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Editorial policy

What decides, what explains

Every number on this site is computed by a deterministic engine from versioned, cited rules files. No AI computes prices, selects contract clauses, or writes legal language. Content pages are drafted by humans against the same rules files the engine uses, so prose and computation cannot drift apart.

The separation is enforced rather than promised. Money is held in integer cents and rates in basis points; a deposit cap of one-third is evaluated as exact integer thirds rather than as 33%, because on a $9,000 job the difference between the two is $30 of lawful deposit. Clause selection is a small trigger grammar evaluated against the job facts, and an expression the engine does not recognise throws an error instead of being interpreted charitably. Where a rule is not fully known, the engine produces nothing rather than something plausible.

How does a rule get onto this site?

From the statute, into a dated rules file, with a citation. Each state file carries a ruleset version and an effective date, so a legislative change is a new file rather than an edit to code, and each required clause records whether its wording is drafted or prescribed by statute. The loader enforces that distinction: a clause whose wording is prescribed must carry the URL to transcribe from, and is rejected if it carries any text at all. That rule exists because a paraphrase sitting in a text field is a paraphrase that gets rendered into a contract and signed.

What closes a verification gap?

A primary source — the state's own text — fetched and read. A secondary source may cross-check a value but may never close a gap, and rows resting on one stay labelled until the authoritative document is read. That distinction is live here: California and New York were verified against the states' own legislative sites, while Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania rest entirely on secondary hosts because the state legislature sites could not be reached. Prescribed notice wording gets a stricter rule still — it is transcribed character-for-character from the statute, never paraphrased, summarised, or reconstructed from recall. Nine notices across four states are outstanding for exactly that reason, and those states generate no contract until the text exists. The open items are listed on sources.

Who has reviewed the clause language and the pricing?

Nobody has, and both reviews are launch gates rather than aspirations. The pricing data must be sanity-checked by two working contractors, and each state's contract clause language must be signed off by a construction attorney before it loses its unverified marker. Neither review is engaged today. What has happened is narrower: a verification pass checked whether encoded values and citations match their sources, which is not the same question as whether a generated contract is legally sufficient or a price is what the work actually costs. Until both gates are passed, every page and every generated document carries the warning, and reviewer names and credentials will be published on the about page when they are secured.

Corrections

A wrong number is fixed within 48 hours of confirmation, with a dated entry in the changelog naming what changed and why. Rules data is never silently edited. Report an error to info@bracketsight.com.

Corrections are published even when they are unflattering. The Pennsylvania down-payment cap was cited to a subsection that contains no down-payment limit at all, and now cites the prohibited-acts section that actually imposes it. Its trigger fired on any deposit above 33% of the price, which was wrong in both directions: the statutory cap applies only to contracts over $5,000, and it is one-third of the price plus the cost of special-order materials, so the old trigger raised false alarms on every job with special-order materials. The clause prose had been right the whole time; the machine-readable trigger beside it disagreed with it.

Funding disclosure

Bracketsight is free and requires no signup. Planned revenue — advertising, unbranded-document upgrades, and clearly labeled software affiliations — never influences a computed estimate, a clause selection, or a recommendation. It cannot: the engine has no knowledge of monetization and takes no input from it, and clause selection is decided entirely by the statute and the job facts. The commercially inconvenient behaviour is the proof — four of five states currently produce no contract, which is the opposite of what a revenue-maximising rule would do.

How often is each ruleset re-checked?

All five state statutes are re-verified annually, and again after any legislative session in which a consumer-protection or lien bill passes — statutes change by session, not by calendar. Some details drift faster than the statute: Florida's recovery-fund contact information is set by board rule and can change with no statutory amendment at all. The federal wage series that will anchor labor rates republishes annually each spring on a May reference date, so the release year is recorded alongside every figure. Pricing rulesets carry their own staleness window and flag every estimate they produce once it lapses.

This is an independent estimating and paperwork tool. It is not a quote, not a contract until you and your customer sign one, and not legal advice — a state’s required clauses change, and a contract that matters is worth an hour of a construction attorney’s time. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.

Pre-launch build, and the prices are the part to be careful with. Every unit cost, labour hour, labour rate, waste factor, access multiplier and regional multiplier in all 3 rulesets is placeholder reference data, modelled rather than licensed, and none has been sanity-checked by a working contractor. Each file also sets its own staleness window of 120 days from , which has already elapsed. Use the structure — the takeoff, the assemblies, the ranges, the clause list — and put your own numbers over the top. The state contract requirements are a different matter: those are cited to statute, and where a statutory notice has not been transcribed word for word the generator refuses to produce the document rather than paraphrase it. What is settled and what is not is on sources and pricing methodology.