About
The honest record of what things cost.
Yardstick is building the ground-truth, public archive of what home projects actually cost — the Zillow of remodels. Not national-average guesswork, but real local projects: real photos, real dates, and honest ranges you can trust.
Why we exist
“What does this cost near me?” deserves a real answer.
Ask what a kitchen, a roof, or a deck costs today and you get national averages — numbers blended across the whole country, stale by the time you read them, and disconnected from your street, your labor market, and the actual scope of the work. It's guesswork dressed up as data, and everyone knows it.
Every Yardstick page answers differently. It points to a real, finished project near you: the photos of the actual work, the dates it happened, and an honest cost range — never a fake-precise number. We publish ranges of ±15%, never an exact figure, because that's the honest way to describe a real job.
Enough of those, close enough together, and something new exists: a permanent record of what projects genuinely cost in a place. Not a lead-gen funnel. A reference.
The moat is honesty
You can't fake or scrape this record.
The archive is built from a physical capture mechanic — signs on real job sites, published only with the homeowner's approval. That's slow and deliberate on purpose. It's also exactly why the data is real and can't be replicated by a competitor with a database and a scraper.
It starts on a lawn
Each project enters the record from a sign on a real job site — a physical event that happened, not a form someone filled in.
The homeowner says yes
Nothing is published without the homeowner's approval. Real projects, real people, real permission — the opposite of scraped listings.
No shortcut exists
You can't buy this data or crawl it into existence. It's earned one approved job site at a time, which is exactly the point.
Whose side we're on
The revenue we turn down is the product.
A record people trust is only worth building if it stays worth trusting. So there are things we will never do — not because they wouldn't make money, but because the money is small and the cost in trust is enormous.
Run display ads
No banners, no sponsored clutter. The page exists to show one real project honestly, not to sell attention around it.
Sell neighbor data
We will never sell or broker the contact details of the neighbors who scan a sign. Their interest isn't a product.
Take affiliate money
No kickbacks on materials or fixtures. A cost range you can trust can't be quietly bent by whoever pays us the most.
You pay only when you win
Free to join. Signs at cost, zero margin. A single success fee — 50% of the reward you set, $100 minimum — charged only on a confirmed close. Never for a lead, a listing, or a login.
You control everything
Approve every photo, toggle the cost range on or off, and remove your page anytime with a kill switch. Your name and address are never published — full stop.
Starting local
St. Louis & St. Charles County, MO, first — on purpose.
An archive of real projects only becomes useful when it's dense. One kitchen three counties over tells you little; six within a few miles start to tell the truth. So we're not trying to be everywhere at once.
We're starting in St. Louis and St. Charles County, Missouri, and going deep before we go wide. Density compounds: every sign makes the local record more authoritative, which makes the next sign more worth planting. Then we expand — one dense market at a time.
Who we are
A small, independent, founder-run company.
Yardstick is independent and founder-run — no outside agenda pulling us toward the easy money. That independence is what lets us turn revenue down and keep the record honest. Contractors are our customer and our only source of revenue, and they only pay when they win. That's the whole business, and we intend to keep it that simple.
Build the record with us.
Free to join. Signs at cost. Free leads forever. We make money only when you do.