Contractors pay us. You don’t.
Home Services Marketplace is a marketplace. Reading the cost data and getting an estimate costs a homeowner nothing; the money comes from the contractors who pay to receive a project we matched them to. That is the whole model. The useful part of this page is what it does not change.
Who pays what
- You, the homeowner
- Nothing. There is no fee to see a range, no membership, and no charge for being matched to a company.
Our terms of use put it in the plainest place it appears: our liability to you is limited to the amount you paid us, “which for homeowners is nothing.”
- A contractor
- A price per lead for a project we matched them to, charged on accept rather than on delivery. No subscription, no setup fee, no minimum term.
The full card — the bands by trade, what a firm is never billed for, and how billing runs — is on contractor pricing, which is where those terms are set out rather than summarized.
- Nobody, for a better number
- No figure on this site is for sale. That is structural rather than a policy we maintain: a cost table in a guide stores a label and a unit code and carries no number at all — the figure is looked up when the page is served — so there is nowhere for a paid number to be written.
How the lookup works is on our methodology; the rule that keeps prose out of it is on editorial standards.
What a contractor pays
Per accepted lead, by trade. These are bands, not a firm’s bill: territory density moves the figure inside the band, and we quote a firm’s exact rate during onboarding before it funds anything.
Windows
$38 – $72
per accepted lead
Roofing
$52 – $95
per accepted lead
Bath Remodel
$44 – $88
per accepted lead
We do not publish what any individual firm pays, and we do not publish our revenue. Neither is a number this site could state truthfully today.
What that money does not change
A contractor cannot buy a different range, a different figure in a guide, or a position in the list of firms you are shown.
- Your cost range
- The range is computed when the page is served, from two reference tables: a national typical cost for the work, scaled by a multiplier for your region. Whether a contractor has paid us, how much, and whether any firm covers your ZIP at all are not inputs to that calculation — so two people asking the same question from the same ZIP see the same range.
The reference data and its sources are set out on our methodology.
- Which companies you see
- The companies matched to your project are named on screen, on the step where you give consent, before you submit anything — and those names are recorded with your submission. Today that list is ordered by company name. No position in it is for sale.
The screen you see and the record we keep read the same list, so they cannot disagree about who was disclosed. What may be shared, and when, is on the marketing-partner disclosure.
- What the guides say
- Cost guides are not sponsored and carry no advertising. Where a guide makes a checkable claim about the world, it cites a source next to the claim rather than in a footer nobody reads.
The rules the content is written under are on editorial standards.
What we ask you for, and when
- The range comes first
- The questionnaire opens on a range preview and does not reach contact details until the end. You can see a full cost range without giving a phone number; details are requested when you ask to be connected to contractors, and not before.
- Consent is shown, not buried
- The exact wording you agree to sits directly beneath the submit button, with any matched companies named above it. If no company is named there, none covers your area, and your request goes to no company at all — you still get your range. Every submission records the wording you were shown and the names you were given, and you can ask us for a copy.
The wording in force is published in full at how consent works.
- What happens to your details
- Governed by the privacy notice and the marketing-partner disclosure — the versions in force, linked rather than summarized here.
Deliberate: a page like this one paraphrasing a legal document is how the two come to say different things, and the paraphrase is never the one you agreed to.
Why this page exists
A site that asks for your phone number owes you a straight answer to “who is paying for this?” before you give it. Being coy about the answer would be worse than saying nothing: a reader who works out the business model for themselves has good reason to distrust everything else they read here.
If something on this page does not match what you experienced, that is worth telling us — contact lists the routes that exist, and is equally plain about the ones that do not yet.