commonly deploy anti-automation measures, so scrapers require continuous maintenance to keep working. There is also genuine legal uncertainty — platform terms of service typically restrict automated access, and EU database rights (the sui generis right) add a layer of risk that each team has to assess for itself with its own counsel. For a deeper treatment of the maintenance and compliance trade-offs, see our guide on alternatives to running your own scraper.
For most teams, the total cost of ownership of a self-maintained scraper — engineering time, proxy infrastructure, breakage risk, legal review — exceeds the cost of simply buying clean aggregated data.
A compliant path: the CarDossier Market API
CarDossier operates its own database of 1.4M+ Polish market listings, aggregated from publicly available sources and updated daily. On top of it we run the Market API — a read-only analytics API designed for exactly the use cases above. Base URL: https://car-dossier.com/api/v1. Five endpoints, priced in credits (1 credit = $0.01):
/market/valuation— price distribution for a make/model/year: average, median, P25, P75 (8 credits)/market/price-history— monthly price trends, up to 24 months back (10 credits)/market/liquidity— days-on-market and supply metrics (6 credits)/market/valuation-factors— impact of import status, transmission, and fuel type (12 credits)/market/regional— price breakdown across all 16 Polish voivodeships (8 credits)
The API resolves natural vehicle names: VW Golf, BMW 3 Series or 320d, C-Class, A4, XC60 all parse automatically, and every response includes a matched block showing exactly how your input was interpreted. The fuel_type parameter accepts plain English values: petrol, diesel, hybrid, electric, lpg. Failed calls are automatically refunded.
Official Otomoto API vs. CarDossier Market API
| Official Otomoto API | CarDossier Market API | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Publishing and managing a dealer's own listings on Otomoto | Reading aggregated Polish market statistics: valuations, trends, liquidity, regional prices |
| Intended audience | Dealers with an Otomoto Business account; IT firms serving them | Developers, dealers, fintech, insurers, analysts — no dealer status required |
| Access barrier | Business account required; registration form and approval; one key per application | Instant: 5 keyless demo calls per IP per day; email OTP signup for 50 free credits, no credit card |
| Data you can read | Your own adverts only; no market statistics or other sellers' data | Aggregated statistics from CarDossier's own database of 1.4M+ Polish listings, updated daily |
| Market analytics | Not provided | avg/median/P25/P75 valuations, 24-month price history, days-on-market, 16-region prices, value factors |
| Documentation language | Polish (primarily) | English, with OpenAPI spec and machine-readable docs |
| Cost model | Tied to the Otomoto Business relationship | Pay-as-you-go credits: 1 credit = $0.01, plans from $49 / 5,000 credits to $699 / 100,000 |
Quickstart: one curl, real data, no key
You can test the Market API right now — no registration, no API key. Every IP gets 5 free demo calls per day against real data:
curl "https://car-dossier.com/api/v1/market/valuation?make=BMW&model=3%20Series&year=2019"The response returns the price distribution (average, median, P25, P75), sample size, and a matched block confirming how "BMW 3 Series" was resolved. When the demo quota isn't enough, registration takes an email OTP — no credit card — and comes with 50 free credits, enough for several full valuation and history calls.
For machines and agents: the full spec lives at car-dossier.com/openapi.yaml and car-dossier.com/llms.txt. There is also an MCP server (pip install cardossier-mcp-server, keyless mode supported) and a remote MCP endpoint at https://car-dossier.com/mcp. Full reference: API documentation · pricing.
Which one should you use?
- You are a Polish dealer syndicating inventory to Otomoto: use the official Otomoto API (or an integration partner that already has a key). That is exactly what it is for.
- You need prices, trends, liquidity, or regional data for Poland: use the CarDossier Market API. The official API cannot provide this, and a self-built scraper carries ongoing maintenance and legal-review costs.
- You are a dealer who needs both publishing and pricing: the two are complementary — inventory out through the official channel, market intelligence in through an analytics API.
Polish car market data, one HTTP call away.
5 free demo calls a day, 50 free credits on signup — no credit card.