A product that holds your money should be boring about the details.
This page is longer than a marketing page should be. That’s the point — every claim here is one you can go and check, including the ones that don’t flatter us.
Who is holding the money right now.
- During the pilot
- Project funds are held by our payments provider, Stripe Payments Company, earmarked to your project on our ledger. Releases are instructed by us, against your approvals.
- What that is not
- It is not a bank account held in your name for your benefit, and we will not describe it that way until it is one. You will not find the phrase “held at a bank for your benefit” anywhere on this site, because during the pilot it would not be true. Stripe states plainly that it does not offer escrow and is not a bank.
- Where it’s going
- A for-benefit-of account at a chartered partner bank — a direct bank relationship rather than a middleman. We are deliberately avoiding banking-as-a-service intermediaries: when one of them collapsed in 2024, customer funds were stranded not because the money vanished but because nobody could reconcile whose it was. That migration, not growth, is why the pilot is capped at ten projects.
- What if ProjectComplete fails?
- We do not have a complete answer yet, and you deserve to know that before you fund anything. A proper answer is a bankruptcy-remote custody structure at a partner bank, and it arrives with the migration above. Today, the honest version is: the money sits at a large regulated payments company rather than in our operating account, the ledger records what belongs to which project, and the pilot is small enough that ten projects could be unwound by hand. Stated at full strength — during the pilot those funds sit in a platform balance rather than an account in your name, which is precisely the arrangement a bankruptcy-remote structure exists to fix, and we have not built one yet. That is a mitigation, not a guarantee, and we are not going to dress it up as one.
- Not a deposit, not insured
- Worth being exact about, because a balance on a screen looks like a bank balance: project funds are not a bank deposit and carry no FDIC insurance. Money held at a payments company is not insured the way money in a checking account is. This changes at the partner-bank migration and not before it.
- Reversal risk, stated plainly
- A standard bank debit from a consumer account can be returned as unauthorised for up to 60 days. Releasing money against a transfer that hasn’t settled means eating that loss if it reverses. So funding by standard bank transfer holds releases until it settles, and irreversible funding — an instant push, a wire, a lender payment — can release immediately. That is the single largest uninsured risk in this product and it drives real behaviour in the app.
Five things people assume, and shouldn’t.
Not a bank. We hold no deposits, we are not chartered, and nothing here is FDIC insured by us.
Not a lender. If a homeowner finances, the lender is Affirm or Klarna. Their approval, their rate, their disclosures, their relationship with the borrower.
Not a law firm. We generate documents from templates. Every page of every generated document says it is software-produced and not a substitute for an attorney’s advice, because in at least one of our states that sentence is what keeps document generation lawful.
Not a judge of construction defects. Where a reviewer decides a dispute, they decide whether held funds release against written acceptance criteria. Whether work is legally defective is a question for the courts, and in Texas the Residential Construction Liability Act runs its own process that we do not replace.
Not a licensed escrow agent in every state. California, in particular, licenses this activity directly — its Escrow Law defines a “joint control agent” as someone receiving money for disbursal toward construction costs on real property, which is a verbatim description of what we do. That is a licence, a bond and capital requirements, and it is actively enforced. It is why we are not in California, and why we’d rather tell you the map is small than imply it isn’t.
Most fraud in construction payments is social, so most of the defences are too.
No passwords
Accounts are a phone number and a code. There is no password to reuse, phish, or find in a breach dump — and no password reset flow to social-engineer, which is usually the weaker door anyway.
Payout accounts lock
A contractor’s payout account locks at verification, with the account holder’s name checked against their verified business. Changing it later triggers re-verification, a 24-hour freeze and a notice to every open project. Payment diversion is the top fraud in this industry; the friction is aimed squarely at whoever is impersonating your contractor.
Lookup runs one way
A homeowner can look up a contractor by their public code. A contractor cannot search for homeowners — a searchable directory of people about to spend $50,000 on their house is a target list, not a feature.
The two codes are deliberately different
A contractor’s code is permanent and public — it belongs on a truck, and it is safe for anyone to scan. A homeowner’s code is the opposite: it expires in 15 minutes, works once, can be rotated at will, and grants exactly one capability — permission to send one quote. It shows a first name and a city. Never a street address, phone number, email, bank detail, or what they paid anyone else. The address reaches the contractor when the homeowner accepts and funds, and not before.
