CostRule publishes cost figures produced by a documented model, written up with AI assistance, checked against their own sources by an automated pass, and read by a person before release. No page is signed with an invented name, no figure appears without a traceable source, and no commercial relationship has ever changed a number on this site — there are none yet to change it. This page says who stands behind the content, how it is made, what happens when it is wrong, and how the site is paid for.
Who publishes this
CostRule is published by Keydams. The organization is the author of record.
There are no bylines belonging to people who do not exist, no photographs of a review board, no badges, and no star ratings. Nothing on this site has been reviewed by an outside tradesperson, and nothing claims to have been. If that changes, the page will name the person and what qualifies them, and this policy will be updated to say when the practice started — the field stays empty rather than filled with a name that means nothing.
How a page is made
Cost figures are not written. They are produced by the model set out on the Methodology page from wage, price and labor-hour data, and placed into the page as data. Nobody types a dollar figure into an article.
The surrounding text is drafted with AI assistance and we would rather say so plainly than let you work it out. The draft is written from three inputs and nothing else: the page’s own data file, a sourced knowledge base for that material (manufacturer instructions, trade-association standards, retailer program terms, published cost guides — each entry carrying its URL and the date it was retrieved), and this policy. The writing has no access to the open web while it works, which is the point: it cannot pick up a plausible number from somewhere it cannot name.
Every draft then goes through an automated check before anyone reads it. That check requires each number in the text to match a number in the page’s data or a sourced figure in the knowledge base, requires each citation to resolve to a real source entry, and rejects a fixed list of claims this site cannot support. A separate review pass reads the page against the knowledge base, and the publisher reads it before release — all of the launch set, and a sample of every batch after that.
The rule about numbers
Three kinds of statement, three different standards of proof:
| What it is | Where it may come from |
|---|---|
| Our cost figures — dollars, dollars per square foot, totals, shares, hours | The model only. Never an outside source, never an author’s estimate. |
| Technical facts carrying a number or a standard — waste allowances, cushion thickness limits, installation standards, another company’s published prices | The sourced knowledge base only, named on the page. |
| How the work is done — sequence, tools, terminology, what to ask a contractor | Written from the trade sources, no figures attached. |
When a draft needs a number that nobody has sourced, it is marked as a gap and the number is researched. It is never estimated, rounded off from memory, or dropped because sourcing it is inconvenient. A page ships with the gap filled or without the sentence.
Numbers that are not ours
Other people’s figures are labeled as theirs. When a page cites what a retailer’s installation program charges, what a competing cost guide publishes, or what a manufacturer says a job involves, the source is named and dated at that spot. Those figures are never restated as our own output, never averaged into our ranges, and never quietly used to fill a hole in our data.
Where published sources contradict each other, the page shows the contradiction. Averaging three incompatible bands into one number would look tidier and would tell you less.
Arithmetic we performed ourselves — an order quantity, a per-step area, a comparison between two published figures — is marked as our arithmetic rather than dressed up as a citation, because there is no source page to send you to.
Dates and the year in a title
A page title carries the current year only when the data behind it was actually refreshed in that year. The year is not incremented every January as a freshness signal. On every cost page, the visible data date comes from a single field in the page’s data, and it does not move unless the underlying data moved. The dates in the page’s structured data and in the sitemap record when the page was first published and when it last changed; both are written from the same fields, so they cannot drift apart. Pages like this one carry the date they were last revised instead.
Corrections
If a figure is wrong, a source has been updated, or a page says something the source does not: [email protected]. Corrections are made on the page concerned. Nothing is edited silently, and a correction is not folded into an unrelated update to make it less visible.
How this site is funded
Today: no advertising, no commissions, no paid placements, no sponsored content. Every page you can read was funded independently of any retailer, manufacturer or contractor.
That is expected to change, and the plan is not a secret. We intend to add clearly marked retailer product links that earn a commission on purchases made through them, and a way to reach local contractors for quotes. When the first such link goes live it will carry the required disclosure at the point where you can see it, before you click it, and affiliate links will be marked as sponsored in the page’s markup. Advertising slots exist in the page templates and are switched off; they occupy no space and reserve no height until there is something to put in them.
What will not change: a commercial relationship will never decide which numbers appear here, which materials get a page, or the order in which anything is listed. Material prices are collected from public list prices the same way whether or not the retailer sells us anything, no retailer or manufacturer sees a page before it is published, and no one can pay to appear in a comparison. If we ever cannot honor that, we will say so here rather than let you find out.
Independence and what we are not
CostRule employs no contractors and sells no installation. It is a reference, not a bid, and not a substitute for a written quote for your actual project. Our ranges are built from published wage and price data, with the limits of that approach spelled out on the Methodology page instead of buried.
Changes to this policy
This policy is updated when the editorial process changes — for example, when the first monetized link goes live, or if outside professional review is ever introduced. Changes are dated and noted on the page concerned, not made quietly.