Know your options before you pay

Because a lot of quotes in this trade are priced to win the appointment rather than to be accurate, and the real number arrives once someone is standing in your driveway and it is awkward to say no. We attack that from two directions. Every price you see was published by that company before it saw your job. And after a job is done we ask what was quoted and what was actually paid, then publish how often that company's price held. A firm that routinely quotes low and charges high cannot hide it here.

Not from a price list on this site. The most common surprises are dispatch or call-out fees, heavy item charges for sofas and mattresses, disposal levies on televisions and appliances, and add-ons for stairs or a long carry. Our software refuses to publish a price list where a charge every customer pays is presented as optional. If it always applies, it appears in the price.

No. A postal code and the item gets you the municipal options and the price range, with no account, no email and no phone number. We ask for an email only at the point you want firm quotes from named companies, and it goes to the three you pick and nobody else.

At most three, and you choose them. That limit is enforced in the database, not just the interface, so there is no path that sends your details to a fourth. We do not sell leads and we do not run an auction, which is why this does not turn into a week of phone calls.

Then we tell you that first, before any paid option, and link the official page it came from with the date a person last checked it. We make nothing when you walk away and we would still rather you did than pay for something you did not need.

That a person checked that company's legal permissions against the authority that issued them, on the date shown. What is required differs by where you are: England needs Environment Agency carrier registration, Scotland needs SEPA, Ontario may need an EASR registration or an ECA, and most US states ask for a business licence and insurance instead. We check whatever actually applies rather than ticking one generic box.

No, and it is not simply a policy. The function that orders results is never given a price, a tier, an amount paid or an advertising spend, so ranking by money is not something the software can express. Companies pay a flat monthly fee for an area with a hard cap on how many are in it, and that is the whole commercial relationship.

Tell us. We record it against the company, look at their other outcomes, and act on a pattern. We will not remove a bad review because the company objected to it, and the software refuses that as a stated reason for hiding one.