ops

Machine-readable schema catalog and limits

Read this once at startup. It is the authoritative source for the pagination ceilings and for whether this deployment can refresh live prices at all — in a detail response, "this deployment cannot refresh prices" and "this car has no live price right now" look identical. The live_prices block is absent on a build from before the feature, which is the only way to tell those two apart.

Do not hardcode live_prices.sites; read it from here.

get/api/contract

Request

  • Base URL: https://api.thecarapi.com
  • URL: https://api.thecarapi.com/api/contract
  • Auth: one of:
    • API key in header X-API-Key
    • HTTP bearer
    • API key in query parameter api_key

Response

The contract.

successboolean
versionstring
schemasobject

Per-schema required/optional field catalogs, keyed by schema name (search_result_card, auction_detail, gallery_image, brands_models_facets, catalog_seo_metadata, calculator_request, calculator_result, …).

Example response

{
  "version": "2026-09-03",
  "pagination": {
    "max_limit": 100,
    "max_offset": 5000
  },
  "live_prices": {
    "sites": [
      "openlane"
    ],
    "ttl_seconds": 120
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.