Hey everyone!
Like many folks, I got really frustrated with the official NC DMV site – it takes forever to load and you can only check one location at a time for appointment availability.
So, I built a tool to scrape the info and make it easier to check multiple locations quickly. After monitoring my tool for a few days, I found an appointment just 2 days out within a 45min drive!
I figured others could benefit from it too, so I built a simple, free site around it:
https://nc-dmv-appointments.com
I've thought about adding notifications for newly opened nearby appointments. If that sounds useful to you, you can register for the waitlist on the site. If enough people sign up, I'll build it! :) EDIT: I built this feature in so you can now sign up for notifications!
Hopefully this makes dealing with the NC DMV a little less painful for someone else!
tl;dr: I built a free tool to easily monitor for open NC DMV appointments. Check it out at https://nc-dmv-appointments.com
Hey everyone,
A couple weeks ago, I shared an initial version of a passion project, nc-dmv-appointments.com, designed to reduce frustration when looking for NC DMV appointments. The goal was to show available slots from multiple DMV locations on one page, saving you from clicking through the official site location by location.
I created a waitlist to see if folks would be interested in getting notified about DMV appointments (or if anyone cared at all haha). The response and interest in getting notified about openings was way higher than I expected (thanks to everyone who joined it!), so I've spent the last couple of weeks building out the feature.
I'm excited to announce the notification feature is now live!
You can now visit nc-dmv-appointments.com and sign up for push notifications. The site will alert you when an appointment becomes available at DMV locations in your selected area and you can go book the appointment if you are quick.
Important Note: If you joined the waitlist before you will still have to sign up to get the notifications. Turns out with the number of people on the waitlist, sending that many SMS notifications would cost me hundreds of dollars a month and a bunch of regulatory paperwork. So I likely can't use the waitlist to notify people. Whoops.
Appointment slots are still scarce compared to demand. When you get a notification, you'll need to act fast to book it through the official DMV portal. Persistence is key, but hopefully, this tool makes the process significantly less painful.
What I'm working on next:
Improving the data refresh rate to be even faster (aiming for under a minute delay from the official site).
Investigating more reliable methods for obtaining appointment data than the current web scraping approach.
Feedback is welcome! Let me know if you find it useful or have suggestions. I probably won't post about it much after this to avoid spamming folks.
TL;DR: I launched the full version of my free site, nc-dmv-appointments.com, which finds NC DMV appointments and now sends push notifications when slots open up near you.
I need to renew my license in August and I know they're backed up, but I can't even schedule an appointment, literally every office in the state is booked. What am I supposed to even do? I can't just drop everything and wait outside and office all day.