Why FairCost exists
You get a $480 quote for plumbing. Your neighbour paid $220 for similar work. Were they lucky, or were you ripped off?
Most Australians have no way to know — and that's exactly what FairCost fixes.
Home services pricing is opaque by design.
Every existing platform makes money from your confusion. That's not an accident — it's the business model.
Quote comparison sites
Sell your details to the highest-bidding tradies, then steer you toward whoever paid most for visibility.
Tradie directories
Rank providers by ad spend, not by quality, honesty, or actual price competitiveness.
Review platforms
Tell you which provider is liked or disliked, but never what they actually charge.
SEO content sites
Publish pricing copy-pasted from other sites, often years out of date, with no real data behind it.
Whats The Damage tells you what tradies charge. FairCost tells you what your neighbours actually paid.
What FairCost does differently.
FairCost is a research platform, not a marketplace. The data comes first. Everything else flows from that.
Real submissions from real Australians
Every pricing point comes from someone who actually paid for the service in their suburb. Submissions are reviewed and scope-normalised before publication.
Materials and GST flagged on every job
A $400 quote that excludes materials and a $400 quote that includes them are not the same data point. We capture both signals and adjust comparisons accordingly.
Confidence scoring on every range
We tell you how reliable each pricing estimate is. A range from 200 submissions reads very differently from a range built on 3.
Last-reviewed timestamps on every page
Every pricing-guide page shows when it was last reviewed and by whom. If the timestamp is older than 90 days, we mark the price as potentially stale.
Methodology shown openly
How we collect, verify, weight, and publish pricing data is public. You can audit our logic at any time.
Editorial independence by design
Providers cannot pay to rank higher on pricing pages or influence the data. Featured Provider listings are clearly marked and never alter the numbers.
Want the full structural detail? Read our methodology and editorial independence policy.
What's in FairCost today.
23
Service categories
15
Australian cities
1+
Verified submissions
$0
Paid placements
Every pricing page on FairCost is built on this data. See our methodology for how we collect and verify submissions.
Built by someone who got tired of guessing.
FairCost is run by Delah Gomasi, a Sydney-based founder who has spent over a decade in home services — first as a customer trying to work out whether quotes were fair, then as the operator of MaidForYou, one of Sydney's largest independent cleaning operators (40+ contractors, since 2018).
Sitting on both sides — paying tradies and being a tradie — made one thing obvious: nobody has the actual numbers. Most consumers compare three quotes and pick the middle one, hoping that's “fair”. Most tradespeople price against what they think the competition charges, which is itself based on guesswork. The whole market runs on vibes.
FairCost is the attempt to fix that. Real submissions, named sources, named reviewer (me), materials and GST flagged, methodology published.
Full disclosure: I run a business in one of the listed categories.
I operate MaidForYou, a Sydney cleaning business. The cleaning prices on FairCost are the AU market median, not MaidForYou's rate card. MaidForYou gets no preferential listing, no free Featured Provider slot, and is not recommended over other operators in editorial copy. If you'd rather see the structural protections written out in full, read our editorial independence policy.
Founder, FairCost
Founder of FairCost and operator of MaidForYou (Sydney, since 2018). Personally reviews every pricing change on this site.
— Delah
Stop guessing. Start knowing.
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