Soft-pull pre-qualification
Find your number without touching your score.
Two minutes of questions and you shop with a budget instead of a guess: an estimated rate range, the most you should be paying a month, and the sticker price that supports it. No Social Security number, no hard inquiry, no obligation.
No hard inquiry
Pre-qualification is a soft pull. Only you ever see it on your report, and it cannot move your score by a point.
About two minutes
Nine fields — name, address, date of birth, housing and income. No employer, no references, no documents.
No Social Security number
There is no field for one here. This demonstration has no bureau to send it to, so it does not ask.
This is a demonstration, and the result is an illustration. No credit bureau, lender or server is contacted at any point — not even a soft inquiry. Everything on the result page is arithmetic performed in your browser from the figures you type, and the page shows you every step of it.
Two different products
Pre-qualification is not an application
One is a soft look that costs you nothing and promises nothing. The other is a hard inquiry that comes back with real money. Most people should do them in that order.
Path one · low commitment
Soft-pull pre-qualification
Find out what you can afford before anyone touches your credit file. Two minutes, no Social Security number, and no mark that a lender will ever see.
- No effect on your credit score
- A payment ceiling and a price to shop under
- Nothing is reserved, so nothing is at risk
Path two · when you are ready
Full credit application
The real thing: one submission to every lender that fits your file, and approvals you can hold in your hand. It creates a hard inquiry, which is the trade for a real number.
- Real rates from real lenders
- One inquiry window, not one per lender
- An approval that holds about 30 days
The same seven questions, both paths
The honest difference between the two is what they cost you in credit and what they are worth at the end. Read across.
| Question | Soft-pull pre-qualification | Full credit application |
|---|---|---|
| What it does to your credit | A soft inquiry. It appears only on the copy of the report you pull yourself, no lender ever sees it, and it does not move your score by a single point. | A hard inquiry at each lender we submit to. Typically fewer than five points, and auto inquiries inside a 14-day window are scored as one event. |
| How long it takes | About two minutes. Nine fields and a consent box. | About nine minutes across four steps, and you can stop and finish on your phone. |
| What you have to give us | Name, address, date of birth, housing status and payment, gross monthly income. No Social Security number. | All of that plus employer, time on the job, income detail — and on a live site a Social Security number, sent over an encrypted connection. |
| What you get at the end | An estimated credit tier, an APR range, a payment ceiling and a price to shop under. An estimate, not an approval. | Actual lender decisions: rate, term, payment and total interest for each approval, side by side, with our recommendation and the reason for it. |
| How long it is worth | Nothing is reserved and nothing is held. Run it again the moment your income, rent or down payment changes. | Most approvals hold for about 30 days, and the rate is locked to the structure on them. |
| Use it when | You are still shopping and want a budget before you fall in love with a vehicle you cannot structure. | You have narrowed it down, or you are buying inside the next few weeks and want the approval waiting when you arrive. |
| On this demonstration site | Runs entirely in your browser from a formula this site prints in full. No bureau is contacted, soft or otherwise. | Validates and adds up in your browser and stops there. No lender, no bureau, no server — nothing is transmitted. |
Both flows on this site are demonstrations. Neither one reaches a credit bureau, a lender or any server at all — the soft-pull result is arithmetic performed in your browser, and the application ends on a page telling you nothing was submitted.
Questions
Soft pulls, plainly
The word "pre-qualified" gets used for four different things across this industry. Here is exactly what it means on this page.
A soft pull is a look at your credit file that you, or a company you are already doing business with, can request. It is recorded on the copy of the report you pull yourself and nowhere else. No lender sees it and no scoring model counts it, which is why checking your own credit has never lowered a score.
A hard inquiry is a lender reading your file because you asked them to lend you money. It is visible to every other lender for two years, and it typically costs fewer than five points. Auto-loan inquiries inside a 14-day window are scored as a single event, which is why the full application goes out to matched lenders on one day rather than over a week.
No, and any dealership that tells you otherwise is being loose with the word. A pre-qualification is a range built from a thin summary of your file. An approval is a lender agreeing to specific money on a specific vehicle at a specific rate, after underwriting your income, your debts and the collateral itself.
The useful thing about pre-qualification is the ceiling. Knowing you can carry $500 a month and roughly $28,000 of vehicle stops you from falling for something at $41,000 that will never structure.
The payment ceiling is the lower of two rules: 15% of your gross monthly income, and 45% of gross less what your housing already takes. The price is that payment run backwards through the same loan formula the rest of the site uses, at 72 months with tax and the documentary fee financed.
The estimated tier comes from three bands — housing cost against income, housing status, and income level — and the result page prints every band, every point and every line of the arithmetic. It is a formula, not a credit file, and it can land several tiers away from your real one.
No. DriveSimple is a demonstration build. There is no server behind this page, no connection to Experian, Equifax or TransUnion, and no lender receiving anything. The consent box explains what a soft inquiry is because a live version of this form would make one — this version makes none at all.
Your answers are kept in this browser's local storage so the full application can prefill from them, and clearing the illustration deletes them. Nothing is transmitted, stored on a server or shared.
Shop with the price ceiling, not the payment. Payment shopping is how a 60-month deal quietly becomes an 84-month one at the same monthly figure and thousands more in interest.
Then, when you have narrowed it to a vehicle or two, run the full application. That is the one that creates a hard inquiry and comes back with real lender decisions you can hold us to.