Editorial policy

How a figure gets onto the site

It starts as a document — a manufacturer’s data sheet, a code clause, a federal dataset — or, where nobody publishes a usable national price, an estimate of our own, labelled as an estimate on the sources page. The document is registered with its publisher, title, edition and the date it was opened. Only then can a calculation reference it, and it references it by identifier, not by a sentence someone typed.

That is why the sources page is generated rather than written. A citation on a calculator and the entry on that page are the same record, so they cannot drift apart, and a figure with no source cannot be shipped — it fails to compile.

Who writes it, and how AI is used

The pages are drafted with the help of an AI model, working from the registered sources and from the calculator engines, and edited by Pablo Ruiz Quintero, who decides which sources count, what every default value is, and what gets published. The model writes prose. It never produces a figure: every number on a page is computed by the same engines that run the calculators, from cited inputs, and the code will not build if a figure has no source.

The price ranges that are our own are estimates, and the sources page says so. They were set by the editor, not measured by a survey or a sample of quotes, and they are being replaced with sourced figures — federal wage data for labour, dated retail listings for materials — one page at a time, each change in the changelog.

Who reviews it

Every page shows the date it was published. It is set when the page goes out and is never refreshed automatically on deploy, because a date that updates itself tells you nothing. Every page has been read by the editor before publication. A line-by-line check of a page against each of its sources is a separate, slower step, and a page will only say it was reviewed once that check has been done.

Where a figure is a judgement rather than a citation — a waste allowance, a crossover point, a rule of thumb from the trade — it is labelled as a judgement and the reasoning is printed next to it. You are meant to be able to disagree with a specific number without having to distrust the whole page.

What we will not do

• We do not sell materials, take a cut of a quote, or pass your details to a contractor. There is no lead form on this site and there will not be one.
• We do not let a sponsor set a number. If a supplier ever pays for placement it will be labelled as advertising, kept away from the calculators, and it will never change a default, a price range or a recommendation.
• We do not cite other calculators. A figure that can only be traced to a competitor is not sourced, it is copied — and copied figures are how the same error ends up on thirty sites.
• We do not publish a number the model produced. The takeoff reader turns your words into geometry and nothing else; every quantity comes from the same engines that run the calculator pages.
• We do not fabricate precision. Where a range is honest, you get a range. A single confident figure that hides its tolerance is worth less than a range that admits it.

How the site is funded

Today it is funded by its author and carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no sponsored content. If that changes, this paragraph changes with it, on the date it changes, and the entry goes in the changelog — advertising is a business decision, but concealing it is an editorial one.

Mistakes

Wrong numbers get published in corrections, with what they said, what they say now, how the error was found and how far off it was. Not edited away quietly — including the ones we found ourselves.

What this site is not

It is not a quote, and it is not engineering advice. It does not know your soil, your access, your local amendments or your inspector. For anything structural, the drawing and the building official win over anything a web page told you.