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Starting this page with the story that started SquaredUp.

Earlier this year my wife came downstairs to politely let me know she'd just taken a very cold shower. I went to the laundry room thinking I'd re-ignite a pilot light or flip a GFCI outlet. Something simple. What I found was much worse. The entire room was covered in water seeping out of the bottom of the hot water heater. My stomach sank. I'm pretty handy and would normally try to fix something like this myself. But two things: the water heater wasn't up to code, and I didn't know how to bring it up to code. So I called a bunch of plumbers and waited.

The first guy quoted over ten thousand dollars, and said if we were spending that much we might as well upgrade to tankless for thirteen. In my gut I knew something was off. I thanked him and said we'd think about it. The next guy quoted five thousand out the door, water heater plus everything needed to bring it up to code. We shook on it, and a few hours later my wife was back to taking hot showers.

I don't know why the first guy was charging twice as much, but I was happy with the second's prices. Still, half the price made me nervous the whole time he was working. What if I'd just hired someone to do crappy work?

Everything turned out fine. But the whole transaction had happened with all the information on one side of the table.

That was the moment SquaredUp started.

The problem in one sentence: homeowners make 4, 5, and even 6-figure decisions about construction work without knowing what fair pricing looks like in their market. The asymmetry is massive. The contractor does this every day and knows what the market will bear. The homeowner does it once every five or ten years, often out of frustration or desperation. They trust the contractor blindly, get a couple of quotes and pick the lowest, or delay the project because they're afraid. It's not that contractors are dishonest. Most I've met aren't. But the problem is structural: one side has all the data, the other side has none. The only way to learn the market is to spend years working in it.

That's what SquaredUp is for: showing homeowners where their quote actually lands.

Tonight (Saturday, well past 10pm) I closed the last technical blocker on the homeowner ad campaign. The analyze pipeline now produces the same answer for the same quote every time. Sounds basic. Took weeks. That's why the ads have been paused: can't sell honest pricing analysis if the same homeowner gets a different number on a refresh. Also flipped squaredup.app off the old marketing site onto fresh code, so what you're reading is from a few hours ago. Caught a contractor signup CTA pointing at a dead-end and fixed it.

Up next: launching the ads.

New updates here every other week. Follow along, share ideas, send your contractor quote stories. hello@squaredup.app.