A contractor cannot ask for money
There is no mechanism for a contractor to originate a payment request. They submit completed work; the homeowner releases. A quote is a proposal — it cannot bill anyone.
Money never moves by message
Nothing in the message thread can redirect a payment, and the thread itself says so. It also says that a message does not stop the review clock — the dispute button does — because confusing those two costs somebody real money.
State by state
Three states, three different products underneath the same screen.
The industry writes one national story about liens. The law disagrees with that story often enough that we keep the rules in the product itself — in several places below, the state doesn’t change our copy, it changes what the app does.
Waiver scope carries the weight
Lien agents. § 44A-11.1 exempts improvements to an existing owner-occupied single-family dwelling from the lien-agent requirement, at any cost. That exemption is only from designating an agent — subcontractors can still lien the property, so the double-payment exposure is genuine either way. We say this rather than implying the exemption is protection.
Waivers. § 22B-5 voids a progress lien waiver unless it is limited to the payment actually received, and voids advance waivers outright. North Carolina prescribes no form, only scope — which is why one waiver per release, written at the amount released, isn’t housekeeping here. It is the thing that makes the paper enforceable.
Cancellation. Three business days after signing, under § 25A-39, when the contract is signed away from the contractor’s place of business — a kitchen table qualifies. Under § 14-401.13, failing to give that notice in an off-premises sale is a criminal offence. This is a large part of why we will not build a flow that lets a homeowner waive it to save three days.
Licensing. Required above $40,000, in tiers by project value. North Carolina courts generally will not enforce an unlicensed contractor’s contract where a licence was required, so our unlicensed ceiling protects the contractor’s ability to collect as much as it protects the homeowner.
The friendliest licensing, the most disruptive statutes
Retainage changes the schedule. § 53.101 requires the owner to withhold 10% of the value of completed work, held 30 days after final completion, for subcontractors’ benefit. Under § 53.105 an owner who fails to retain can become personally liable to subs up to what should have been retained. This is not a copy change — the schedule reserves it and the money stays in the project balance through the statutory window.
Retainage runs opposite to Utah. Texas requires 10%; Utah caps retention at 5%. A single national default would be wrong in both.
Disputes. The Residential Construction Liability Act requires written notice by certified mail 60 days before suit, then runs inspection, settlement-offer and repair periods. Our terms state that our process decides release of held funds, not whether an actionable defect exists — and in Texas we do not arbitrate at all.
The homestead lien finding. The Property Code alone doesn’t tell you this — you have to read the constitution. Art. XVI § 50(a)(5) lets a mechanic’s lien attach to a homestead for repair or renovation only if all four conditions hold: written and consented to by both spouses the way a homestead conveyance is (which implies notarisation), not executed before the fifth day after the owner applies for credit for the work, an express three-day rescission right in the contract, and executed only at the office of a third-party lender, attorney or title company. Not a kitchen table. Not a phone. There is no dollar threshold — the triggers are homestead-or-not and repair-or-new-build.
What we do about it. Rather than silently fail to perfect a lien a contractor thinks they have, the app offers two explicit routes. The default is balance-secured: the contract doesn’t attempt a homestead lien, so those conditions never apply, and it works remotely. The alternative lists every step of the lien route with the three we cannot perform — notarisation, venue, county filing — marked as unsupported. A funded balance is, we’d argue, better security than a lien on a house you would have to foreclose.
Also. Texas licenses no general contractors; trades run through TDLR. And § 53.255 requires a plain-language disclosure delivered before the contract is executed, not attached to it.
Strong homeowner protection, with a trap inside it
The Residence Lien Recovery Fund (Title 38, ch. 11). An owner-occupant with a written contract, a properly licensed contractor, permits pulled, who has paid in full, is protected from subcontractor liens. If you’re ever served in a lien foreclosure, you have 30 days from that first summons to apply for a Certificate of Compliance, and the closeout package is assembled to be that evidence file.
The trap. The protection requires payment in full, so withholding money you’re unhappy about can forfeit it. So in Utah a dispute offers a written change order reducing the contract by the disputed amount instead of an open-ended hold. You end up paid in full on a smaller contract and the protection survives. This is the clearest example in the whole product of a state rule changing behaviour rather than wording.
