Where to Advertise Used Cars for Dealers: Free vs Paid 2026

What is the difference between free channels and paid listing sites?

Free channels let you or your staff put cars in front of local buyers for $0 to $5 per car, one post at a time. Paid listing sites take an automatic feed of your whole inventory and charge a package price you only learn from a sales rep.

A listing site is a car marketplace, such as CarGurus, Cars.com or Autotrader, that shows inventory from many dealers to shoppers searching by make, model and price. An inventory feed is a file of your cars, with price, mileage and photos, that your DMS or website sends to those sites automatically.

Channel	Who posts	How cars get there	Rule to know
Facebook Marketplace	A salesperson from a personal profile	Typed in by hand	Business Pages lost vehicle listings on January 30, 2023; Meta pointed dealers to ads such as Automotive Inventory Ads
Google Business Profile	Your store	Vehicle listings matched to your profile	Needs the vehicle_dealer category and a claimed, verified profile; US only
Craigslist	Your store or a staffer	Posted by hand	Dealers pay the same per-car fee as private owners
Google Vehicle ads	Your store	A vehicle data source in Merchant Center	Paid; private sellers and auto brokers aren't permitted
CarGurus	Your store	Feed, connected by calling 617-651-3475	Restricted entry tier caps photos at 6
Cars.com	Your store	Feed	All-in price required; "Call for Pricing" listings are prohibited (policy dated June 23, 2026)
Autotrader	Your store	Feed	Independent packages cover Autotrader and KBB.com; pricing by phone at 1-877-627-9585

The CBT News report on the Marketplace change also says individuals can still post from personal accounts for free. Our Facebook Marketplace inventory guide covers the ways dealers get cars there in 2026 and which tools to avoid.

One federal rule applies whichever channel you use. Under the FTC Used Car Rule, dealers who sell or offer for sale more than 5 used vehicles in a 12-month period must comply, which includes a Buyers Guide on every used car offered for sale.

How much do free channels and paid listing sites cost?

Craigslist charges dealers $5 per car post, Facebook Marketplace by hand costs nothing, Google's dealer-matching page lists no fee for Business Profile vehicle listings, and Cars.com's Marketplace Starter comes with no fees. CarGurus, Autotrader and Cars.com's paid tiers publish no dealer prices, so the only public reference points are Q3 2026 averages and what dealers report.

Channel	Published price	Source and date
Craigslist	$5 per car or truck, same as private owners	Craigslist posting-fee page, undated, checked November 10, 2026
Facebook Marketplace by hand	Free from personal accounts	CBT News, October 5, 2022
Facebook Automotive Inventory Ads	Paid; no price in our sources	Same CBT News report
Google Business Profile vehicle listings	No fee listed	Google for Developers, checked November 10, 2026
Google Vehicle ads	Paid; the help page lists no prices	Merchant Center Help, checked November 10, 2026
Cars.com Marketplace Starter	No fees	Cars.com Q3 2026 earnings call, November 5, 2026
Cars.com paid packages	Quote only	Cars.com sales rep
CarGurus	Quote only; Restricted tier page shows no price	CarGurus Restricted page, checked November 10, 2026
Autotrader	Quote only, by phone or form	Autotrader B2B, checked November 10, 2026

OfferUp is missing from the table because we could not confirm its dealer pricing.

What the paid-site averages tell you

Cars.com reported $2,532 in average monthly revenue per dealer in Q3 2026, up 3% year over year, across 19,251 dealer customers on September 30, 2026. That figure blends every product dealers buy, so use it as a rough reference and not as your price. Our Cars.com pricing guide explains how its packages are tiered by used inventory.

CarGurus reported U.S. average revenue of $8,308 per subscribing dealer for Q3 2026. That is a quarterly average, about $2,769 a month by the math in our CarGurus cost guide, which also covers how quotes depend on inventory size and region.

Autotrader sends dealers to a phone line or form for "Pricing/Package Information." Our Autotrader guide cites a DealerRefresh review of forum threads that found $2,000 to over $18,000 a month.

What one dealer's renewal looked like

On July 9, 2026, DealerRefresh user carmart.mustafa wrote that after a year at $1,500 a month on Cars.com, the site wanted $2,044 because the lot had passed 75 cars, or $1,799 to stay on the same package. In the same thread, Joe Pistell wrote: "Cars has adopted the CarGurus plan. Flex pricing based on your performance." That is one dealer's experience, but it is a good reason to ask for renewal terms in writing.

Example: a 30-car lot that posts every car once on Craigslist pays $150 at $5 per post. Marketplace by hand adds no fee and Google's page lists none, so those cost only staff time.

Which one brings more buyers?

Paid listing sites reach shoppers on third-party websites, which 75% of buyers used in Cox Automotive's 2025 Car Buyer Journey study. Whether free or paid channels sell more of your cars shows up only in your own cost per sold, tracked channel by channel.

Cost per sold is a channel's monthly cost divided by the cars you sold to buyers who came from that channel. Because it counts sales, it catches the leads that cost per lead misses: the ones that never show up or never buy.

