The AskBaily Promise

Angi’s public fee schedule discloses lead prices of $15–$85 per contact, with each homeowner lead sold to between 3 and 8 contractors simultaneously. Thumbtack operates on the same structure: contractors pay per contact, and competing bids land in the homeowner’s inbox within minutes of one another. In 2023 the FTC entered a $7.2 million settlement with HomeAdvisor (Angi’s parent at the time) over allegations of deceptive lead practices, including leads sold to contractors who had not consented to specific categories. In October 2025 the Vermont Attorney General announced a $100,000 settlement with Angi Inc. over related consumer-protection concerns about lead-sharing practices in Vermont.

AskBaily does not participate in that model. Every scope that Baily produces — project type, budget band, timeline, permit constraints — is introduced to exactly one contractor. The contractor sees a structured scope document, not a raw lead blob. The homeowner receives one call, from one builder, who has already read the scope. The matching engine considers six signals (service area, license class, live regulator status, insurance currency, prior project history, current capacity), and the first candidate who clears all six is the only candidate who gets the introduction.

If no partner clears all six for a given scope, we tell the homeowner directly rather than routing an unqualified match. The economic model makes this rational: AskBaily earns a tiered 8–15% take-rate on closed projects only. An unqualified match that falls through costs us the opportunity and the homeowner’s trust. There is no revenue from a broken introduction.

The homeowner experience on a shared-lead marketplace is well documented by their users: within 20 minutes of submitting a project, 4–15 contractors call or text, often from numbers the homeowner doesn’t recognize, sometimes at 7am on a Saturday. The auction is won by whoever calls back fastest, not whoever is best-qualified. Homeowners have described the experience as “getting swarmed” — the same phrase appears in consumer reviews across Angi, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor with enough frequency that the FTC took notice.

At AskBaily, the scope interview produces one structured document. That document goes to one contractor. One message. One response window (48 hours). One calendar invite if the homeowner wants to proceed. There is no secondary contractor waiting in case the first one doesn’t respond fast enough — if the first contractor doesn’t respond within 48 hours, the matching engine runs again and selects the next-qualified partner. The homeowner is notified; they are not bombarded.

This is a structural choice with a real cost to us: slower time-to-introduction on projects where a partner is unavailable. We accept that tradeoff because the alternative — fan-out for speed — is the exact problem homeowners already have with the incumbents. A homeowner who has their phone explode with calls after submitting to AskBaily is a homeowner who will correctly conclude that AskBaily is just another lead seller. We are not.

Most contractor marketplaces verify credentials once — at onboarding — and then charge a monthly or annual subscription to maintain listing status. A contractor whose license lapses in February is still listed and contactable in September if they keep paying the platform fee. License checks are expensive at scale, and platforms built on subscription or per-contact revenue have no structural incentive to run them continuously.

AskBaily queries the relevant regulator at the moment of match. Not at onboarding. Not monthly. At match-time, for the specific contractor being considered for the specific scope. In California, that means a live call to the CSLB API confirming the license is active, the classification covers the scope type, and no disciplinary action is open. In New York, the NYC DOB. In New South Wales, NSW Fair Trading and the Home Building Compensation Fund (HBCF). In the United Kingdom, Gas Safe where relevant. In Singapore, the BCA. Verification results are cached for 24 hours and then re-queried — not archived.

If a license is inactive, suspended, or misclassified for the scope at match-time, that contractor is skipped and the next qualified partner in the ranked pool is verified instead. The homeowner is never introduced to an unverified contractor. This is not a claim we can make lightly — it means we run live regulator queries on every match, in every jurisdiction, and we absorb that operational cost. We do it because a contractor with a suspended license can still cause real harm to a homeowner, and the platform that introduced them is morally responsible for that harm even if not legally liable.

We are live in a specific set of cities. We are not live everywhere. If you are in a city or country not covered by our current partner network, we will tell you that directly rather than match you to a contractor outside our qualified pool.

We are early. Our matching engine has made mistakes — partners who passed all six signals but still weren’t the right fit for a given homeowner’s style or communication preference. We publish our match failure rate at /transparency and we update it when it changes.

We do not promise that every project closes. Some scopes are declined by homeowners after introduction. Some are declined by contractors. Some are paused for budget reasons. The three locks above are about the matching process — they say nothing about whether a project will ultimately get built.

We do not promise that our live verification catches every edge case in every jurisdiction. Regulator APIs go down. Data lags. A license suspended after our 24-hour cache window could theoretically produce a match we wouldn’t have made with real-time data. We try to minimize this with the 24-hour re-verification cycle, but the risk is not zero and we don’t claim it is.