I built a free ADU quote checker so California homeowners can compare contractor bids line by line
Most ADU quotes in California arrive as a single number. Soft costs, allowances, and exclusions get buried — so two bids are hard to compare.
I published a free /compare tool on everylineitem.com that maps contractor quotes onto the same line-item ledger (hard costs, soft costs, contingency) against published California ADU scenarios.
URL: https://everylineitem.com/compare/
Would love feedback from anyone who has compared remodel/ADU bids or shipped a similar verification tool.
Allowances and exclusions are where bids that look the same end up thousands apart, so this is a good one to solve.
I tried /compare though, and I could only pick 2 of your preset scenarios. I expected to type in my own two quotes. That's the real moment for a homeowner: two bids on the table and a feeling one of them is hiding something. Right now that part is in the worksheet download, and I think most people won't get that far.
Also, I couldn't see where the numbers come from or when they were checked. Building costs change fast, so that's the first thing I'd want to know before trusting a benchmark against a real bid. I do this on my own tool, a source and date on every number, and it's honestly what people look at first.
Are people actually filling in the worksheet, or mostly just browsing the scenarios?
This is such a practical tool. ADU permitting is notoriously opaque and homeowners get completely blind-sided by contractor bids — having a free checker that compares line by line is exactly the kind of transparency the industry needs. Smart to build this as a free tool that earns trust before monetizing.
The categorization step is the part I'd stress-test hardest. Contractor line items are never worded consistently — one bid says "site prep," another says "grading & excavation," a third lumps three of your categories into one "sitework" line. If an unfamiliar label gets silently forced into hard cost / soft cost / contingency, that's a quiet miscategorization that only surfaces when someone tries to reconcile the total back to the invoice. Worth flagging any line that didn't match a known label instead of defaulting it somewhere — an "unmatched, categorize this yourself" bucket beats a confident-looking wrong bucket. That plus the source/date on the benchmark numbers (the other commenter's point) are what would make me trust the comparison over just eyeballing the raw PDFs.
The line-item comparison is useful only if it changes the decision. Have any homeowners found a bid difference they would have missed in the original quotes and changed which contractor they preferred?