About us

If you are not paying,
you are the product.

Anyone who believes something on the internet is free has not heard the oldest rule in the tech business. Most people hear that line and think: fine, but how exactly am I the product? Here is how.

Say you want a dining table built

You go looking on one of the big sites that list contractors. You type in what you need. And then something odd happens: the site offers to let you pick up to ten businesses to send you a quote.

We call that feature the trap. As a customer you think: how convenient, I do not even have to go find them myself, the platform does it for me. And often nothing comes of it. You wanted a rough idea of the price, you got it, and the table stays a plan for another year. Perfectly normal. Nobody thinks about it twice.

What you never find out is that you were just sold.

Because every one of those businesses has to pay to be allowed to write you that quote. Not a token amount. It is called a lead, and it is priced like a commodity.

Trade	Cost of one lead
Roofing	$50 – $120+
General remodeling	$50 – $100+
HVAC	$45 – $100
Plumbing	$40 – $85
Electrical	$35 – $80

Plus roughly $300 a year in membership, and many contractors report a minimum spend of $400 a month. In metro areas the per-lead prices run another 20 to 25 percent higher.³

Now do the arithmetic

Here is the part that decides everything, and it is not an accusation – it is the published business model: the same lead is sold to three to eight businesses at once.³ Say five. Before anyone has even picked up the phone, each of them has a one-in-five chance.

One customer wants a dining table1 request

The request is sold to5 businesses

Each pays, per lead$50 – $120

Jobs actually awarded0 or 1

Platform revenue for one request$250 – $600

Four of those five paid for nothing, guaranteed. Sometimes all five did. And the platform earned every dollar of it without building anything, delivering anything or standing behind anything. It got paid because somebody typed a question into a form.

Whoever gets paid for the contact instead of the job has no reason to care whether the job ever happens.

This is not our opinion. It is on the record.

We are not going to stand here and call anyone a crook. We do not have to. A federal agency already went through it, and the file is public.

Federal Trade Commission · In the Matter of HomeAdvisor, Inc.

In March 2022 the FTC charged HomeAdvisor – the lead business of Angi, the largest contractor platform in the United States – with deceiving the very businesses paying it.¹ The findings:

Leads did not match the trade or the service area the contractor had selected and paid for
The company quoted job-conversion rates it could not substantiate
Leads were sold as requests from customers who had never asked for that service
On top of the per-lead charges: $287.99 a year in membership, and software billed at $59.99 a month that had been advertised as free

The order became final in April 2023: up to $7.2 million.² What reached the affected businesses was capped at $30 each – after years in which some of them had paid thousands.

Separately, contractors have been suing in federal court in Colorado since 2016, including under RICO. Hundreds joined. In their filings they described the leads they had been paying for as „overwhelmingly bogus“.⁴

We go the clean way

None of that exists here. There is no toll on the door of this platform. A contractor who uses WrightGuild pays one fee, once a year. That is all we want. Not per contact, not per quote, not a cut of the job. However many customers find you through us – ten or a thousand – the number on your invoice does not move.

Because let us be honest about what building a dining table actually requires: a customer, and a carpenter, and somebody to put the two of them in the same room. Nothing else. Nobody checking anything, nobody taking a cut, nobody in the middle deciding who gets to talk to whom. We hold to that strictly. No interference, in anything. We provide the modules. That is the whole job.

Imagine walking up to a shopping mall and finding a man at the door who says: if you want to go in, put cash on the table first.

This platform is closer to a bulletin board – a modern one. Whoever wants to pin something up pays once a year for the privilege of pinning it up. That is the entire arrangement.

Who is behind this

I have worked with the internet since 2000, and in all that time I have watched small businesses get cheated.

The budget a small company needs just to do business online climbs every year. The doormen get bolder, and they keep inventing new ways to stay in control.

Here is what that looks like in this trade. Four years ago the published price of a roofing lead ran $15 to $50, and $80 to $100 in the hottest markets.⁵ Today the published range is $50 to $120 and up.⁶ Two to three times higher, in four years.

A roof did not get two to three times more expensive in those four years. Construction prices move two to three and a half percent a year – call it ten percent over the same stretch. The difference between those two numbers does not come out of thin air. It comes out of the contractor's pocket.

Control is an illusion.

Nobody can control a customer. And nobody owns the internet – least of all a doorman. The man who invented it did not sell it.

I want no investors. Take investor money and you stop deciding things in your own shop. And I have no intention of handing what comes in straight over to Google or Meta. Good search results and patience save a great deal of money, and that saving is exactly why the price can stay where it is. What is left I would rather put back into the people who use this.

That is the whole philosophy

One Company. No investors. No advertising budget. One fee, once a year.

And when a tool does its job, people pass it on – in both directions. That is the only marketing I am counting on.

A.J. Cross · Austria

Sources