Independence

How we make money, and what we refuse to sell.

A registry is only worth reading if you know who paid for it and what that money could buy. So here is all of it — every line of revenue we have, and every one we have decided not to have.

The whole of it

One way in, and it is boring.

Businesses pay for tooling, per project. That is the entire model. There is no second revenue line waiting behind it.

Interior design firms

S$20 to S$90 per project, banded by contract value. Charged once, when a project starts. The first project is free.

Live today.

Defect checkers

S$12 per HDB inspection, S$20 per private or EC inspection.

From launch — not chargeable yet.

Developers & main contractors

S$8 per unit for a main contractor, minimum S$1,500 per development. A developer licence is S$3,000–8,000 per development, quoted by unit count.

From launch — not chargeable yet.

The designer prices above are read from the same price list that bills the project, so this page cannot drift from the invoice. See the full price table →

The refusals

What no amount of money buys.

Each of these is a revenue line that exists, that others in this market run on, and that we have decided not to have. Saying so is cheap; the point is that they are checkable against how the product behaves.

We never sell leads. A homeowner’s enquiry is not a thing we auction to firms.
We never sell placement, ranking, or a “featured” slot. There is no top of the list to buy, because there is no list.
We never take a percentage of a renovation contract.
We never charge a homeowner anything — not a subscription, not a premium tier, not a one-off.
We never charge per designer, per inspector or per seat.
We never remove, soften, delay or annotate a published record for money.
We never sell contact lists, and we never sell the contents of anyone’s defect list.
We never let a firm edit or delete what a homeowner wrote.
We never accept advertising from a firm we grade.

Why it’s built this way

Each refusal removes a specific way this could go wrong.

Not a values statement. A list of failure modes and the thing we gave up to avoid each one.

If we sold leads, the grade would follow the buyer

A lead-generation business gets paid when a firm gets work. The instant that is true, every editorial call — how a grade is worded, how prominent a bad record is — has a revenue answer. So we don’t sell leads.

If we sold placement, search would stop being honest

There is no browsable list of firms here, by design. A list has a top, and a top can be sold. Search returns matches to what you typed, in no sponsored order — there is nothing else it could return.

If homeowners paid, “who is the customer” would blur

A paying homeowner is a customer to be retained, and a retained customer is one you avoid telling inconvenient things. Homeowners pay nothing, so the only thing we owe them is the record.

If a record could be bought back, none of them would count

A published record does not come down because a firm stopped paying, and it does not come down because a firm started. If either were true, every record on the site would be unreadable.

If we charged per seat, firms would share logins

And a shared login destroys the one thing the record depends on: who actually did what. Per project, never per head.

If the formula were private, you’d have to trust us

It is published in full — every weight, every band, the exact arithmetic — so you can compute any grade yourself and check ours. How grades work →

The test

What happens when a firm stops paying.

This is the question that tells you whether a registry is a registry or an advertising product.

They stop being able to accept new projects and they lose the firm tooling. Their grade stays published.

A grade a firm can make disappear by not paying is worthless to the homeowner reading it — it would mean every absent firm was ambiguous and every present firm was a customer. The record is about work that actually happened, and that does not become untrue when an invoice does.

The same holds in the other direction. Paying has never added anything to a record and never will. There is no premium placement to buy, no badge, no response we publish on a firm’s behalf.

Being straight about it

What we don’t claim.

The refusals above are worth less if we overstate everything else, so here is the other side.

We are new

There is no customer count on this site, no logo wall and no testimonial, because we have not earned one yet. When there is a number worth stating, it will be stated with its source.

We measure one thing

Whether defects get fixed. Not taste, not design quality, not whether you enjoyed working with someone. A firm with a good grade can still be wrong for your project.

We grade some parties and not others

Designers and firms are graded. Developers and main contractors are not, and will not be — their subcontractors change every project, so a company-level grade would attribute the work to the wrong entity.

Questions

Straight answers.

Do homeowners pay anything?

No. Not now, not later. Design firms pay to be listed and graded, and other businesses pay for the tooling. Homeowners never pay us anything.

Can we pay to improve our grade or appear higher?

No. There is no ranking to buy and no placement to sell. Search returns matches to what you typed, in no sponsored order.

What happens if we stop paying?

You stop being able to accept new projects and you lose the firm tooling. Your grade stays published. A grade you could make disappear by not paying would be worthless.

Do you sell our data?

No. We don’t sell leads and we don’t sell contact lists.

How is the grade calculated?

Published in full, with the exact weights and bands, on How grades work. Same formula for every firm.

Who can see a homeowner’s address?

Only their appointed designer or defect checker, while the project is running. Never public, and never on anything a firm can print.

Do developers and main contractors get a public grade?

No. We publish no grade and no score for developers or main contractors. Subcontractors change from project to project, so a company-level grade would attribute work to an entity that didn’t do it and won’t do the next one. What we keep is the evidence trail on each development.

How do we pay?

Invoice and bank transfer. No card required.

Read the method, then judge the record.

The formula is published in full, with every weight and every band. Nothing about it is negotiable per customer.

How grades work See pricing