No Lead Fees. No Pay-to-Play. Here's Why.

If you have ever looked for a contractor on Yelp, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, or Angi, you already paid for that contractor's bid. You just did not know it.

Here is how it works.

Most of those sites sell contractors something they call a "lead." On HomeAdvisor, Angi, and Thumbtack, a contractor pays a fee every time a homeowner reaches out, usually somewhere around $15 to $100, and more in big cities or on big jobs. The same request often gets sold to four or five contractors at once. Yelp works a little differently. There, contractors pay for ads and promoted spots. Either way, the contractor is paying just to be seen. Now add up everyone who clicks but never hires, and it runs into thousands a month.

That money has to come from somewhere. It comes out of your bid.

That is the first thing wrong with the old way. The second is who lands at the top of your search.

And the contractors at the top of the page are not always there because they are the best. A lot of that top space is paid for. "Featured." "Sponsored." "Promoted." Those tags look like a stamp of quality. A lot of the time, they are advertising.

So here is the whole chain. You pay the contractor. The contractor pays the site. The site decides who you see. Nobody in that line is working for you.

This is not just our take. In 2023 the Federal Trade Commission ordered HomeAdvisor, the company tied to Angi, to pay up to $7.2 million for making false and misleading claims about the leads it sold to contractors.

We built YouSuperIntendIT the other way around.

What we did instead

I am a working superintendent. On commercial jobsites in the Bay Area, from the first shovel to the day the owner gets the keys, I have been the one reading the plans line by line for the gaps the office missed, making sure the crews do what they promised, and explaining to owners why one number is fair and another one is not. That is the job.

When our family started getting bids for repairs at home, I started really looking at what other homeowners were paying. And it hit me. People do not get bad bids because contractors are bad people. They get bad bids because they do not have a working super in their corner. Nobody whose only job is to read the bid hard and tell them what to push back on.

So I built the working super into a tool.

That is what YouSuperIntendIT is. For $14.99 you upload a contractor's bid and you get back a plain-English read, the same things I check on a commercial bid, said in words a homeowner can use:

• What work is actually included, and what is missing.
• What materials you are really getting, by brand and quality.
• What is just a rough guess in the budget that could climb later.
• What got left out that you will end up paying for.
• How long the job will really take.

Plus the honest benchmarks: what is normal, what is high, and what is too vague to trust. Then we tell you what to get in writing before you sign.

No subscription. No commission to anyone. No contractor pays us to rank higher.

Where the contractors come in

The other half of the platform is the contractors. We list two kinds. Licensed Contractors, who carry a state license. And Skilled Tradespeople, the people who do excellent work and do not always carry a license. Every neighborhood has them, and every honest super knows it.

Here is how working with them is different:

• No per-lead fees. They never pay us when a homeowner reaches out.
• No pay-to-play. They cannot buy their way to the top.
• No fake reviews. We do not build a star system they have to game just to survive.

A contractor who is good at the work should not also have to be good at gaming a website. We let the work speak.

What this means for your bid

When your contractor is not paying $30 for a lead and a few hundred a month for a featured spot, that money is not buried in the price they hand you. We cannot prove the exact dollars on every job. But we know where the slack is, and we know where it is not.

It also means when you ask a contractor on our platform "why is this number what it is," they can give you a straight answer. They are not hiding marketing costs somewhere in your kitchen remodel.

Why family-owned matters here

YouSuperIntendIT is a family business. My wife is the majority owner. We do not answer to investors and we are not building this to sell it. The only math we have to make work is paying our bills and earning enough to keep building this for the homeowners and tradespeople in Vacaville, Solano County, and beyond.

That is a different math than a venture-backed platform that has to grow at any cost. It is why we can sit at $14.99 a bid and never push you toward a pricey monthly membership. It is why we can welcome Skilled Tradespeople who do great work without a state license. And it is why we can keep our promise: no lead fees, no pay-to-play, no games.

You should not have to pay extra just to find out if the bid in your hand is fair. The whole system has been doing it backward.

We built it the right way around, and we put a superintendent in your corner.

Tim is a working California construction superintendent based in Vacaville. He founded YouSuperIntendIT to give homeowners the same critical eye on contractor bids that owners get on commercial jobs.