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How we work

Editorial policy

The rules we hold ourselves to: how cost data is sourced and reviewed, who signs off, how often it's updated, and what advertisers can never touch.

Our editorial standard

Every page on this site exists to help a homeowner make a large, unfamiliar, expensive decision. That sets the bar: useful to someone about to spend five figures, and honest about what we don't know.

Concretely, that means leading with the number, publishing ranges rather than false precision, naming the uncertainty and why it exists, and telling readers when they don't need to spend money. That last one is the editorial commitment that costs us the most, and it's the one we protect hardest.

How cost data is produced

  1. Compile. Figures come from published contractor pricing datasets, rate sheets and industry cost surveys, cross-checked across multiple independent sources.
  2. Normalize. Everything is converted to installed cost including labor, so units are comparable. Where a source quotes materials only, we say so.
  3. Range, don't point. We publish the band real invoices fall into. A single number would be more quotable and less true.
  4. Technical review. Marcus Oyelaran, PE, licensed structural engineer, reviews structural and cost claims before publication and at each update.
  5. Source and date. Every table carries a source strip naming its basis, its year and its review date. A table without one doesn't ship.

Full detail is in our cost methodology.

Review and update schedule

  • Every page carrying dollar figures is reviewed at least annually, and the review date is published on the page.
  • Out-of-cycle updates happen when material market movement, a code change or a reader correction warrants it.
  • The review date is real. We don't refresh a date without re-examining the figures under it. A date that just tracks the calendar is a lie about freshness.

The commercial firewall

These are absolute, not aspirational:

  • No advertiser, affiliate or referral partner sees a page before publication.
  • No payment can alter a cost figure, add a line item, or change a recommendation.
  • No contractor buys placement in a cost table or a ranking position.
  • Monetized links are marked rel="sponsored" and disclosed where they appear, not only in the footer.
  • Editorial recommendations and paid placements are visually and verbally distinct.

Where our revenue comes from is set out in full on how we make money, including the conflicts inherent in it.

What we never publish

  • Claims of testing or inspection we didn't perform. We compile and review cost data; we don't inspect houses, and we never imply otherwise.
  • Fear or urgency framing. No countdowns, no "your home is at risk," no manufactured emergency. Foundation movement takes years.
  • Ratings we didn’t earn or aggregate legitimately. No invented star ratings, no “trusted by thousands,” no review schema without real reviews.
  • Product verdicts we haven’t earned. Our equipment pages compare published specifications and explain which suits which situation. They carry no “best overall,” no editor’s choice, and no implication of hands-on testing, because we have not tested these products. Our build check greps for those phrases and fails the release if it finds them.
  • Contractor rankings ordered by payout.
  • AI-generated cost figures. Numbers come from sourced data and human review, not from a model's estimate of what a number should look like.

How we use images

The photography on this site is illustrative and AI-generated. It shows what a helical pier, a settled walkway or a horizontal block-wall crack typically looks like, so you can compare it against what you are actually seeing at your house. Where people appear, they are generated too — they represent a situation, and they are not customers, staff, or anybody's documented experience.

That has one firm boundary: no number, measurement or diagnosis on this site comes from an image. Cost figures come from sourced data and human review, and a photograph is never evidence for a price, a tolerance or a repair method. Where a page shows a labeled cutaway or a technical diagram, it is drawn to match the sourced text, and the text governs.

The same standard applies as everywhere else here: an image may make a page clearer, and it may never make a page look more authoritative than the data behind it.

Corrections

We correct errors promptly and visibly. If a factual error affects a cost figure or a structural claim, we fix it, update the review date, and note the change where the change is material.

Reader corrections are genuinely valuable to us — especially "I was quoted X and your table says Y." That's the real-world data this site is trying to represent, and a systematic gap between our figures and actual invoices is exactly the thing we want to find. Send corrections with the page and the figure in question.

Limits of what we publish

Cost figures on this site are estimates, not quotes. They describe typical market pricing; they cannot account for your soil, access, local labor market or the scope a licensed professional defines after inspecting your property.

Nothing here is engineering advice for a specific structure. A structural assessment of your house requires somebody standing in it. Where a decision is structural or above roughly $5,000, we recommend an independent structural engineer — consistently, and with no financial interest in your doing so.