Notes from the first stretch of reports

Three things stood out when I went through the first stretch of reports homeowners have shared on this site.

First, the cheapest numbers in almost every category are not benchmarks. They are misfiled service calls. A diagnostic visit or a minor repair logged under "HVAC replacement." The first time I saw a $75 at the bottom of a five-figure range, I assumed the dataset was broken. It was just a category error. The fix is editorial: on service pages that carry an obvious low-end outlier, I now add a short italic note explaining which reports are pulling the range down and why they are probably not a useful comparison for someone getting a quote for that specific job. That note is the single most valuable piece of content on some pages.

Second, the middle 50% is almost always more useful than the median. Homeowners looking at a quote do not need a single number. They need a band that tells them whether they are inside the zone where most people land, or outside of it. Two quotes at the same headline price can sit in very different positions within that band depending on scope, and a single median cannot capture that. Everywhere the site surfaces a range now, it is the p25 to p75, not the full min-max.

Third, the geographic dimension matters more than I thought. Not for the reasons I expected (labor rate differences, permit costs) but because the mix of jobs logged under the same service is regionally different. "Fence installation" in Texas is mostly 100+ foot runs of cedar. "Fence installation" in a dense northeast city is mostly 20-foot chain-link runs behind a row house. Same category. Different price universe. If you are checking a quote, comparing against your state or city is not a nice-to-have. It is the comparison.

None of this is a grand observation. It is the kind of thing that only shows up when you look at real numbers from real people instead of a generic range article. If you have had work done recently and never wrote it down anywhere, sharing what you paid is the single most useful thing you can do on this site.

Connor, founder