A bidding diary that survives the auction.
One free-text note per lot, attached to your account. Months later — long after the listing is gone — you still see the car you wrote it about.
One note per lot. Free text. Yours.
A single editable text field on every lot detail page. Use it for bidding notes, inspection observations, the parts you've already sourced, your max bid before you raise it. No multi-entry journal, no formal structure — just somewhere to write what you'd otherwise lose.
Survives the auction-end sweep.
CarMargin removes lot-cache data shortly after the auction ends — the AI analysis is gone, the photos can't be re-fetched, the listing has cycled off Copart. Your note is the exception. It's user-authored content, scoped to your account, and stays with you for the lifetime of the account.
Identity snapshot, frozen at write time.
When you save a note, CarMargin freezes a small identity snapshot alongside it: make, model, year, mileage, hero photo URL, sale date, and lot number. Months later you still see "BMW 320d M Sport (2010, 67k mi)" next to your note — not an orphaned text field on a lot you can no longer identify.
If the photo URL eventually 404s on Copart's CDN, CarMargin shows a placeholder; the text snapshot still tells you what the car was.
VRN excluded by design.
The snapshot identifies the car without including its VRN. CarMargin's broader rule is that VRNs live on the lot record only — never linked to a user account. Notes follow the same rule.
Post-auction state.
After the auction ends, the lot context strip above your note shows: "This auction ended on [date]. Live analysis no longer available — your note is preserved." The note remains fully readable and editable. Your reasoning lives on, even when the listing it described doesn't.