Treat the numbers as yours
Your appkeep plan now says, line by line, how well we know what it shows you. Cost estimates print rounded, a foundation type nobody told us shows as not known, parts with no price say so, and the monthly figure counts what you have already saved. Much of it traces to Sander declining to vouch for prices he does not know, and telling us to treat the numbers as ours.
This spring we asked Sander to look over the installed prices behind appkeep’s plan: what a new roof or boiler costs. His answer, in July: “without live per-country pricing data I’d only be swapping a guess for your research. On money figures that’s worse than staying quiet, so I won’t rubber-stamp ranges I can’t personally stand behind.” In August we asked again, this time for a formal sign-off, and he declined again. You can only say a price range is in the right ballpark if you know the prices, he wrote, and across four markets he does not. He pointed back to what he had told us the first time: “treat the numbers as yours.”
So the numbers are ours. Since late August a run of changes to the plan has been about one thing: saying, line by line, how well we know what it shows you.
Cost estimates now print rounded, and a range prints as a rounded band. The rounding scales with the size of the number: fives under a hundred, fifties in the hundreds, five hundreds in the thousands, thousands from ten thousand up. The low end rounds down and the high end rounds up, so a band can come out wider than before and never narrower. Sander suggested the rule as the cost version of the five-year steps appkeep already uses for lifespans, and we adopted it on 7 September. A figure quoted to the euro claims a precision the research does not have. Your own numbers are not rounded into bands: a contractor’s quote, the ceiling you set for a job, what you paid.
Where we do not know, the plan now says so instead of filling the gap. When you set up your house, appkeep used to pick your foundation type from your country and the age of the house, and store the pick as though you had told us. That row now reads “type not known”, with the note “nobody can tell from a desk”, until you name it. Some parts have a lifespan but no price data we have found: copper pipes, sockets and switches, tiled floors among them. They used to look quiet, as if the plan had checked and found nothing due. They now show “no cost on file” and stay out of your budget rather than being guessed at. Sander’s rule for these, in his words: “if we can’t find data, we can’t cost it.”
In September Sander worked through the plan’s funding and found that the suggested monthly budget was calculated as if you had saved nothing. Someone putting money aside every month was told to save more each year as a big job came closer, as though those savings did not exist. That was a guess too, a zero stated as fact. The monthly figure now counts what you have already saved, which you enter on your plan’s overview. The plan does not see your bank account, and it does not add to that figure deposits it assumes you made. Beside it, the plan shows the month you last stated or confirmed it. When you mark a big job done with a cost and have savings on file, the plan asks whether the money came out of your savings. Once a year it asks “Still about right?”, with no answer picked in advance.
Some lines in your plan now say, in effect: we are not sure. Where a part has no cost on file, that is the line to get a contractor’s quote for. Where it is your foundation, name the type.