Straight answers, including the unflattering ones.
If something you need isn’t here, ask us. We’ll answer it properly and add it.
Hiring someone
What does this cost me?
Nothing. No fee, no subscription, no percentage. You fund exactly the quote total and not a dollar more.
The contractor pays a flat fee by job size, netted from the first release that pays them. See pricing for the bands and a worked example.
Can my contractor pull money out without me approving it?
A contractor cannot originate a payment request at all. They submit completed work with evidence; you release it.
There is one exception you should understand: if you never respond, a review clock can release a milestone on its own, so a contractor isn’t held hostage by silence. It will never release your first draw while nothing has been released yet — silence shouldn’t buy an unearned deposit. And raising an issue stops the clock immediately.
What if I’m away and can’t review something in time?
Raise an issue before you go, or approve early if you’ve already seen the work. The clock is generous and visible to both sides, and it can be stopped with one tap. What it can’t do is be invisible — a countdown you didn’t know about would be indefensible.
What if the work is genuinely bad?
You raise an issue on the specific line item you disagree with. That amount is held; the rest of the milestone still releases. Your contractor can correct it, concede it, or defend it, and both of you see the same evidence.
If it escalates, a reviewer decides whether those funds release, judged against the acceptance criteria written before work started. They do not decide whether the work is legally defective — that stays with the courts, and in Texas the state’s Residential Construction Liability Act runs its own process that we don’t replace.
This is leverage and a paper trail. It is not a warranty and we won’t sell it as one.
Can I cancel after I’ve signed?
Yes — three business days in North Carolina and Utah, three calendar days in Texas, when the contract is signed away from the contractor’s place of business. A kitchen table counts.
Nothing releases from the project balance while that window is open, which is the whole reason this structure suits the problem: cancelling inside the window is a refund, not an argument. We will never offer you a way to waive it — in North Carolina, failing to give you that notice is a criminal offence for the contractor, not a technicality.
Cancelling later is a settlement rather than a refund: your contractor claims for work you already agreed to and that got built, you accept or dispute it, and the contract reduces to what actually exists. The refund is what’s unearned minus that claim.
Do you actually check the contractor, or just take their word for it?
Licence, insurance and business registration are checked against the issuing board or registry — not self-reported. Anything missing is listed first on the record you see, not buried at the bottom.
A new contractor’s record says plainly that they have no funded projects here yet. We don’t pad it, because a padded first-day record would make a thirty-job record worthless.
Ratings come only from homeowners who actually funded a project here, and they’re checkable yes/no answers — would you hire them again, were they on schedule, were they on budget — rather than a star average, which is the weakest thing on a screen that also carries a verified licence number.
Can I finance the project?
Yes, through Affirm or Klarna. We are not the lender — their approval, rate and terms govern.
Lender caps are real, and neither covers a large renovation on its own, so funding can split across a lender leg and a bank leg into the same project balance. Two things we say on that screen that ordinary instalment checkout doesn’t: you are borrowing for work that hasn’t happened yet, and if the project ends early the unreleased money refunds to the lender, not to you as cash — and it doesn’t unwind interest already charged.
Is my money insured?
Not by us, and we’re not going to imply otherwise. During the pilot, project funds are held by our payments provider, Stripe Payments Company, earmarked to your project on our ledger. That is not a bank account in your name for your benefit, and you won’t find that phrase anywhere on this site while it isn’t true.
The custody section lays out exactly where this stands, including what we don’t yet have an answer for.
My contractor has never heard of you. Now what?
Send them the contractor page and let them read the cash-flow half of it, which is the half that actually concerns them: the job is funded before they start, materials go straight to their supplier, and a clock protects them if you go quiet.
If they’d rather not, that’s their call — it only works if both sides agree to it. But how a contractor reacts to “the money will be sitting there, released as we agree the work is done” is itself information worth having.
Doing the work
Why would I pay a fee to get paid?
Because you’re not paying for a payment — you’re paying to know the money exists before you order materials, and to stop financing someone else’s renovation out of your own account.
On a $48,500 job the fee is $499, or about 1%. Compare that to one deposit that arrives three weeks late, one homeowner who turns out not to have the money in week six, or one materials order you floated on a card.
It comes out of the first draw that pays you, never a supplier’s materials draw, so we are never paid before you are. If the job is cancelled before your first draw, it costs nobody anything.
When do I actually see money?
On approval of each milestone, or when the review clock runs out. The first release additionally waits for the later of two things: the homeowner’s funds settling, and their statutory cancellation window closing. On a standard bank transfer those usually land the same day.
If the sequence starves you — and it often does, because materials go straight to the supplier and your own first money can be weeks out while you carry wages — counter the schedule and pull money earlier. A counter reshapes the schedule; it never changes the price.
