How we verify the sub-trade graph

1 — License-board cross-check

Every declared sub is looked up against the license authority that issues the credential in the sub's jurisdiction. Six boards are fully automated in-line today: California CSLB, Oregon CCB, Washington L&I, NYC DCWP Home Improvement Contractor, Indiana PLA, and Quebec RBQ. The automated integrations pull the sub's license number, status, classification(s), and bond/workers-comp filing directly from the board's public data endpoint on a rolling schedule — not once at signup.

Every other jurisdiction — 82+ states, provinces, and international regions we serve — routes through a 72-hour manual ops review. A human on our operations team looks up the sub's record on the relevant board, captures the status page, and stamps the declared edge with a verified-at timestamp. The verification includes the sub's insurance certificate (general liability minimum, plus workers-comp where applicable) and, for trades where it is required, the bond number.

A license that lapses mid-relationship causes the sub record to flip to an inactive state and the matching engine stops surfacing that sub's edges. The edge itself is preserved — edges are append-only — but a new edge is required to re-activate the relationship after the license is reinstated.

2 — Payment-record verification

A GC can claim any sub on the application form. A GC cannot pay a sub without it going through the AskBaily payment splitter, and the payment splitter only accepts sub payouts that reference an existing edge in the graph. This means that over time, the set of edges where real payments have flowed is a strict subset of the set of edges that have been declared — and that subset becomes the visible, ranked graph in the homeowner-facing view. Declared but never-paid edges are flagged as unverified and shown with a distinctive surface so that homeowners can tell the difference between a paper claim and an active relationship.

The payment splitter writes a SubAssignment record per line-item, linking the payment to (a) the project, (b) the milestone that gated its release, and (c) the sub-trade edge that entitled the sub to the payout. The ledger retains this record indefinitely and it is not editable.

3 — Photo evidence on completed jobs

At each milestone (rough-in, pre-drywall inspection, finish install, project close) AskBaily captures photo evidence from the GC's mobile app. Photos are EXIF-stripped, watermarked, and tied to the specific sub-trade edge they represent — the plumbing rough-in photos are linked to the plumbing sub's edge, the tile install photos are linked to the tile sub's edge, and so on. This creates a visual portfolio for each sub that is cross-referenceable across every GC who works with that sub.

The photos feed the sub's digital-twin record. Over time the twin accumulates a portfolio of work product that is independent of any single GC's marketing materials. Homeowners see the portfolio on the sub-trade view.

4 — Peer-vouching signals

When two AskBaily GCs both declare the same sub, that is a stronger signal than either declaration individually. We weight cross-GC appearances in the confidence score computation. A plumbing firm that appears on three different GCs' graphs across the same metro is a different tier of trust signal than one that appears on a single GC's graph. The graph is the only place this information exists — it cannot exist on any platform that treats the GC as a black box.

5 — Dispute handling

When a dispute opens against a sub-trade edge, the dispute record writes to the same ledger as the edge itself. Disputes carry severity, category (scope, payment, quality, schedule), and outcome. Resolved-in-sub-favor, resolved-in-homeowner-favor, settled-split, open, and escalated-to-Jason are the five outcome states. The sub's digital twin stores the rolling dispute history so that pattern risks (repeat-disputant patterns, escalating severity) are visible to the matching engine even when the individual homeowner complaint is anonymized.

6 — The Trust Ledger

All of the above — edges, payments, photos, cross-vouches, disputes — write into a single append-only event log. The log is a Merkle-tree structure: each event carries the hash of the prior event, so any attempt to alter history fails a hash-chain check. External auditors can verify any claim AskBaily makes about a sub-trade relationship by replaying the log from any point forward.

The Trust Ledger is described in detail in our patent provisional (“Trust-Ledger: Merkle-Append-Only Event Log for Contractor Marketplace Relationships”). In plain terms: we cannot quietly remove a bad outcome from a sub's record, and neither can the GC or the sub themselves. Everything that was declared stays declared; it can only be superseded by a new event.

7 — What this means for homeowners

When you see a sub listed under a GC's declared network on AskBaily, you are seeing a statement that has survived six distinct checks: the license board confirms the firm exists and is in good standing, the payment ledger confirms money has actually flowed between the GC and the sub, photo evidence confirms the sub did the work that was paid for, cross-vouches from other GCs confirm the relationship is not fabricated, the dispute history confirms no material pattern of unresolved complaints, and the Trust Ledger confirms nothing has been quietly edited. This is as much evidence as any residential marketplace has ever assembled for a single contractor-sub relationship.

8 — What this means for pros

The methodology is the reason you cannot transfer your AskBaily-accumulated trust history to Angi or Thumbtack or any other platform. The ledger lives here because the verification lives here. Every month a GC works on AskBaily, the declared graph deepens, the payment history lengthens, the photo portfolio thickens, and the cross-vouches accumulate. This is the contractor-side compounding asset — the reason strong GCs stay and build rather than chase lead pools.

If you are a GC reading this, see the for-pros brief on bringing your subs and the side-by-side comparison against Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, Houzz, and Buildertrend.