01
Every payment is a donation
Final, non-refundable, and paid to me personally. Not a product and not a share of a car.
Brand My Plate
your text hereplace onesmall mark
your-longer-url.exampleby David Ilie
Car budget
People and brands outbid each other for my number plate and its holder. Highest total takes each.
€30,000the ladder€140,000
CurrentlyNothing yet
The dreamCLE 450 Cabriolet
The car below does not exist yet. €22,000 makes it real.
The developer
The person you are funding.
David Ilie. Not an agency, not a team. One developer with a public commit history.
David is a full-stack developer from Romania, working between the UK, Spain and Romania. He has been shipping software since 2018, most of it Mercedes-adjacent by now: MBRetrofit Tools sells datacards, map codes and remote coding to Mercedes owners, and Zerocut is a Stripe donation platform for streamers. His own infrastructure runs on a Kubernetes cluster he maintains in the open.
This site is his code too. The same person writes it, approves every plate on it, and answers the email at the bottom of it.
- MBRetrofit Toolsmbretrofit.it
VIN datacards, map activation codes and remote coding for Mercedes owners who would rather not book a dealer slot. Built for an engineer at Mercedes-Benz.
- Zerocutzerocut.gg
Donation platform for streamers. Stripe checkout, ClickHouse analytics, admin dashboard.
- home-clustergithub.com
The Kubernetes cluster his services run on, managed with Flux and public in full.
GitHub contribution graph for DavidIlie, one square per day for the last year. 6,977 contributions in total.
Milestones
The better the total, the better the car.
Targets, not promises. Built on today’s prices with a buffer for import and registration. If the market moves before December 2026, the closest achievable spec wins.
€22,000 until the first CLE. Until then €30,000 buys a C-Class, which is not what this is.
- €52,000CLE 220 d CoupéUsedCoupé€22,000 to go
- €57,000CLE 220 d CabrioletUsedCabrioletLocked
- €59,000CLE 300 4MATIC CoupéUsedCoupéLocked
- €66,000CLE 300 4MATIC CabrioletUsedCabrioletLocked
- €74,000CLE 450 4MATIC CabrioletUsedCabrioletLocked
- €90,000CLE 53 AMG CabrioletUsedCabrioletLocked
- €113,000CLE 53 AMG CoupéNewCoupéLocked
- €140,000CLE 53 AMG, highly optionedNewCoupéStretchLocked
At close I buy the highest fully funded rung, not the next one up. Surplus above a funded rung buys options on that car: seats, paint, packages. Not a different car.
Standings
Your bid is everything you have ever given.
There are no separate bids. Pay again and your one total goes up. Whoever leads on the day I buy the car wins it.
License plate
opens at €50 · €10 to passNobody yet. The first €50 takes it and holds it until somebody goes €10 higher.
Plate holder
opens at €20 · €5 to passNobody yet. The first €20 takes it and holds it until somebody goes €5 higher.
Latest
Full historyNothing has come in yet. The first €20 appears here within a minute of clearing.
How it works
The premise is a joke. The rules are not.
I am putting €30,000 of my own money toward a Mercedes-Benz CLE. The long version is on the terms page.
02
Your bid is cumulative
€30 today and €25 next month leaves you standing at €55. Nothing expires when you are passed.
03
Two things are for sale, sort of
The plate opens at €50 and changes hands on €10 clear of the leader. The holder text opens at €20 and moves on €5.
04
5 free plate checks
Your first payment unlocks 5 lookups for life. After that they are €5 each, and that €5 counts toward your total too.
05
“Likely available”, never “available”
A miss means probably free. A hit means probably taken, and I show you the car wearing it. DRPCIV at the desk is the only real answer.
06
The guarantee, and its fallback
A personalised plate of the winner's choosing will be registered on the physical car. If DRPCIV will not issue that exact combination, the winner picks again.
07
I approve everything first
Plate strings, names, links and holder text all pass through me. Editing yours resets approval. Rejection is not a refund.
08
It closes when I buy the car, around December 2026
Whoever leads on the day wins. The configurator choices then go to an amount-weighted donor vote, where every euro is one vote.
Your entry
Already paid?
You pay first and get an account after. Use the email address from your payment and I will send you a magic link.
Signing in lets you edit your entry and spend the 5 free registry checks your first payment unlocked.
Email me a magic linkThe reason
Why a CLE?
The CLE runs on the STAR3 platform, the electronics generation my work on MBRetrofit Tools is built around. Owning the platform I code against beats borrowing access to it.
The other reason is that I would like to stop driving my parents' cars.
The 64 CLEs already in my databaseCompany sponsors
Want your name on the car itself?
From €1,000 I will talk about where it goes on the body. The doors and the hood run €5,000–10,000. This car drives across Europe, Spain to Romania and back at least twice a year, with your brand on it. Because I will be driving it every day, I keep the veto on how it looks. Arranged directly with me and invoiced through Stripe, not bought from this page.