You found the fat book.
The cost index homeowners use to check your bids, and the free Elite listing that puts the honest contractors in front of them. If you are paying Angi, BBB, or Google to look trustworthy, read this first.
You are already paying to be trusted. A shared lead here, an annual accreditation there, a per-lead charge on a Google badge. Below is what each one actually costs, and the free alternative underneath it. TheFatBook is a public cost index built for homeowners, the people reading your bids, and the math underneath is the same math you would recognize: Craftsman labor hours, BLS metro wages with burden, current material prices, verified city permit fees, NAHB overhead benchmarks.
Shared leads, sold three and four times over
Angi and HomeAdvisor sell shared leads that resell to three or four contractors at once, commonly reported at $15 to $100 each depending on the job, on top of an annual membership. Thumbtack charges you per lead whether or not you win the job. You are not buying a customer. You are buying the right to compete for one against three other trucks, at a price the platform sets.
The free alternative. A Better Builders Network Elite listing is free, and the leads that come through it are exclusive: one homeowner, one contractor. No auction, no reselling the same job to your competitors. Your listing links to your own website, so the traffic and the trust build your brand, not the platform's.
Google Guaranteed and BBB, priced honestly
Google Guaranteed runs on a budget you set plus a charge per lead, commonly $25 to $50 for home-service trades, after you pass a license and background check. The badge is real and it works, but you rent it by the lead, every month, forever. Google Screened is the same program wearing a different name for professional services.
BBB accreditation is an annual fee that varies by your local BBB and business size, commonly several hundred dollars up to more than a thousand a year. It buys a recognized mark, but it sends you zero leads, and homeowners increasingly check Google reviews and your license status directly instead.
The free alternative. The BBN Elite mark costs nothing. We verify your active license and your real customer reviews at claim, then your listing carries the Elite badge and links to your site. It is the same trust signal, hosted on an independent cost-data site homeowners already use to sanity-check bids, without the annual bill or the per-lead meter.
The number in your bid is no longer a mystery to them
Homeowners run quotes through our Bid Fairness Checker, which grades a bill against cost to deliver for their exact metro: labor hours times the local wage, materials, the permit fee, overhead. That sum is the break-even, not the target price. The index then names a fair margin on top, 15 to 22 percent on most jobs, because nobody works for free.
That is the opposite of a race to the bottom. A homeowner who understands that a fair bid carries margin stops treating your honest number like a rip-off. If your pricing is straight, this site is the independent third party that says so, and you did not pay for the endorsement. The methodology is public and the labor-rate data is the same BLS wage math you price from. Bring it to the kitchen table when a customer asks where your number comes from.
Free to cite, free to embed
Every trade has a free embeddable bid checker for your own site, with the embed code on each trade's checker page. Cite any figure on TheFatBook in a proposal, a blog post, or a bid walkthrough. All we ask is attribution and a link to the page it came from.
Claim your free Elite listing.
We are building a vetted contractor network in the metros the index covers, deliberately small and one trade per city. If your metro is open, claiming takes a minute: we verify your license and reviews, then your Elite card goes live with your website link and the BBN mark. If it is not open yet, tell us your trade and city and we will reach out when it is.