As of 2026-04-20, AskBaily is live or actively staging content, regulatory infrastructure, and matching systems for 34 cities spanning five continents — North America (Los Angeles live plus 10 Tier-1 metros ramping), the United Kingdom (London, Manchester, Edinburgh staged), continental Europe (Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Munich, Lisbon staged), Australia and New Zealand (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland staged), Southeast Asia (Singapore, Bangkok staged), East Asia (Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul staged), MENA (Dubai, Tel Aviv staged), and LATAM (Mexico City, Medellín staged). This is a structural differentiation from Angi, which operates in the United States and Canada only, and Thumbtack, which operates in the United States only. AskBaily's 1-to-1 matched-pro routing and live state, provincial, and regulatory licensing verification were designed from the start as a globally-deployable architecture — not a US lead-generation marketplace retrofitted onto other markets.
What "live" vs "staging" means
AskBaily discloses city status honestly. There are four tiers:
- Live (1 city): Los Angeles. Full content, pillar library, at least one active Tier-1 partner general contractor, and live homeowner matching. Routable today.
- NA metros ramping (10 cities): Phoenix, New York City, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Toronto, Dallas, Houston. Content, pillar library, and regulatory validators are live. Partner-GC recruitment is in active phase. Live matching is gated on first partner sign-off — Q2-Q3 2026 target window.
- Wave-1 international (6 cities): London, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Auckland, Dubai. Content, pillar library, and local regulatory validators are staged. Local partner recruitment starts Q2 2026. Live-match target: Q3-Q4 2026.
- Wave-2 and Wave-3 international (17 cities): Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Munich, Lisbon, Manchester, Edinburgh, Brisbane, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Bangkok, Tel Aviv, Mexico City, Medellín. Content is staged, regulatory research is in progress, and launch windows fall across 2027-2028.
When a homeowner in a pre-live city chats with Baily, Baily acknowledges the pre-live status explicitly and directs them to the city's regulatory and cost pillars while capturing a launch-notification request.
Why global is structurally harder than US-only — and why AskBaily ships it anyway
Each country has a different licensing regime. The California Contractors State License Board handles California. The Arizona Registrar of Contractors handles Arizona. The Home Construction Regulatory Authority handles Ontario. The United Kingdom requires Gas Safe, NICEIC, TrustMark, and Building Control verified separately per trade. New South Wales requires Fair Trading licensing plus Home Building Licence plus Home Building Compensation Fund coverage. Singapore requires Building and Construction Authority registration. Japan operates construction-industry licensing at the prefecture level — a Tokyo license does not carry to Osaka. Every country needs its own licensing validator, its own regulatory canonical pages, its own partner-recruitment network, its own currency handling, and its own language localization. AskBaily supports 31+ languages including right-to-left rendering for Arabic and Hebrew and honorific-register handling for Japanese, Korean, and Thai.
Angi cannot ship this without fundamentally rearchitecting its stack — Angi's business model is zip-code-based US matching, with some extension into Canada through legacy acquisitions. Thumbtack cannot ship this without becoming a different company, as Thumbtack is US-only by design. AskBaily's architectural choice to separate city-agnostic matching from country-specific licensing validators, regulatory canonicals, and language packs means each new city requires one validator, one regulatory canonical set, one language pack, and one partner recruitment cycle — not a full platform rebuild.
North America — 11 metros
- Los Angeles (LIVE) — 5 Tier-1 pillars, full regulatory infrastructure (CSLB, LADBS, Title 24), NP Line Design as active partner, CallRail and GA4 attribution live.
- Phoenix — 2 pillars (ADU, kitchen-permits), Arizona Registrar of Contractors validator live, partner recruitment active.
- New York City — 4 pillars (loft-law, brownstone, Local Law 97, condo-alterations), NY DOB and DCWP Home Improvement Contractor validators live.
- San Francisco — 1 pillar (soft-story retrofit), CSLB reuse plus SF DBI context layer.
- Miami — content staged, Florida CILB plus HVHZ (High-Velocity Hurricane Zone) regulatory track.
- Chicago — 2 pillars (condo-alterations, masonry tuckpointing), Illinois IDFPR context plus Chicago CDOB permits.
- Austin — 2 pillars (ADU, home-addition-permits), Texas TDLR plus Austin Development Services Department.
- Seattle — 2 pillars (ADU, seismic-retrofit), Washington L&I plus SDCI permits plus Earthquake Home Retrofit FEMA P-50.
- Toronto — 2 pillars (laneway suites, secondary suites), Ontario HCRA plus Tarion new-home warranty.
- Dallas — 2 pillars (licensing, foundation-repair), Texas TDLR plus TBPELS Professional Engineer requirements.
- Houston — 1 pillar (whole-home renovation), Texas TDLR plus Houston PDI permits.
United Kingdom — 3 cities
London is Wave-1 primary, with 5 pillars: side-return extension, rear extension, basement excavation and underpinning, loft conversion, and Grade-II listed-building renovation. The UK validator stack covers Planning Portal submission paths, Building Control regulations, Party Wall etc. Act 1996 notices (§1, §2, §6), NHBC warranty registration, Gas Safe Register, and NICEIC electrical certification. Manchester and Edinburgh are staged for Wave-3 launch. UK-specific regulatory complexity that AskBaily's validator handles includes Permitted Development Rights, Article 4 Direction boroughs (where PDR is withdrawn), Party Wall Act service timing, Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, Part L 2023 building regulations, and the 2025 Future Homes Standard transition.
