How to save almost $10,000 on a new Tesla if you know how to no-code ??

To give you some context, I'll share some thoughts about one unusual phenomenon that hit me when I first moved to the US. And that phenomenon is crazy high purchasing power demand. In the US, and especially in California, a lot of middle-class people can afford many expensive goods, which leads to very high demand. Some examples are hundreds of thousands of pre-orders for the new iPhone every year during the first 24 hours, lotteries and auctions on video cards and PC components (hi, Newegg), and so on. Another example (as strange as it may sound) is tickets to national parks: to get into Yosemite in the summer, and you have to buy a ticket a couple of weeks in advance. The ticket sale opens at 8 am, and everything is sold out in the first 30 minutes. Camping spots are bought a year in advance (!), and to go rafting on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, you have to book the trip five years in advance... Needless to say, it's the same situation with EV sales in the US - demand exceeds supply for most manufacturers. Tesla has even suspended Model 3 Long Range sales because they racked up orders a year in advance.?

Six months ago, my three-year-old Model 3's warranty expired, and I, for the first time, considered buying a new one. But on the other hand, no issues so far, and I decided to drive it for a couple more years. In December 2022, Tesla started to offer a $3500 discount on all new inventory Model 3 and Model Y until the end of the year to stimulate sales due to the next year's tax credit (some buyers decided to wait). Not a bad offer, but apparently, the discount didn't make much of a difference, and on December 21, Tesla became very generous: $7500 off and free superchargers for 10,000 miles (another ~$2300) if the customer takes delivery before December 31. In 24 hours, the entire inventory was sold out, including test-drive and demo vehicles. The employee at the Tesla Store said that when they arrived at 8 am, there was already a line of customers, and they were only dealing with purchases the whole day. In general, I left in the lurch. The only thing the manager at the dealership advised me - was to monitor the Tesla website for new inventory.

After a couple of days of random visits to the site, it became clear that the vehicles either didn't appear there or they were just sold out instantly. Manual monitoring will not work for sure. So I got the idea to build a small application on our?AppMaster no-code platform and automate vehicle inventory tracking.?

After a few minutes of searching through the requests on the Tesla website, it became obvious that it has an API, which is used to get the list of available inventory vehicles. Usually, this type of API is secured with reCaptcha, tricky cookies, or some other protection from automated calls, but not at Tesla )). In 10 minutes, I got the app to check inventory every 30 seconds by reading the "total_matches_found" field in response from the Tesla server and, if there is at least one vehicle - send me a message in Telegram.

I was proud and enjoying myself for the rest of the day until I found out that at some moment, the application stopped polling API and started getting errors. As it turned out, the problem was that some "developers" in Tesla made a very strange API. The field "total_matches_found", which I used to monitor the inventory, was an integer if there were no vehicles and an integer inside the string if there were some vehicles. The same strange behavior turned out to be in other fields with changing data types (object to arrays, etc.). I had to hack together and simply count the number of characters in the response from the server with super simple logic: if there were no vehicles, then the length of the response from the server would be not more than 300 characters. Stupid and simple, but it worked. Of course, while I was figuring out why the application stopped polling the API, everything that had appeared in the stock was sold out ((

The following 24 hours showed that my plan worked, but not so well since my smartphone is in the Sleep Focus mode during the night and will not show any notifications from Telegram. Closer to the morning, Tesla released some stock again, but I slept through it all. There is no way I can disable Sleep mode since our team works almost 24 hours a day from multiple timezones, including nighttime in California and I will be jumping on every message. To solve this issue in under 15 minutes, I added integration with Twillio to send text messages and added the sender's number to my exclusions of the sleep mode. I tested it a few times: my smartphone and Apple Watch vibrate with sound. Re-tested again and again to make sure that everything worked. After three days of waiting and checking request history in the database, it became clear that everything was working correctly, but Tesla stopped adding new vehicles to the inventory website. "I've come to terms with the fact that I was not going to get a new Tesla with a discount.

On the fifth day of the epic story, I finally got lucky: there was one vehicle added to the stock, and I got a lot of notifications - Telegram, SMS, and even email! About 30 seconds later, I was already sitting happily with confirmation of the order on my screen. I took the only available vehicle! The purchase process was very smooth with Tesla: photos of DL, insurance, acceptance of terms and conditions, final payment, and in a few minutes delivery manager called to say that I could pick up the vehicle in the afternoon the same day. I was pretty happy even though I had to take delivery 3.5 hours away at Fresno with huge after-Christmas traffic jams on the highways ( HW101, HW33, HW99 and i-5 were seriously slow).

In fact, I was really amazed by how in very little time, I could put together a very useful server application that helped me save almost $10,000 on purchasing a new vehicle. Professional no-code is the future for sure.

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