HomePilot – Home Buying Co-Pilot for Zillow

The average first-time homebuyer makes an offer within 3 weeks of starting their search. Most of them have never calculated a true monthly payment before.

Zillow shows a mortgage estimate. It leaves out property taxes, HOA fees, PMI, homeowners insurance, and maintenance. The number buyers see is never the number they actually pay.

Add in the fact that Zillow's Zestimate is wrong on a specific property as often as it's right, that days on market is a negotiation signal nobody explains, and that closing costs are a surprise for almost every first-time buyer — and you have a platform that shows people homes without giving them the tools to actually evaluate them.

I built HomePilot to fix that.

What it does

Install the extension. Browse any listing on Zillow, Redfin, or Realtor.com.

HomePilot opens in the side panel and shows:

• True monthly cost — mortgage, property tax, HOA, PMI, insurance, and maintenance reserve, all in one number

• Price vs. Zestimate — is this listing over or under Zillow's own estimate

• Negotiation signals — days on market, price history, price reductions

• Offer calculator — what to offer based on listing behavior

• Closing costs breakdown — no surprises at the table

Everything runs locally in your browser. No property data leaves your device.

The stack

Chrome Extension (Manifest V3) — content scripts + side panel Data read directly from the listing page — no external API calls Railway server for auth and usage tracking Stripe for Pro subscriptions

Pricing

Free: 5 full analyses per month Pro: $19.99/month — unlimited

Honest launch numbers

Installs: — Revenue: $0 Reviews: 0

The bet

Every serious home search starts on Zillow. That's the distribution channel — not an app store, not a search ranking. The extension lives inside the workflow buyers are already in.

The content strategy targets every "how to negotiate home price" and "true cost of buying a house" search. Eight articles live already.

What's next

Reddit is the primary channel — r/FirstTimeHomeBuyer, r/RealEstate, r/personalfinance. These communities ask the exact questions HomePilot answers. Not advertising — being genuinely useful.

What's the most confusing part of buying a home for the first time? That's what I'm trying to make obvious.