About CostPatch

We built CostPatch because the gap between what homeowners pay and what work actually costs is the kind of unfairness that compounds over a lifetime. Most "cost guides" on the internet are owned by lead-generation companies whose financial interests run opposite to the homeowner's. Ours don't.

What we publish

For 8 home exterior services across all 50 US states, we publish:

• Per-service cornerstone guides with national ranges, cost factors, and step-by-step decision frameworks
• State-by-state pricing derived from public Bureau of Labor Statistics Regional Price Parity data applied to national medians
• Interactive calculators for every service, factoring in your project size, materials, and state
• Contractor tactic disclosures — when sales pressure, financing-driven quotes, or scope inflation typically appear
• Insurance and tax credit guides for storm damage, IRA energy credits, and home warranty edge cases

Our mission

Home services is the consumer category with the largest documented price-information asymmetry — homeowners buy each service once or twice in a lifetime, while contractors deal in those services daily. That asymmetry is worth roughly $30–80 billion per year in excess American household spending versus a fair-market baseline. Our mission is to close that gap, one cost-guide article at a time.

We're not the first cost-guide site. Sites like HomeGuide and Fixr have existed for years. The difference is structural: most existing cost-guide sites are owned by lead-generation networks (Networx, Angi, Modernize) whose revenue scales with more homeowner spending, not less. That conflict of interest shows up in their content — ranges biased high, sales pressure framed as urgency, fine print that obscures real cost drivers.

CostPatch earns affiliate commissions from lead-gen referrals too — we'd be dishonest to claim otherwise — but our editorial direction is deliberate: tell readers what overcharge looks like, even when it costs us a referral. Sometimes the right answer is "you don't need this work yet" or "a $500 fix beats a $25,000 underpinning". That's the work we want to do.

How we work

Our pricing data combines four sources:

1. BLS Regional Price Parity (2022) — the official US government index of cost-of-living differences by state and metro. Applied to national medians to derive state-level pricing.
2. Lead-gen platform aggregates — quote data from Networx, Bark, and similar networks where the median quote across thousands of jobs serves as our national baseline.
3. Contractor surveys — direct phone calls to 5–10 contractors per service per quarter to ground-truth our ranges against current-market reality.
4. Industry trade publications — Construction Specifier, JLC Online, Remodeling Magazine for material cost trends.

Every cost claim on the site cites its derivation. State estimates show their methodology footer ("National median $X × BLS RPP 2022 applied to [State]"). Ranges are wide because contractor pricing varies materially within a metro — a quote in a typical range is market-priced, a quote well above is worth questioning.

AI involvement disclosure

Articles on CostPatch are researched and drafted with significant AI assistance (Claude by Anthropic), then reviewed and revised by our team for factual accuracy, tone alignment, and removal of common AI patterns ("delve into", "crucial", "it's worth noting"). We disclose this directly because:

• AI-assisted content is increasingly common but rarely disclosed; we think readers deserve to know
• Our methodology relies on verifiable public datasets (BLS, government tax credits, industry trade pubs) — AI helps with synthesis and structure, not source-of-truth
• Every pricing figure is human-verified before publication

About H19 Research Group

CostPatch is published by H19 Research Group LLC, a Wyoming-registered research and publishing company. The team has a background in economics, agricultural research, and quantitative analysis (see our team page for full bios). We chose Wyoming for our LLC for the same reason many small publishers do: minimal franchise tax and clear liability separation from personal assets.

Get in touch

Found a pricing range that doesn't match what your local contractor quoted? We refresh quarterly and welcome ground-truth corrections. Email [email protected] — see our contact page.

Want to read more about our process? See our methodology page and editorial standards.