Your first Chassly assessment: what to expect

Sign-up takes about 30 seconds. You can use email + password or sign in with Google. Either way, Chassly creates your account and a default Basic-tier subscription that's marked unpaid until you make your first purchase.

If this is a one-time inspection (a parking-lot ding, a curbed wheel, a fender-bender), the $2 one-time Basic tier is the right starting point. It buys you exactly one full assessment. If you have multiple vehicles or expect to run assessments regularly, the Driver plan ($5/month, 5 assessments) is the better value.

You can upgrade at any time after starting. The $2 starter never expires, and your account history persists across tier changes.

After signing in, click the orange 'New assessment' button or visit /assess. You'll see the upload wizard with photo slots for the damaged area. The instructions tell you to upload 4–6 photos from different angles: focus on the damaged area itself, not the whole car.

If you have damage in two separate places (say, a rear bumper scrape and a driver-door dent from different incidents), click 'Add another damage area' to give them separate photo groups. The AI will analyze each area independently.

Each photo runs through a quick quality check on your phone before upload, checking minimum resolution, file size, and image format. Any photo that fails the check (too blurry, too small, wrong format) gets rejected with a specific reason so you can replace it.

On the second wizard step, enter your vehicle's year, make, and model. You can type them manually or paste your 17-character VIN to auto-decode all three from the federal NHTSA database. The VIN method is faster and avoids typos.

Why does the AI need this? Because the same damage on different vehicles can have very different repair implications. A 6-inch dent on a 2018 Toyota fender (steel, repairable) gets different recommendations than the same dent on a 2022 Tesla fender (aluminum, usually replacement). The model uses this context to inform every part of the assessment.

Your VIN is encrypted in Chassly's database with AES-256-GCM and never sent to the AI. Only the year/make/model goes to the AI model for analysis.

After you submit, a progress screen shows the analysis running. Three things happen in this minute: a quick vehicle-presence pre-screen confirms every photo actually shows a vehicle (rejecting accidentally-uploaded selfies), the main damage analysis runs on the deep inspection layer, and the cost estimator and reminder suggestions are computed from the results.

If our AI provider's primary model is slow or has an outage, Chassly automatically falls back to a secondary vision model to keep your assessment moving. You won't see this happen; the report just arrives, possibly with slightly less detailed reasoning.

While you wait, this is a good time to review your photos for the next time. The progress screen sometimes shows which steps are taking longest, which can help you take better photos in future assessments.

The report has a clear structure: overall severity at the top, total cost range below that, then a per-part breakdown showing each damaged part with its damage type, severity, and recommended repair action. Each part includes a one-sentence explanation of what the AI saw and why.

Below the breakdown, you'll find tier-specific sections. Driver and Business tiers get an insurance guidance section explaining whether and how to file a claim, plus DIY instructions for any parts that can be safely repaired yourself. Business adds a downloadable PDF version of the full report.

At the bottom of the report, Chassly's AI suggests follow-up reminders: things like 're-photograph this dent in 14 days to check for rust' or 'get a body shop quote within 7 days for the major fender damage.' Accept the ones that matter; they get added to your /reminders inbox and trigger email digests when they're due.