Check our homework. Every figure is sourced.
You are about to make a four or five figure decision partly on what you read here. So rather than ask you to trust a byline, every number on this site carries the source it came from and the date we pulled it - because a citation you can open beats a credential you cannot verify.
Bad home-improvement advice is expensive in a way bad advice usually is not - you find out two winters later, once the work is covered up. So the standard we hold ourselves to is not that we sound authoritative. It is that you can check any figure on this site without leaving your chair.
Four rules we publish against.
They are deliberately checkable. A promise you cannot audit is decoration.
Every number carries its source
Cost ranges cite the dataset or the industry survey they came from, with the date it was retrieved. Click it and read the original. If a figure on this site has no source beside it, that is a defect - tell us and we will source it or delete it.
Ranges, never a single price
A national average is the least useful number in home improvement, because nobody lives in the national average. We publish the spread and say what moves you within it.
Dated, and re-checked
Material prices move. Every cost page shows when it was last reviewed, so you can judge for yourself whether it is stale rather than trusting that it is not.
We say when we do not know
Where we have not been able to source something properly, the section is left out rather than padded with a plausible guess. Some categories on this site are visibly thinner than others for exactly that reason.
What this page used to say
Until recently this page introduced four expert reviewers by name, with photographs and credentials - a professional engineer, a licensed public adjuster, a master roofer, a cost estimator. They were written as illustrations of the kind of board we intend to build, and they were presented to you as real people.
That was indefensible, particularly on a site whose entire argument is that you should not have to take a stranger’s word for their qualifications. We have removed them. We would rather show you a thinner page that is true.
What replaced them is smaller and real. The people who write and check this site are now named, with photographs and roles, on our team page - and you should notice what those profiles do not carry. No licence numbers, no certifications, no awards. Every one of those would be a claim you cannot verify, which is the exact failure this page was written about.
An externally credentialed board of licensed roofers, adjusters and engineers is still being built, and it will be held to the standard we hold contractors to: names, licence numbers, and a registry you can check them against. Until that exists we will keep saying it does not.
See the work behind the advice.
How we check every pro
The six-point check a company passes before it can be matched with you - and the date stamp on each one.
See the methodWhere the cost figures come from
The datasets behind our ranges, how they are combined, and how often they are refreshed.
Read the methodFound something wrong?
An unsourced number or a figure that looks off. Corrections are the cheapest quality control we have.
Tell us
The job will still be there next month.
It will just cost more, and you will be choosing in a hurry - which is how most people end up with the contractor they regret. Getting matched takes about a minute and costs nothing.
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