Why we hold contractor prices for 45 days before publishing them

The most useful thing this site could eventually offer is a real answer to "what does this cost around here" — built from what contractors in your county actually charged, not from a national average with a regional multiplier bolted on.

That is also the most dangerous thing it could offer, if built carelessly. So before a single price is published, here is exactly how it will work and why.

The problem with a live price feed

Start with what a price database looks like from the outside.

If a landscaping contractor in Amherst can log in and see, today, what other Amherst landscapers charged for mulch installation this week, that is not market research. That is a mechanism by which competitors observe each other's current pricing continuously — and the reason it matters is that the same information, exchanged deliberately, is something antitrust law takes an extremely dim view of.

The legal ground here shifted recently. For decades, contractors and trade associations relied on a set of Department of Justice and FTC safety-zone guidelines that treated exchanges as safe if the data was aggregated, anonymized, managed by a third party, historical, and drawn from enough participants. Those guidelines were withdrawn, and the DOJ's 2026 settlement in the Agri Stats matter proceeded on the view that aggregation and anonymization alone are not a safe harbor. What matters is whether the exchange has the effect of stabilizing prices — and near-current data is the ingredient that makes that possible.

None of which means price data is off limits. Published cost information is genuinely valuable to homeowners, and there is a long tradition of it. It means the design has to be deliberate.

The four rules

1. Never at company level

No published figure will ever be attributable to an individual contractor. Not by name, not by a code, not by a filter narrow enough to identify one business by inference.

The original plan for this site included a feature where you could search quotes from a specific contractor. That is gone, and it is not coming back. In its place, a contractor can publish a rate card about themselves — their own rates, their own choice, shown publicly under their own name. That gives a homeowner the same useful thing (what does this company charge) with none of the exposure, because it is a business voluntarily advertising its own prices, which is just advertising.

2. Aged at least 45 days

No contribution enters a published average until it has sat for a minimum of 45 days.

This is the rule that does the most work. Historical pricing tells a homeowner what a job costs — that is what they need, and a six-week-old figure serves it perfectly well. Near-current pricing is what would let a contractor track a competitor's moves week to week, and that is the capability we are deliberately removing. Delay is what separates a useful reference from a signaling mechanism.

3. At least three contributors, and no one dominant

A figure is published only when at least three separate contractors have reported that job type in that region, and no single contributor accounts for more than roughly 70% of the figure.

Two contributors is not an average, it is two prices — and if you know one of them, you can derive the other. The dominance cap handles the subtler version: three contributors where one supplied nine of the eleven jobs is effectively one contractor's pricing with decoration.

Below the threshold, you see the generic national range and a note saying why. You will see a lot of that at first. That is the system working.

4. Equal access, always

The aggregates are free and public. Homeowners see exactly what contractors see.

This is the rule people find surprising, and it is the one I am most confident about. A pricing dashboard available only to producers is the risky shape — non-public information circulating among competitors. Making the same data public to the customers those prices are charged to defuses that almost entirely, because information a customer can read is not a private exchange.

It also happens to be the version that works commercially. A public pricing reference is a page that ranks in search and gets read. A gated contractors-only dashboard is a login wall that Google cannot index. The safe version and the version that actually builds an audience turn out to be the same version, which is a rare and welcome thing.

What contractors get out of it

A fair question, since contributing is voluntary and the benefit is not obvious.

Their own numbers back, structured. A contractor who saves quotes accumulates their own history — production rates, material costs, what they actually charged — which is the raw material for pricing better. That is worth having whether or not they ever contribute a thing.

A regional reference for their own use. The same published averages homeowners see are useful to a contractor entering a new town or a new service line.

Customers who arrive already informed. A homeowner who has read what a job costs and why is a dramatically better lead than one who has not. Every contractor who has spent an evening explaining why a quote is not a rip-off knows the value of that.

And one more thing worth being blunt about: the checkbox that contributes a quote to the database is unticked by default and always will be. A contractor who never contributes gets the full use of the tool anyway.

What is on the dataset page right now

Sample data. All of it, marked with a banner saying so.

The map, the state and metro drill-down, the suburb-level breakdown around Buffalo — the structure is real and the numbers are illustrative. No contractor has reported anything yet, because the site launched this week. Publishing invented regional prices as though they were real is the one thing that would genuinely damage this project's credibility later, so the banner stays until the thresholds above are actually met.

You can see the rules operating in the interface already: states with no data show a "needs three contributors" message rather than a number. That is not a placeholder. That is how it will behave permanently.

Frequently asked

Can I see the raw contributions? No. Only aggregates that clear the thresholds, and never anything company-level.

What region counts as "my region"? The published breakdown goes national, state, metro and then suburb-level where the data supports it. The narrower the geography, the harder the three-contributor threshold is to meet — which is intentional, since a "suburb average" from two companies would identify both.

Will you sell the data? No.

Run your own numbers

You can measure a job and see the installed range today; until the database has real depth it does the honest thing and shows a wide national range, and tells you it is wide. What it also shows is the structure underneath — crew hours, labor rate, material, disposal, overhead — which is the part that lets you evaluate a quote even without local averages.

Sources: United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, on the withdrawal of prior information-exchange safety-zone guidance and the 2026 Agri Stats settlement. Contractor-directory boundaries drawn from California Contractors State License Board guidance on when a referral service becomes a contractor.

Educational use, and not legal advice. If you operate a price-reporting service, talk to an antitrust lawyer about your own facts.