Know if your quote is fair.
Home-services bids for the same job differ by thousands, and nothing tells you which one is right. We price the work from real material costs and local wages — and show you every number we used.
Priced from the parts, not from a hunchA price you can argue with
Every estimate is built from parts, and every part is labeled measured or assumed.
Hard materials
The listed price of the actual equipment, stored with a link to the listing and the date we checked it. A price older than 90 days fails our build.
Local labor
The median wage for that trade in your metro, from the BLS. A plumbing job is costed at the plumbing wage, not a generic construction one.
Time and margin
How long the work takes, and the overhead a business runs on. These we have not measured, so we give them as ranges and say so.
Free, and backed by the same engine
No invented numbers. Where we cannot measure something, the tool says so instead of guessing.
Check a quoteStart here
Paste, upload or photograph a quote. We price it against your metro and tell you what it leaves out.
📐Cost estimator
What a job should cost in your ZIP, built from material prices and local wages, with the working shown.
⚖️Compare quotes
Put two or three bids for the same job side by side, against the model and against each other.
📋State rules
Deposit caps, efficiency minimums and refrigerant rules, by state, with the statute behind each one.
💬Questions to ask
The checklist for your trade, before you have a quote in hand.
Answers with the source attached
Short pages on the things people actually want to know before signing. Every number carries where it came from and when we checked it.
How to read a contractor quote
The things a complete quote contains, why each one matters, and the exact sentence to send when it is missing — generated from the rules engine, so it cannot describe a check we do not run.
The red flags worth acting on
Deposit caps by state with the statute for each, the five things summaries of this routinely get wrong, and the refrigerant rule that most content written in 2024 and 2025 now has stale.
When we will not tell you whether your quote is fair
Three tests decide whether we give a price verdict or refuse one, and this is the arithmetic behind them. Every threshold is read from the live model, so the published rule cannot drift from the code it describes.
What margin do contractors actually make?
37.0% of revenue, computed from the 2022 Economic Census rather than from an industry survey — with the arithmetic, the Census variable names, and the six identity checks the parse had to pass.
What does emergency service actually cost?
Nobody publishes a number, and we do not either. What can be established is a ceiling — and the usual justification for an after-hours rate turns out to be weaker than the industry implies, because federal law requires no premium for evenings or weekends at all.
Check our arithmetic yourself
Every input behind our estimates, published as ungated CSV under CC BY. No signup, no API key. If you work in one of these trades and think a number is wrong, this is how you prove it without asking us.
8,561 rows across 6 files
BLS wages for 530 metros with their occupation codes, measured material prices with the listing and the date, labour-hours ranges marked as assumed, and the Census margin figures with the raw variables.
How we build an estimate
Material price, local wage, hours, margin, and the point at which we stop answering. The whole arithmetic, including the rule for when we refuse to give a verdict.
What we cover
We can price all of these. We check the rules — permits, efficiency minimums, deposit limits — for HVAC replacement so far, and each hub says which it is doing.
🌡️ HVAC
Furnaces, air conditioners, heat pumps and mini-splits.
🚿 Plumbing
Water heaters, tankless, repipes, drains and sewer lines.
🏠 Roofing
Replacement, tear-off, gutters and ventilation.
⚡ Electrical
Panels, service upgrades, EV chargers and rewiring.
🪟 Windows
Replacement windows, doors and glazing.
🐜 Pest
Treatment plans, termite work and recurring contracts.
What we will not do
We do not ask a language model what things cost. It would answer fluently and the answer would be a recollection, not a measurement — and being confidently wrong about a price is how you talk someone out of a fair bid.
- Every price carries a source link and the date we checked it.
- Assumptions widen the estimate. They never quietly shift it.
- When too much of a job is assumed, we withhold the verdict and name the missing measurement.
- We never tell you a contractor is cheating you. We cannot know that.