Why we built Recoupe

The problem

When another driver damages your car, their insurer pays to fix it. Nobody pays for what the accident did to its resale price, and there is always an effect, because the collision is now on the car's permanent record and buyers price it in.

You are entitled to that money in 47 states and the District of Columbia. Most people never claim it.

Three things keep it that way:

• Nobody tells you. An insurer is not going to volunteer that you have an additional claim against them.
• The default offer is designed to be low. The 17c formulacaps your loss at 10% of the car's value before reducing it twice more, reaching zero for any vehicle past 100,000 miles.
• Real help is expensive. A licensed appraiser charges $200–400 and takes a week. On a $2,000 claim that is hard to justify, so people give up, which is exactly what the low offer assumes.

What we built

A documented, market-based valuation and the paperwork to collect it, for a fraction of the appraiser's fee and in minutes rather than days.

The calculator is free and shows its arithmetic. The method is published in full, down to the individual coefficients, partly so you can check it, and partly because a valuation an adjuster can follow is worth more than one they have to take on trust.

The paid product is a valuation report and a demand letter generated from your specific facts and your state's law. Not a template with blanks. The most common complaint about the existing services in this space is paying for a generic sample that did not work, and avoiding that is the entire design brief.

What we are not

How we make money, and what that means for you

One flat fee, once, after you have already seen your number. We do not take a percentage of your recovery, we do not sell your data, we do not run ads, and there is no subscription, a diminished value claim is a one-time event and charging monthly for it would be absurd.

The flat fee has a useful side effect: we have no incentive to inflate your estimate. A service taking 30% of the recovery is rewarded for a bigger number whether or not it is defensible. We are rewarded by an estimate that actually gets paid, which means being conservative where the evidence is thin and telling you when a claim is not worth pursuing.

That is why the calculator refuses the sale when your car was totalled, when you were at fault, when the deadline has passed, or when the claim comes out under about $400.

Accuracy, and how to tell us we are wrong

The 51-jurisdiction rules table was compiled from primary sources: state codes, state courts and state insurance regulators. It was then independently re-checked by a separate adversarial review pass, which found and corrected real errors. Every state page cites its sources and shows when it was last reviewed. Entries we could not verify to our own standard are labelled as such rather than presented as settled.

Law changes, and we will get things wrong. If you find an error, whether a stale statute, a small-claims limit that has moved or a broken regulator link, please tell us. We will fix it and credit the correction.

Who runs it

Recoupe is operated by Handler Labs LLC. Support goes to support@getrecoupe.com and is answered by a person, not a macro. If your documents are wrong we fix them; if the packet is not what you expected we refund it within 30 days without argument.