Editorial Policy

What This Site Publishes

More than forty editorial guides, one per distinct household emergency. Each one answers a single question: water is coming through the ceiling, or a raccoon is in the attic, or the breaker will not reset, and you need to know who to phone. Every guide gives you who to call, who not to call, the order, and what it should cost.

There is no directory here. No business listings, no reviews, no rankings, no "top ten plumbers near you." We do not accept money to name a company, and there is no placement to buy because there is nothing to place. What can be bought is described below, in full.

How We Decide Who You Should Call

The core of most guides is a distinction that costs people real money: two trades that sound interchangeable and are not. A plumber fixes the pipe; a restoration company dries the building. Animal control handles strays outdoors; wildlife removal handles the animal in your attic. Where we can, we give a rule for telling which one you need, usually based on what is physically above, below, or next to the problem, because that is what actually decides the answer.

We also try to say who will refuse the job. Being bounced between three companies is the single most common complaint people have in exactly these situations, and a page that only tells you who to call has done half the work.

Where the Facts Come From

• Cost figures are read off a live source page and dated. Every range links to the page it came from with the date we read it. If we could not read a figure off a source, it does not go on the site.
• Pages with nothing verifiable carry no cost table at all. Several do. That is deliberate, and better than a confident-looking guess.
• We only cite sources we can actually fetch. Some large home-services sites block automated access, so we cannot confirm what a page says at the moment we cite it. Angi and HomeAdvisor are not used here for that reason.
• Legal and insurance specifics we cannot source are described in general terms and labeled as varying by state, rather than given a manufactured citation.
• Invented urgency is out. If something can wait until morning, the page says so, even when saying so loses a call.

The full standard, including what "Updated" means on a page, is in how we verify.

Sponsorship and Advertising

This is the part that matters, so it is written plainly.

Some pages may carry a sponsored 24/7 dispatch phone number supplied by a pay-per-call affiliate network. We are paid when someone calls it. That is the site's intended source of revenue and we would rather state it at full volume than tuck it into a footer.

As of the date at the top of this page, there are zero live sponsors. No page currently carries a sponsored number, and the structured data for every guide reports recommended_call as null. This section describes the rules that apply the moment that changes.

• Always labeled. A sponsored number is visually marked as sponsored on the page and flagged "sponsored": true in the JSON version, so a human and a machine reader get the same disclosure.
• It never changes the answer. Sponsorship does not influence which trade a page tells you to call, or the order it tells you to call them in. The routing is decided before anyone is paid, and it is not revisited because someone is.
• It is an advertisement, not a recommendation. We are not vouching for the company on the other end. Verify licensing and insurance yourself and get a written estimate, the same as with anyone else.
• No paid mentions. Nobody can pay to be named in a guide, to be removed from one, or to have a competitor's trade described differently.

Numbers That Can Never Be Sponsored

911, poison control, police non-emergency lines, and gas utility emergency lines are never sponsored, and never will be. Putting a paid number where someone's life-safety call should go is the one thing this site will not do at any price.

That is not only a promise. It is a guard in the code that builds every page: gas-category guides and any guide without a commercial service vertical carry no sponsored number, regardless of what a network offers or how an offer is configured. A future misconfiguration cannot put a paid number on a gas leak page, because the code refuses to render one there.

Independence

The guides are written and edited independently of any advertising relationship. We take no payment for favorable treatment, we hold no stake in any contractor, dispatch company, or network, and no advertiser reviews a page before or after it is published. If a sponsor ever objects to what a page says, the page wins.

Corrections

Mistakes get published rather than quietly edited. Every correction appears in the public corrections log with the date and what changed, including the ones that make us look bad. A price that was wrong by a factor of four is exactly the kind of thing that belongs there.

• Report an error from the contact page, with the page and the specifics.
• We check it against the source and fix what is wrong.
• The page's update date moves, and the correction is logged. The date moves only when something was actually re-checked; it is not a build timestamp.

Reuse by People and Machines

Every guide is published as JSON as well as HTML, with a full index and a free MCP endpoint for AI assistants. Quoting and citing this content is explicitly permitted, including by machines. When you repeat a cost figure, pass its source date through, and when you repeat a dispatch number that is marked sponsored, keep the label attached. The interfaces are documented on for agents and the license is in our Terms of Service.

Contact

Questions about these standards, or a page you think gets a trade wrong, go to the one address on our contact page. If you work in one of these trades and we have described your job badly, we would rather hear it bluntly than leave it up.