State Construction Registry. Every would-be lien claimant must file a preliminary notice within 20 days of first furnishing — a public list of everyone who could lien your project. Unlike North Carolina’s equivalent, this one works on residential work.
Licensing. DOPL licence above $7,000; a handyman affirmation between $3,000 and $7,000; exempt below $3,000. The homeowner’s screen tells them plainly whether their contractor is licensed. Our unlicensed ceiling in Utah matches that $3,000 exemption line.
Waivers and retention. § 38-1a-802 prescribes waiver wording — a non-complying form is unenforceable — and if the payment never clears, the waiver is void. § 13-8-5 caps retention at 5% and requires a separate interest-bearing account with the interest going to the contractor, though that section is written around nonresidential work and whether it binds a pure remodel is a question for counsel.
Cancellation. Three business days under §§ 70C-5-102 and 70C-5-103. The agreement must be dated the day it was actually signed and carry the notice under the caption “BUYER’S RIGHT TO CANCEL” — a statutory conspicuousness requirement, which is why it is never folded into a collapsible section anywhere in the product.
We generate the contract, so its form is our problem.
This was the sleeper issue when we mapped compliance. All three states give a homeowner a right to cancel after signing, triggered by where it was signed — and they disagree on the clock. North Carolina and Utah count three business days; Texas counts three calendar days, with the day after signing as day one, extending if day three lands on a Sunday or federal holiday.
One document format satisfies all three, because Utah’s caption requirement is the strictest. Texas additionally needs a plain-language disclosure delivered ahead of the contract rather than attached to it.
The product point worth stating: holding the funds is the right instrument for a cancellation window. Nothing has been released while it’s open, so rescinding is a refund rather than an argument.
Waiver law splits on an axis nobody expects.
Texas and Utah prescribe the wording. A non-complying waiver is unenforceable, so our forms carry the state name, Texas’s statutory bold notice, and the exact statutory verbs — Utah’s “upon” where Texas says “on”. Texas § 53.281 also makes it unlawful to require an unconditional waiver before payment is received, which is why ours are conditional until a release settles.
North Carolina prescribes no form, only scope. Different problem, same answer: one waiver per release, at the amount received.
A number that looks wrong but isn’t. Waiver totals can legitimately exceed the amount the project balance released — the homeowner pays the contractor, the contractor pays subcontractors, and both parties can lien, so both need waivers. Any screen showing both numbers has to say why, and ours does. The ledger shows paid versus waived per party, with the gap named as exposure rather than hidden.
The list of things we haven’t solved.
We keep this list because a company that holds money and claims to have no open items is either new or lying. These are the ones that would matter to you.
- Bankruptcy-remote custody. Answered by the partner-bank migration, not before it. Described honestly above.
- Who decides an escalated dispute long term. Today it is a reviewer following written criteria. A neutral third-party arbiter is the better answer and isn’t in place.
- What we call this. We have stopped using the word “escrow” for our own product, because it is a licensed term in several states and using it loosely is a risk in itself. We say milestone payments, and the project balance. The word survives on this page in exactly two places, both deliberate: naming California’s Escrow Law, and denying that we are a licensed escrow agent.
- Statutory deposit caps. Some states cap what a contractor may take up front — California caps at the lesser of $1,000 or 10%, which would break a schedule like our example outright. We have not finished checking our own three.
- A contractor’s right of reply to a rating. Should exist. Doesn’t yet. Ratings don’t go public until it does.
- Emergency work. A burst pipe doesn’t wait three days for a cancellation window. The fast path is designed — modelled on the federal rule requiring the buyer’s own handwriting — and not built.
- The economics of financed projects. Lender processing costs can exceed our flat fee. Unresolved, and disclosed on the pricing page rather than absorbed quietly.
- Multiple simultaneous projects per account, and a few smaller gaps we’d rather you heard from us than found.
How to read the citations on this page. They are our own research, chosen because a claim you can verify beats one you can’t. They have not been reviewed by counsel in every state, they are not legal advice, and where our reading is genuinely contested — the venue condition on Texas homestead liens is the clearest example — we’ve said so instead of picking the flattering interpretation. If your project is large or unusual, have a construction attorney in your state read your contract.
Read all that and still interested?
Then you’re the kind of person we want in the first ten.