What we will and will not print.

Who writes this

Every cost guide on this site is written and maintained by Home Services Marketplace Cost Desk, the editorial function of Home Services Marketplace. That is the name on every byline and the author named in each guide’s structured data, and it is the same thing in both places: a desk, not a person.

We do not name individual writers, and we do not claim a review board or an editorial committee independent of the brand, because there is none. What the desk publishes is governed by the rules below, and by the way the cost figures are produced — which the desk does not control, as the next section explains.

The rules

Ranges, never quotes

Every figure we publish is a typical-cost range for work like yours in your region. It is not a bid, an offer, or a promise about what any company will charge. We do not guarantee that a contractor will bid inside a published range, and a bid outside one is not evidence that anybody did anything wrong.

Range language is the site’s rule, not this page’s: the terms of use state it, and every cost surface renders a low-to-high span because a span is what the reference data holds.

Our cost figures are never typed

The numbers we hold out as costs — every row of a cost table, and the range you are shown — are not written by anyone. A guide’s cost table stores a row label and a key and carries no figure at all; the figure is looked up from the reference data when the page is served. Where prose sits directly beside per-material costs, a dollar sign is rejected outright when the document is validated, rather than left to an author’s discipline.

The point of the rule is drift: a typed number stays where it was typed when the underlying data moves. A looked-up number cannot. What the rule does NOT cover is every number a guide can mention — a guide may quote a third party’s amount, a utility rebate say, in prose. Those are that party’s figures rather than our cost data, and the sourcing rules below are what govern them.

Sources sit with the claim

Where a section makes a checkable claim about the world — a licensing threshold, a building-code requirement, an insurance credit, a humidity guideline — the citation is rendered in that section, next to the sentence it supports, rather than pooled in a bibliography at the bottom.

Not every section carries them, and the sections that summarize or that simply render the cost data deliberately do not: a summary line is argued in full further down the page, and a figure selected from reference data cites the row that produced it rather than an author’s second opinion about it.

A source has to say the thing

A link earns its place by containing the specific sentence the guide leans on — not by loading. That distinction is not theoretical: in one round of checking, two candidate sources were dead and a third returned a perfectly healthy page answering an entirely different question.

An uncited claim beats an invented one

When a figure cannot be verified we state the claim qualitatively or leave it out. We do not borrow a plausible-looking number from somewhere adjacent.

A real example, and you can check it: our bath guides say a midrange remodel ranks ahead of an upscale one on cost recouped, and give no percentage — because the edition of the study that would have supplied the percentage could not be verified. The ranking survives verification; the number did not, so the number is not there.

A correction is an edit

Guides are records, not files. Correcting one changes that record in place: the address stays the same, and so does every link and bookmark pointing at it. There is no second page and no silent replacement.

A guide also carries its own content date, and that date moves only when the writing moves. Fixing a typo does not re-date a page as fresh — a freshness claim nobody wrote is still a claim.