Terms of use

Home Cost Doctor produces modelled cost ranges for home improvement projects from pricing data and the project characteristics you supply. That is the entire product.

• It is not a quote or an offer. We do not perform work and cannot contract to do so.
• It is not an inspection or a survey. No model can see your deck condition, your structure, your site access or your local crew availability.
• It is not a valuation, an appraisal, or insurance advice, and must not be relied on in a claim, a dispute, a purchase decision or a legal proceeding.
• It is not financial or legal advice. The payment scenario tool performs arithmetic on figures you enter. We are not a lender, we broker no finance, and we have no lending partners.
• It is not a judgement about any contractor. The quote checker compares a number to our model. A quote outside our range is not evidence of wrongdoing, overcharging or incompetence.

Actual prices vary by contractor, site conditions, materials, labour availability, permits, code requirements, season and market conditions. We publish a confidence score with every estimate, and it is designed to fall when the evidence is weak. Where our data is sample or modelled rather than verified, we say so on the page.

We make no warranty that any estimate is accurate, complete, current or fit for any purpose. Read the methodology before relying on anything here.

Licensing, permitting, insurance and building code requirements differ by state and by municipality, and they change. Anything we say about them is general context, not legal advice, and must be verified with the authority having jurisdiction for your address. Verify any contractor’s licence and insurance directly with the issuing board and the insurer — never from a number printed on a proposal, and never from this site.

If you contribute project cost figures, you confirm they are accurate to the best of your knowledge and that you are entitled to share them. You grant us permission to use them, in aggregate and without identifying you or your property, to improve our pricing model and to publish derived statistics. You can ask us to delete a submission — see the privacy policy.

Do not submit anyone else’s personal information.

• Do not attempt to bypass, evade or overwhelm rate limits.
• Do not scrape the site to build a competing dataset. Our public API exists for programmatic access; ask us for a key.
• Do not submit deliberately false cost data. Every submission is reviewed, and false data damages a dataset other homeowners rely on.
• Do not attempt to access the administrative interface or any account that is not yours.

The partner API is provided under a separate key. Keys may be rate limited, suspended or revoked. Attribution requirements, caching rules and redistribution terms will be set out in the key agreement, and redistribution of our data as a dataset is not permitted without one.

Some data originates from third parties under their own terms and licences, which are recorded on our data sources page. Where a source carries attribution or share-alike obligations, those obligations travel with any derived output.

The service is provided “as is”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we exclude all warranties and are not liable for any loss arising from reliance on an estimate, a comparison, or any other output of this service — including money spent, money not saved, or a decision to hire or not hire a contractor.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. Specific limits and a governing law must be added here before launch.

We may update these terms. Material changes will be reflected in the date at the top of this page.