Autter

Your headlights are on in a parking lot. Someone is boxed in behind you. It is starting to rain and your window is open. A stranger notices and wants to help, and there is no way to reach you.

The usual answers are bad. A paper note gets soaked or blown away. Honking until someone comes out annoys a whole street. And the one thing that would actually work, a phone number on the dashboard, hands your personal number to anyone who walks by.

Autter fixes that in the simplest way I could find.

What it does

You put an Autter QR code inside your windshield. Anyone who needs you scans it with their phone camera, picks what is going on (“Your lights are on”, “You’re blocking my car”, “Your window is open”), edits the message if they want, and taps Notify owner.

You get a private text alert. You sign in and read the message. That is the whole loop.

The person who scanned needs no app and no account. They never see your name, your number, or even whether you read the message. You never see theirs, unless they choose to share a callback number, which is off by default.

Built so strangers can reach your car, not you

The privacy model is the product. Everything else is plumbing.

• The code contains nothing personal. The QR holds a random token. Not your phone number, not your name, not your licence plate.
• One-way by design. A sender cannot see your profile, read past messages or open a chat. They can submit a message. That is all.
• You stay in control. Pause your code, replace it with a new one, or block a sender at any time.
• Abuse protection everywhere. Each sender is limited to a couple of messages a day across all codes, with further limits per network and per code, plus spam filtering and bot protection. A tool that lets strangers contact you has to be very hard to turn into harassment.
• Sensitive data is encrypted. Phone numbers are stored encrypted, and looked up through a keyed hash so the database never holds them in the clear.

The moments a paper note cannot handle

Autter is for the small, real situations that happen to every driver:

• You are blocking someone’s driveway or parking spot.
• Your headlights are on, or your alarm will not stop.
• A window is open and it is raining.
• Someone dinged your door and wants to own up.
• You have a flat tyre and do not know it.
• Snow removal is coming and your car has to move.
• A dog has been left in a hot car.
• A driver at a shared EV charger needs you to move.
• Your car is for sale and buyers want to ask questions without you printing your number on the glass.

Each of these has its own page on the site, written in four languages.

How it works for the owner

1. Sign up with your mobile number and confirm it with a code sent by text.
2. Autter creates your personal QR code immediately.
3. Print the sticker at home, cut it out and place it inside the windshield. The printable sheet is generated for you, two stickers per page, in your language.
4. When someone scans and sends a message, you get a text alert, and an optional push notification.

It takes about a minute. It is free.

Four languages, two countries, any scanner

Autter speaks English, French, Spanish and Arabic, including a fully right-to-left Arabic interface and Arabic sticker artwork. Text alerts go out to owners in Canada and the United States. Owners elsewhere sign in and receive alerts by email instead. Anyone, anywhere, can scan a code and send a message.

How it is built

One Next.js application serves both the marketing site at autter.com and the app at app.autter.com, splitting them by hostname. Data lives in PostgreSQL through Prisma. Sign-in is a custom one-time-code system: codes are hashed, attempts are limited, and sessions sit in server-side, HTTP-only cookies.

Text messages go through Telnyx, on a verified toll-free number for the US and a local number for Canada. Email goes through Resend. Push notifications use the standard Web Push protocol. Notifications are written to an outbox table in the same database transaction as the message, then delivered by a worker that runs every minute, with an immediate first attempt, so an alert is never lost if a provider hiccups.

The sticker is generated on the server: the QR code at the highest error-correction level with the Autter mark in the centre, laid into pre-outlined artwork and rendered to PNG and PDF. The test suite runs against a real PostgreSQL database and covers registration, failure modes of the one-time codes, sessions, QR generation and rotation, messaging limits and notifications.

Where it stands

Autter is live at autter.com, with the app at app.autter.com. SMS alerts are live in Canada and the United States. Today each account has one live code for one vehicle; uses beyond cars, such as keys, luggage, pets or fleets, are waiting until the product supports several codes per account.

Made in Montréal.