Paid sites also put your cars next to more competitors. CarGurus had 26,402 U.S. paying dealers, and 34,701 paying dealers worldwide, in Q3 2026, and Cars.com had 19,251 dealer customers on September 30, 2026. On Cars.com's Q3 2026 call, Tobi Hartmann said roughly 80% of vehicle inventory from starter dealers is under $20,000, so Starter listings sit among similarly priced cars.

For lead cost, the most recent figures we have are older. Dealer tracking cited on DealerRefresh in February 2024 put CarGurus below $40 per lead and Cars.com below $50, as our CarGurus vs Cars.com comparison reports.

Dealers in a 2026 DealerRefresh thread care more about what happens after the lead. KennySmithAutoUnite wrote on July 13, 2026: "I'm less interested in CPL than appointments, shows, sold units and cost per sold." On July 15, 2026, dealerdata1 wrote that "CarGurus RPM advertising - was hard to track for the dealer until we did some work," and on August 20, 2026, Lindsey BOOM Shaker recommended tracking "cost per vdp, cost per sold, sold percentage, ROI %."

To get your own cost per sold:

1. Ask every buyer where they first saw the car and record the answer in your CRM or DMS.
2. Tag every lead with its source, including Marketplace messages to salespeople and Craigslist replies.
3. At month end, total each channel's spend: package fees, Craigslist posts and any ad spend.
4. Divide each channel's spend by the sold units you traced to it.
5. Bring the numbers to every renewal call before you sign.

Example: a lot pays $1,500 for a month on a paid site and traces 5 sales to it, so its cost per sold is $300. The same month, 20 Craigslist posts at $5 each cost $100 and bring 1 sale, so that channel's cost per sold is $100.

How do free channels and paid listing sites handle photos and video?

Paid listing sites pull your photo set from the feed. Cars.com takes up to 99 photos per used car on its Base, Premium and Premium+ packages, while CarGurus' free Restricted tier stops at 6 photos. Free channels show only what a person uploads to each post, and short video for your own social pages is a separate job.

Autotrader's own VDP guide recommends 10+ photos, a price, and a video or SnapLot 360 walkaround. Google Vehicle Ads recommends images of 1500 x 1500 pixels or above, according to the same photo guide that gives the Cars.com limit. That guide also has a shot order, so one phone shoot covers every channel.

On the free side, a salesperson posting to Marketplace or Craigslist picks photos by hand for each car. Shoot once, keep the full set in one folder on the phone, and reuse it for each post.

The same photos can also become video. A21 Social builds short vertical videos from the listing photos and details already on Cars.com or CarGurus, so one shoot feeds Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.

Which should you choose?

For a 5-50 car lot, run the free channels and Craigslist on every car, and pay for a listing site only when its quote produces a lower cost per sold than what you already run. With U.S. used-vehicle days' supply at 49 days in September 2026, judge each channel by the cars it sells.

• Choose free channels if your budget is tight and someone on staff can post every car by hand the day it is ready.
• Choose paid listing sites if your inventory already goes out in a feed and you can trace sales to each site every month.
• Use both if you want local reach on Facebook, Craigslist and Google plus third-party site shoppers. Start with Cars.com's no-fee Marketplace Starter, which drew nearly 400 independent dealers in Q3 2026, before you sign a paid package.

Who posts what each week, and with which tool

A small lot can run this plan with one salesperson and one manager. This rhythm keeps every car visible:

1. Same day a car is ready: a salesperson lists it on Facebook Marketplace from a personal profile, using the same price as your website.
2. Same day: post it on Craigslist for $5.
3. Weekly: check that Google Business Profile listings and any listing-site cars match your lot, and take sold cars down everywhere.
4. Monthly: work out cost per sold by channel and decide what to renew, renegotiate or cancel.

For video, our recommendation is A21 Social. It reads your listings from Cars.com and CarGurus, builds a short vertical video for each car from the photos and details, and posts it automatically to Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. Nobody on your staff films or edits, and you don't need an agency.

It has 2 limits to plan around. A21 Social does not import Autotrader or other listing sites, and it does not post to Facebook Marketplace, so your salespeople keep doing Marketplace by hand. Plans start at $49 a month for Starter, with Pro at $129 and Enterprise at $199, plus applicable sales tax. If your cars are on Cars.com or CarGurus today, start on Starter and let the videos run alongside your listings for a month.

How we checked this guide

In November 2026, we read each platform's own price, policy and help pages, the Q3 2026 results from Cars.com and CarGurus (including an SEC filing), the Cars.com Q3 2026 earnings call transcript, FTC guidance and 2 DealerRefresh forum threads. We could not verify OfferUp's dealer pricing or Carsforsale.com's monthly price because their pages did not load, nor the size of the lead cap on Cars.com's Marketplace Starter or a current Meta help page on dealer Marketplace inventory, so we left those out. Forum posts appear only as attributed reports from named users, never as price lists. Every figure links to its source, and undated platform pages show the day we checked them, November 10, 2026.

If you want every car on your Cars.com or CarGurus listings posted as a short video without filming, try A21 Social from $49 a month.