About CostCandor
Candor, noun: the quality of being open and honest. It's an unusual trait in the home-improvement cost business, which is why we named the site after it.
What this site is
CostCandor publishes free calculators and guides for pricing major home projects in the United States, across five trades: roofing, interior and exterior painting, plumbing (water heaters, sewer lines, whole-house repipes), HVAC, and electrical panel work — the full list lives on the calculator index. Our audience is homeowners facing a four- or five-figure decision — usually for the first time in a decade — who want to know what a fair price looks like before contractors start bidding.
What makes it different
Most cost-estimate sites are lead-generation businesses: the "estimate" exists to collect your phone number, and the real customer is the contractor buying your contact details. CostCandor has no lead forms and sells nothing to contractors. Our estimates are built from published data, and every tool shows its formula, its sources, and the date its pricing data is current to — documented in full on the methodology page.
How the numbers are checked
Every calculator loads a dataset with a visible asOf date and named sources: retailer shelf prices carried with the date each price is attributed to, published contractor cost surveys that supply the labor and installed bands, producer price indexes for equipment trends, and BLS occupational wage figures printed as context (with the occupation code on the page, and the BLS series ID where the figure was pulled from a published BLS series) so you can judge a band against your market — the wage series informs, but the cost surveys and observed prices are what the formulas actually use. Values we could not observe directly are flagged as interpolated in the dataset rather than passed off as measurements. The calculation logic itself is covered by automated regression tests that re-run the published worked examples, so a silent math change cannot ship. When a reader or a newer price shows a number has moved — a promotional price we mistook for a standing one, a spec that changed — we correct the dataset and the page together and update the review date. Details, including every formula, are on the methodology page.
Who runs it
CostCandor is built and maintained by Daniel Park, an AI engineer. It exists because he wanted it for himself. Pricing repairs on his own house meant comparing bids that measured different things — one itemizing what another folded into a lump sum, in units he had to go look up — and the sites that promised to explain the gap turned out to be lead forms. He wrote the first calculators to answer his own questions, and published them once they held up.
The engineering background buys you the boring part: Daniel builds the datasets, writes the calculators and their regression tests, and re-checks pricing; every dataset carries a visible as-of date that each calculator prints on the page. The figures are not model output — they come from the retail prices, cost surveys, and public wage series named on the methodology page, with anything we could not observe directly flagged as interpolated in the dataset. He is not a contractor and doesn't sell home services — which is the point: the numbers here have no stake in what you decide to build. Corrections and challenges to the math are welcome at contact.
How the site is funded
The site is independently operated and runs Google AdSense ad code on its pages; advertisers get no influence over our numbers, rankings, or editorial content, and we will never present an ad as an estimate. Cookie and opt-out details are in the privacy policy.
What we ask of you
Treat every number here as a planning range, not a quote. Get multiple written bids, use our quote checklist to compare them, and when a bid disagrees with our math — ask the bidder why. That conversation is the whole point.