Read your written offers side by side
Two proposals for the same job can differ by thousands and both be honest, because they have priced different work. This page lays 24 things a written offer either addresses or does not across 6 groups, so you can see which parts of the difference are scope rather than value.
It does not score anything, rank anybody, name a winner, or tell you which offer to accept. It turns your paperwork into a list of questions with the reasons attached, and then gets out of the way.
What this page has not established, before you start
- Whether any of this work is necessary for this building. Nobody here has been to the property.
- Whether any figure is reasonable. This platform holds no pricing observations and publishes no benchmark, so any statement about a fair price would be invented.
- Whether any of these documents describes a design that suits this building. That depends on measurements taken on site.
- What reading would follow the work. No one can state that in advance, and a document that does is describing an intention rather than a result.
- Whether any of these offers comes from somebody who does good work. A written document says what somebody wrote down, and this page reads nothing else.
- Whether anything here satisfies a local requirement. Requirements are set jurisdictionally, and only the responsible authority can answer for your address.
Nobody here has been to your property, seen your paperwork, or met anybody who wrote it. What follows is a checklist and your own marks against it. What we can and cannot determine online
Opening the workspace saved in this browser…
How to read a written offer
A proposal is a description of work somebody intends to do, written before anybody knows exactly what they will find. The useful question is almost never “is this one right” — it is “do these two documents describe the same job”, and the answer is usually no in ways nobody hid from you.
Scope explains most gaps
An offer covering a crawlspace and an offer covering a basement slab have priced different buildings. One that includes the measurement afterwards and one that leaves it to you have priced different deliverables. Neither pairing tells you anything about either firm; both make the two totals incomparable until the difference is named.
Silence is not concealment
Most written offers are short, because most of the conversation happened on site. A document that does not mention the discharge point has not told you where the discharge goes — it has not revealed a shortcut. Every row of the checklist above says so explicitly, because a comparison tool that implies otherwise is a machine for making people distrust whoever quoted lowest.
A longer document is a longer document
This page will never count how many items each offer covers, and that absence is deliberate. A firm that writes three pages and a firm that writes one may do identical work; the length of a document measures how somebody writes, not how they install. There is no total under any column here, because a total under a column is a scoreboard whether or not it is called one.
Where a legitimate disagreement is normal
Two competent people can look at the same building and propose different approaches — and the reasons are usually specific and legitimate. Where your documents differ, the productive move is to ask each of them what they saw that led there, rather than to treat the difference as a mistake by one of them.
What to do with the questions
Ask all of them of all of the documents. A question raised by one offer is not an objection to that offer, and asking it of only one firm produces an answer you cannot compare with anything. The question builder sets out what a complete answer sounds like, and the before-hiring checklist covers the parts that sit outside any single document.
Important limitations
This workspace is not an inspection, an engineering review, a code or permit determination, a legal opinion, a price benchmark, or a professional assessment of any proposal. It does not establish whether work is needed, whether any figure is reasonable, whether any design suits your building, what reading would follow the work, or whether anybody who wrote your documents does good work. It holds no company names, produces no score, and recommends no firm.
It holds up to 4 documents by position, on this device only. What we collect and why · how this platform is paid for · the two-quote scope worksheet
If you want another offer to compare
Describe your situation and we will tell you honestly whether we can route it to a provider in your area today, or whether we cannot.