Colophon

Headings are set in Archivo, drawn by Omnibus-Type. The body text is Public Sans, from the US Web Design System. Tables, figure labels, the spec rail and anything holding a number are set in JetBrains Mono. All three are free to use under the SIL Open Font License. We serve one variable file per family from this site, cut down to the Latin letters, 93 kilobytes for the three together. Nothing is pulled from a font network, so no page you read here tells anybody else that you read it.

Every number here traces back to a named source with a date. Published cost guides, named one by one rather than blended: HomeGuide, Fixr, Angi, This Old House, Modernize, Homewyse, Today's Homeowner. Manufacturer catalogs and specifications from Amerimax, Berger, Englert and Spectra. The Copper Development Association handbook. Rainfall data from NOAA. The plumbing and residential codes as published. Retail and supplier shelf prices, read on a stated day. Each input is tagged measured, derived or estimated. An estimate is labeled as one every time it appears. A number we have not pinned down never gets published at all. The full method is on the methodology page. The data itself is on the cost pages, free to quote if you credit us.

There are no charts and no maps on this site. The figures are tables, and every table names its publisher in the table itself rather than in a footnote you have to hunt for. The cost calculator is the one exception, and it reads its rates from the same data file the cost pages read, so the tool and the sentence beside it cannot print different numbers. A script checks that on every build by running the calculator's own code against the cost model. It used to check a copy of that code instead, which is how the calculator once shipped broken while the check reported everything passing.

Every picture on this site was made with an image model. The band across the top of every page, the illustration near the top of about twenty pages, the small example photos beside the rows of the comparison tables, and the logo in the browser tab and beside the name. None of them is a photograph. Nobody stood in front of any of it with a camera. This paragraph is where we say that, once, instead of writing it under every picture.

That is why the rule runs the other way round here: if an image has a credit under it, that image is a real photograph, and the credit is its license, either federal work that nobody owns or Creative Commons with the photographer named. Nothing on this site carries a credit today, because nothing on it is a photograph. A check in the build holds both halves of that true, so a real photograph cannot quietly lose its credit and an illustration cannot quietly gain one.

There is one line we do not cross. Some pictures are things you hold your own house up against. Rot in a fascia board. A failed seam. Ice damage. Those are real photographs or nothing at all. A made-up picture of damage could send somebody to the wrong call about their own house. So you will not find any damage in ours. What you will find is metal, water and light: what aluminum grain looks like up close, what copper turns into, the shape of a profile. They are atmosphere and they are never evidence. And no picture here shows a job as ours, because none of them is.

The site is built with Astro and served as flat pages from a content delivery network. No page carries a tracking script, an analytics pixel or an ad network. A page can call out to exactly one outside service: the spam check on the quote form. It only loads if you go near the form.

Before any change goes live, twenty-eight checks run against the built site. Any one of them can stop it. They catch an em dash. A British spelling. A cost table with no method. An answer block that runs too long or too short. A page claiming a license nobody holds. A schema type this site does not use. An affiliate link with no disclosure. A paragraph printed twice in a row. A calculator that disagrees with the cost model behind it. Most of these checks were written the day something slipped through without one.

Some errors get past the checks anyway. Those get fixed on the page and written up, with a date. Ours go there too. Write to compassleadgroup@gmail.com with the number, the page, and the source that says otherwise.