About Anchorcost

36 cost calculators for home improvement work, covering all 51 states and DC. Free, no account, and the whole estimate is on screen before anyone asks for your name.

Why it exists

Finding out what a project costs is harder than it should be. Search it and you get a range so wide it tells you nothing, a page that wants your phone number before it will say anything at all, or a tool that quietly calculates how many boxes of tile to buy rather than what the job costs.

The useful question is narrower: for a project roughly this size, at roughly this spec, where I live, what is the normal number? That is the only question this site tries to answer.

What we hold to

• The estimate is never gated. Every calculator shows the full itemised range at step five of seven. The contact step comes after, and it is optional. If the numbers were only useful as bait we would not publish them.
• Every figure names its source. Each page carries the ranges it was triangulated from and the date they were captured. You can check our arithmetic against our own sources.
• We would rather say "we don't know". Regional pricing shipped as a flat 1.0 for months because the only free state cost tables available were self-described order-of-magnitude guesses, some of them AI-generated. It went live when a federal wage series could back it, and not before.
• The breakdown adds up. Line items are forced to sum to exactly the headline figure. It sounds trivial; it was a real bug, and a breakdown that does not reconcile is where trust goes.
• No dark patterns. No countdown timers, no fake scarcity, no invented review counts, no consent pre-ticked. The analytics banner declines in one click, in the same place and the same size as accepting, and never asks twice.

How it is funded

If you submit your details, we pass them to home improvement companies and are paid for the introduction. That is the whole model. It is stated here, on the methodology page, in the privacy policy, and in the consent text on the form itself, because a free tool that makes money somehow should say where.

You can see exactly who receives an enquiry, and you can tell us not to share your information at any point.

We also use Google Analytics to see which calculators are useful. That is a third party and it sets a cookie, which is worth saying out loud on a page about what we hold to. It is declinable, it is off entirely if your browser signals Global Privacy Control, and the privacy policy sets out exactly what it collects.

What this is not

We are not a contractor, and we do not perform, supervise, warrant or insure any work. We do not vet the companies who receive an enquiry beyond their own licensing claims, and an introduction is not an endorsement. Check licence and insurance yourself, and take more than one quote.

If a number looks wrong

Tell us. Every calculator states the sources behind it, so a disagreement is usually checkable rather than a matter of opinion, and if our figure sits oddly against its own sources, that is a bug we want to fix. Costs also move, and a page captured in one season can drift by the next.

How we calculate · All calculators · Costs by state