On jobs over $15,000 you can also draw weekly against work you’ve already submitted, at 1.5%. That advance is our money, not the homeowner’s project balance.
What stops an unreasonable homeowner sitting on my money?
Three things. The review clock releases a milestone if they simply don’t respond. A hold has to be scoped to a specific line item, so they cannot freeze an entire milestone over one detail. And if it escalates, a reviewer judges it against the acceptance criteria you wrote — and a line item with no measurable criterion goes to you, because the burden sits with whoever is holding money back.
That last rule is also why the quote builder warns you when a criterion reads like an adjective. “Level and plumb, verified with a 4ft level” survives a dispute. “Good quality finish” is an argument waiting to happen.
I’m not licensed. Can I use this?
Where your state allows unlicensed work, yes — but capped at what the state allows, not banned. North Carolina caps you at $40,000, Utah at $3,000, and Texas has no cap because it licenses no general contractors at all.
The cap protects your invoice too. In North Carolina a court generally won’t enforce an unlicensed contractor’s contract where a licence was required, so an unlicensed $60,000 job can leave you unable to collect.
In Utah we tell the homeowner outright whether their contractor is licensed. You will lose some jobs to that sentence. You should.
Can I use it on a $1,200 job?
Yes. There is one quote builder for every job and you never pick a track — the price you write chooses the shape. Under $10,000 that means one to three releases depending on size, acceptance criteria drafted for you and editable, three homeowner steps, and 2.9% with a $25 minimum instead of a flat fee.
One thing to know going in: a statutory cancellation window doesn’t shrink with job size, so on a small job the work can finish before the homeowner’s right to cancel expires. We put that on your screen rather than letting you discover it in a finished garden.
What do you need from me to get started?
A phone number, your licence and insurance details, your business registration, beneficial-ownership information, and a payout account. The ownership details are a requirement of the money rail we use, not our curiosity — we say so on the screen where we ask.
Your payout account locks at verification with the account holder’s name matched to your verified business. Changing it later triggers re-verification, a 24-hour freeze and a notice to your open projects, because payment diversion is the top fraud in this industry and that friction is aimed at whoever is impersonating you.
You can open an account in a minute, but nothing resolves to your public lookup code until the checks pass. Verification gates being found, not signing up.
The company
Are you a bank?
No. Not a bank, not a lender, not a law firm, and not a licensed escrow agent in every state. During the pilot the money is held by our payments provider under their licences, not ours. The trust page spells out all five.
What happens to my money if ProjectComplete goes out of business?
We don’t have a complete answer yet, and you should know that before you fund anything.
The proper answer is a bankruptcy-remote custody structure at a chartered partner bank, and that arrives with our migration off the pilot setup. Today the honest version is: the funds sit at a large regulated payments company rather than in our operating account, our ledger records what belongs to which project, and the pilot is capped at ten projects — small enough to unwind by hand. That’s a mitigation, not a guarantee.
If that’s not good enough for the size of your project, that is a completely reasonable conclusion to draw.
Why only North Carolina, Texas and Utah?
Because the law underneath this product varies more than the marketing in this industry admits, and we would rather do three states properly than fifty badly. Texas requires the owner to withhold 10% retainage; Utah caps retention at 5%. One national default would be wrong in both.
California is a specific and deliberate omission: its Escrow Law licenses a “joint control agent” — someone receiving money for disbursal toward construction costs on real property, which is a verbatim description of what we do. That’s a licence, a bond and capital requirements, and it’s actively enforced. We’re not there and won’t pretend to be.
Is any of this legal advice?
No. The statutes cited across this site are our own research — named so you can check them rather than take our word for it — but they haven’t been reviewed by counsel in every state and they are not legal advice.
Where our reading is genuinely contested we say so instead of choosing the interpretation that suits us. Documents we generate carry a notice on every page that software produced them and that they are not a substitute for an attorney’s advice. If your project is large or unusual, have a construction attorney in your state read your contract.
Is there an app, or is this it?
This site is informational. The product itself — the quote builder, the project balance, milestone approvals, waivers, documents — is an app, currently in the hands of pilot participants rather than publicly available.
If you join the pilot, that’s what you’ll be using.
What are you still getting wrong?
There’s a running list on the trust page, and it’s deliberately public. The ones most likely to affect you: no bankruptcy-remote custody yet, no neutral third-party arbiter for escalated disputes, no contractor right of reply to a rating, no emergency fast path for a burst pipe, and one project per account at a time.
Ask us the thing this page didn’t answer.
Hard questions are the useful ones, and during a ten-project pilot you’re talking to the people who built it.