Built for the person paying. And the person delivering honest work.

TL;DR: I built homemd because the same job got quoted at $800 and $4,500 from different contractors and I had no honest way to know who was telling the truth. The enemy isn't the trade — it's the information asymmetry. You're our only customer; honest contractors use it too, to prove their quotes are fair.

I'm Terry. I bought my first house in New York six years ago, and I built HomeMD.ai because of what happened next.

One thing before I tell this story: I am not on a crusade. (Spend any time on r/HomeImprovement — honest contractors complain about bad-faith pricing more than homeowners do. It makes their honest quotes look expensive by comparison.)

The actual problem is much less dramatic than "evil tradesperson" — it's information asymmetry. The pro has the playbook. The person paying usually doesn't. HomeMD just shares the playbook.

The quotes that didn't add up

When I needed to renovate my lawn after a tree removal damaged it, I called several contractors — the quotes ranged from $800 to $4,500 for the same job. I ended up doing it myself: researching soil composition, sourcing the right grass seed for my zone, ordering parts online, and building a drip irrigation system to keep my plants and trees alive through the summer.

When my roof needed replacing, I got 5–7 quotes — wildly different prices, and the cheaper ones quietly omitted things that should have been required, like attic ventilation upgrades. I spent weeks reading building code summaries to learn what every quote should contain.

If terms like R-value or asbestos testing don't mean anything to you yet — that's exactly why I built HomeMD. It tells you what you need to know, when you need to know it, in plain English.

When I rebuilt my garage from studs out, I tested for asbestos behind the old drywall, chose the right insulation R-value for my climate, cut and hung drywall, designed vent placement, did the flooring, and bought every Milwaukee tool I could justify. Every decision took hours of research.

The breaking point

A contractor I hired to install a bath fan took a shortcut: they vented it into my attic instead of through the soffit to the outside — a textbook IRC M1505 violation that would have caused mold within 18 months. I caught it only because I'd been reading the residential building code (IRC) on the side. I tore it out and redid it myself.

That's when I realized: the only thing standing between homeowners and getting ripped off is information — the same information the trade has but most homeowners don't. ChatGPT could explain repairs in general but didn't know which exact part was in stock at my Westbury Home Depot, or whether a plumber's $380 quote was 4× the going rate. YouTube and Reddit took hours per question.

The same problems, multiplied

As I started researching whether to buy rentals myself — and watching friends who already had — I saw the problems compound. One friend with 8 units was tracking 8 water heaters' warranties in a spreadsheet, fielding tenant complaints from 6 addresses, and re-running the same contractor-quote-comparison every other month. The need was the same, just multiplied.

So I started building

Each feature came from a moment I'd needed it myself: photo diagnosis, after the bath fan disaster. Exact Home Depot SKU lookup with real-time stock, after every parts hunt that took an evening. Building code checks, after the attic-vent shortcut. Contractor quote analysis with sourced market rates, after the lawn quote spread. Per-unit warranty tracking and tenant triage email, after watching landlord friends drown in spreadsheets.

Today, HomeMD.ai opens up what was once only inside the trade: building codes synthesized for your state's actual adoption (not just the generic NEC / IRC text), InterNACHI inspection standards, the Home Depot product catalog with real-time stock, and a code-grounded repair knowledge base — and it remembers your home across every chat.

The other side of the same problem

The same information gap that gets homeowners overcharged also makes life harder for the people who do the work. So HomeMD ended up serving both sides of the repair conversation:

• The on-call maintenance tech uses it at 11 PM to know if a tenant's "the AC is clicking" call is real or a $4 reset — without rolling a truck for nothing.
• The 1-person handyman uses it to look up the exact SKU in front of a client without breaking eye contact — the difference between sounding senior and sounding lost.
• The honest 1-person plumber uses it to hand the homeowner a real market rate alongside their quote — saving 20 minutes of "let me explain why this isn't a ripoff" per bid.
• The independent home inspector uses it to cite the building code edition that actually applies in the property's state — a moving target across NEC editions and state amendments.
• The self-managing landlord uses it to track per-unit warranties and sanity-check repair quotes across a small portfolio without spinning up AppFolio.

Who we work for

Every other home-repair platform — Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack — makes money when bids get awarded. They charge per lead, so they're structurally incentivized to push you toward a paid pro, not to tell you the truth about pricing.

We work for the person paying for the repair — and for the person delivering honest work. Bad-faith pricing is the enemy, not the trade.

Your home is your castle. We help you take care of it.