Not a shop trying to lowball you, not a shop trying to pad the bill — just a straight, public answer to a question that shouldn't be this hard to get.
Ask three shops for a quote on the same job and you'll get three different numbers, and no real way to know which one is fair. That's not usually dishonesty — it's that pricing in home and auto trades has never been published anywhere a homeowner could actually check it. Every homeowner starts from zero, every time.
That opacity doesn't just cost homeowners money. It punishes the shops that price honestly, because a customer with no reference point can't tell a fair bid from a fly-by-night lowball, or from padding. A market with no visible baseline rewards whoever's best at sounding confident, not whoever's doing the job right.
"The fix isn't a better sales pitch on either side of the table. It's a number both sides can point to."
This project didn't start as a price index. It started as an attempt to build a full home-services marketplace — matching homeowners to pros, handling the whole transaction end to end. Somewhere in the middle of building that, the more valuable thing became obvious: the price transparency piece didn't need a marketplace wrapped around it. It needed to just exist, in public, for free.
So the marketplace ambitions got set aside, and what's left is sharper: eight trades, the same task dictionary in every state, a published method, and a correction loop that gets more accurate every time someone submits what they actually paid.
Pricing transparency shouldn't depend on which metro you happen to live in. The index launched with all 50 states covered on the same method and the same task dictionary, and it grows the same way everywhere: more verified invoices sharpening the bands, more pros flagging rates that are off for their market, and eventually, Augmented Support helping people figure out which job they actually have before they even call anyone.