The week appkeep learned to give a verdict
A number on its own is not an answer: 'is €640 fair?' is the actual question. This week the calculator learned to answer it: put in a quote, and you get a verdict against the fair band for that trade, not a bare number to squint at. The same verdict now reads back after the work is done, and when what you paid was sound, appkeep says so, because nobody else in this industry will ever tell you that you did well. Underneath, we verified the consumer statutes in Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands, so the price ceiling you send a contractor is written in your market's own legal vocabulary. And the calculator now emails you the mandate text, works in kronor, and hands off to the app for the rest.
A number on its own is not an answer. You can know a boiler repair runs somewhere around €600 and still stand in your kitchen not knowing whether the €640 quote in your hand is fine or well above what the work should run. “Is this fair?” is the actual question, and this week appkeep learned to answer it.
Put a quote into the calculator and you no longer get a bare number back — you get a verdict. The quote sits inside the fair band for that trade, or above it, and the calculator says which, plainly. If a job is too big for a quick check, it says that too, instead of pretending. An honest tool tells you the edges of what it knows.
The verdict also works in the other direction, after the money is spent. When you mark a repair done in the app and the cost was sound, appkeep says so. That sounds small. It is not. Every verdict a homeowner ever hears comes from someone with a stake: the contractor who profits from the work, the insurer who profits from the claim. Nobody in this industry ever tells you that you did well. So when what you paid was fair, we say it, and when it wasn’t, we stay quiet about money you can no longer un-spend and help with the next decision instead.
Underneath the verdict there is drier work that matters more than it sounds. The price ceiling you send a contractor, the mandate, now stands on the actual consumer statutes of the three countries we open in. We went to the sources: the Finnish consumer protection act, the Swedish consumer services act, the Dutch civil code, the model contracts the consumer authorities themselves publish. The clause you send is written in your market’s own legal vocabulary, the words a contractor already knows from every serious client, not a translation of an English template. When you set a ceiling, the law of your country is standing behind the sentence.
The calculator itself grew too: it can email you the mandate text to send on, it speaks kronor now as well as euros, and if you have an appkeep account it hands the whole thing into your house’s record.
And the machine got its quiet week as well: the dependencies, the server and the deployment pipeline now patch their own known vulnerabilities and tell us when they cannot. You will never see it. That is the point of it.
Mid-July. The verdicts are ready before the visitors are.