Why these three sit together
They are the same house at three different moments. The assessment notice arrives in spring and you have three weeks to decide whether to fight it. You think about an ADU in the back garden and nobody mentions that finishing it puts a new line on that same notice. You buy an electric car and an electrician tells you the panel needs replacing before you can charge it.
Each one has a well-funded incumbent with a reason to prefer one answer. Appeal firms keep a quarter to two-fifths of your savings and gate their calculator behind your address and parcel number, because you are the product. Every ADU calculator ranking on Google belongs to a company that builds ADUs, and the property tax line is missing from all of them. Panel calculators mostly run the wrong section of the electrical code — the one written for new construction — which reliably produces a larger number than a retrofit actually requires.
What we do instead
- Ask for nothing. No address, no parcel number, no email, no account. The figures you type stay in your browser and are never transmitted anywhere.
- Show the method. Every calculation names the rule it applies — the median dollars-per-square-foot comparison, NEC 220.83(A) and (B), the demand factors — so it can be checked rather than trusted.
- Publish the limitations next to the result. Each tool carries a list of what it does not account for. That list is the most useful block on the page and it is the one thing a lead-generation competitor structurally cannot write.
- Date the defaults and let you change all of them. Including the ones that make the answer worse.
We do not file appeals, build ADUs, install panels, or take a referral fee from anyone who does. The site is paid for by display advertising and nothing else. More on that on the about page.