How this works, and how we make money
Both questions matter, so both are on this page.
What we actually do
We read your quote and compare it against a checklist of things a complete quote for that job contains, plus the rules that apply in your state. Every finding is one of three kinds:
Defect
Something that appears to conflict with a rule where you live, or that will cost you money or warranty coverage. We only say this when we could read the relevant line clearly.
Gap
The quote does not say. You cannot compare two bids on something only one of them mentions.
Watch
Worth confirming, or a normal practice we want you to recognise so you are not upsold on it.
Where the rules come from
Federal efficiency minimums come from the Department of Energy; refrigerant rules from EPA’s published regulations; deposit limits from state statute, cited by section; warranty registration terms from the manufacturers’ own documents. Every rule in our data carries the source URL and the date we last checked it. Where a rule varies by state and we have not verified your state, we say we have not checked rather than assuming it does not apply.
What we will not claim
We do not tell you a contractor is overcharging, cheating, or acting in bad faith. We do not rank contractors and we do not accept payment to change a finding. When a bid looks thin, the most common explanation is a genuine difference in scope, and the second most common is that the salesperson is repeating something the industry told them that is now out of date.
When our reading of a document is uncertain, the finding is downgraded to a question rather than stated as a fact. You will see that as “we could not read X with enough confidence to say so.”
How we make money
When we can help you reach another contractor for a competing bid, we may be paid a referral fee by a contractor network. That fee does not change what our checks report, because the checks run on the document before any of that is involved and the rules are the same for everyone.
We will also link to home warranty and financing products where they are relevant, and we are paid for some of those. Every paid link is marked. If a page names a partner we are paid by, it says so on that page.
We do not sell your quote, your contact details, or your project to anyone without asking you first and telling you exactly who receives it.
What we keep, and why
We keep the quotes people submit. That is deliberate and it is the main reason this tool can get better. Every quote teaches us what a complete quote for that job looks like, and in aggregate they tell us what work actually costs in a given area — which is something no published source will tell you honestly, because everyone publishing costs is selling something.
We store three things:
- The quote text. Before it reaches anyone working on pricing, we remove the name, service address, phone number, email, ZIP and contractor licence number. What is left is the scope, the equipment, and the money.
- What we read from it — each value, how confident we were, and the words we read it from. This is how we find out where our reading is weak.
- What we told you, stamped with the version of the rules that produced it. When we improve a rule we can go back and see what we would have said before, instead of quietly rewriting history.
Your individual quote is never published, shown to another user, or sent to a contractor. When we talk about local costs we are talking about many quotes together.
The permission we ask for early
One of the boxes on the form asks whether we may, later, contact contractors on your behalf to get competing bids. That product does not exist yet. We ask now because consent is the one thing that cannot be collected retroactively — if we build it and have never asked, we would have to start from nobody.
Leaving it unticked costs you nothing today. If you tick it, nothing happens until that feature exists, and we will tell you who we contacted and what we shared before we act on it.
Deleting it
After a check we give you a reference code. Send it to us and we mark the consent revoked and schedule everything tied to it for deletion. There is a short grace period in case the request was a mistake, and after that the text is gone.
Only the first box — keeping the quote at all — is required, because reading a quote we are not allowed to keep is not something we want to have done. Everything else is genuinely optional and unticking it does not change your result.
When we are wrong
Rules change. The refrigerant rule that matters most here changed twice in eighteen months, most recently in May 2026. If a finding looks wrong to you or to your contractor, we want to hear about it, and the source link on each finding is there so you can check us rather than trust us.