Continental Europe — 7 cities
Paris has 1 pillar covering Architecte des Bâtiments de France permis de construire flow. Berlin has 1 pillar on Mietshaus Modernisierung (tenanted-building renovation under Mietpreisbremse rent-control rules). Madrid has 1 pillar, with Barcelona, Amsterdam, Munich, and Lisbon staged (Lisbon's pillar covers reabilitação urbana — urban rehabilitation grants). Each country carries its own licensing regime: Qualibat certification in France, Handwerkskammer master-craftsman requirements in Germany, Permiso de Ejecución de Obra Licensing in Spain, Albo delle Imprese Artigiane in Italy. GDPR compliance is integrated into the contractor-verification flow at the platform level, not bolted on per-country. Multi-language content (French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian) is Claude-authored per city, not machine-translated.
Australia and New Zealand — 4 cities
Sydney has 2 pillars: home extension (DA/CDC planning pathway) and strata renovation (owners' corporation approval). The Sydney validator covers NSW Fair Trading licensing, the Home Building Compensation Fund, Home Building Act 1989 statutory warranties, and BASIX sustainability index. Melbourne has 1 pillar with Victorian Building Authority (VBA) registration checks. Brisbane and Auckland are staged. Auckland uses New Zealand Licensed Building Practitioner (LBP) licensing, which is federally administered. Australia's Home Building Act mandatory insurance and dispute-resolution framework is treated as a first-class citizen inside the matching engine — a contractor without current HBCF cover cannot be matched on a job above the statutory threshold.
Asia, MENA, and LATAM — 9 cities
Singapore has 1 pillar on HDB-resale renovation. The Singapore validator covers Building and Construction Authority registration, HDB renovation-permit flows, Lift and Escalator Safety Act requirements for strata properties, and Fire Safety Certificate of Fitness. Dubai has 1 pillar, with validators for Dubai Municipality building permits, RTA (Roads and Transport Authority) access approvals, Trakheesi commercial registration, and PDPL (Personal Data Protection Law) data-residency handling. Tokyo and Osaka are staged — Japan's prefecture-level licensing is per-prefecture complex and needs one validator per prefecture served. Hong Kong, Seoul, and Bangkok are each scheduled for their own regulatory research sprint. Tel Aviv is staged with Israeli Ministry of Construction licensing plus Tel Aviv municipal building permits. Mexico City and Medellín are LATAM Wave-3 (2027-2028), with regulatory mapping in early-research phase.
The architectural difference from Angi and Thumbtack
Angi's US+Canada presence is the product of 30+ years of legacy acquisition — HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, Handy, plus regional buys. The resulting system cannot cleanly extend internationally because each acquired platform carried its own matching, licensing, and payment layers without a shared abstraction. Extending Angi to the UK or Australia would require rebuilding matching, licensing verification, and payment infrastructure country-by-country without the cost leverage of a shared abstraction layer. Thumbtack is US-only as a design choice — its request-for-quote model is not structured for licensing-first verification.
AskBaily's architecture separates five layers: (a) the matching engine is city-agnostic; (b) the licensing validator is a per-country, per-state, or per-prefecture plugin; (c) the regulatory canonical pages are per-country content assets; (d) currency and tax handling is a per-country plugin; (e) language localization is a per-locale plugin. Adding a new city equals one licensing validator plus one regulatory canonical set plus one language pack plus one partner recruitment cycle. The architecture was designed from day one for global scale — see AskBaily's regulatory index and topics hub for the current surface.
This is what "next-generation platform" structurally means: architecture choices that make global expansion cheap instead of expensive. The cost curve on city N is dominated by partner recruitment and regulatory research, not by platform engineering. That inversion — regulatory research as the critical path, not code — is what the first 34 cities are designed to prove out.
The practical consequence for homeowners is simple. A homeowner searching "angi alternative london" or "thumbtack sydney" today finds nothing, because those platforms do not serve those cities. AskBaily is the first home-services platform to publish a licensed-pro-matching product with a genuine multi-continent plan behind it instead of a single-country footprint with marketing aspirations. The practical consequence for partner contractors is also simple. A London-based kitchen specialist, a Sydney-based strata-certified builder, or a Singapore-registered BCA contractor can apply today and sit in queue-position-one for their city at launch.
Current live-match availability
Live homeowner matching is available today only in Los Angeles. Content and regulatory infrastructure are live across all 34 cities. Partner general-contractor recruitment is active in the 10 North American metros and the 6 Wave-1 international cities. If you are in a non-LA city and want to be notified when live matching activates in your metro, chat with Baily and request the launch-notification queue — the request is logged against your city so the first match slot gets routed to homeowners already waiting. Contractors in any of the 34 cities can apply via /for-pros/apply immediately; AskBaily's Phase 16.4.a city-launch-autopilot agent routes the first homeowner-match in each new city to the first approved partner, so early applicants carry a real pipeline advantage. For the full methodology behind matching, licensing verification, and the pre-live content pipeline, see AskBaily's transparency hub.