The short version
CostAnswer can be paid three ways: advertising space on the page, a commission when you buy something through a link, and a referral fee when you ask us to connect you with a local professional. All three sit after the answer, all three are labelled, and none of them changes a calculation.
Advertising
Advertising is off. Some pages reserve empty space where an ad would go, so that turning advertising on later does not move the answer down the page. Nothing is loading and no ad network sees your visit.
Affiliate links
Affiliate links are off. When they are on, a materials or tools section can appear under a project calculator, and CostAnswer may earn a commission if you buy through one. It never changes your price.
Product suggestions come from what the calculator worked out you need — gallons of paint, squares of roofing, cubic yards of concrete. A merchant paying more can decide which of two equally relevant links we show. It cannot invent a product you had no reason to see, and where payment did affect the order, the module says so.
We do not publish a stored price for anything we cannot keep current. Where a merchant’s terms govern price display, the link says “check current price” instead of showing a number that may be weeks old.
Professional referrals
Professional referrals are off. When they are on, some home-project pages can offer to pass your request to a partner who works with local contractors, and CostAnswer is paid a referral fee for that.
If you use it, we tell you which partner receives your request before you agree, we ask for nothing we do not need, and we check that a professional actually covers your area before we ask for a phone number at all. Asking for estimates does not commit you to hiring anyone.
We do not send one request to several networks at once. We have not inspected, vetted or approved any individual contractor, and we never say we have.
What it never affects
No advertiser, merchant, partner or payout influences a formula, an assumption, a data source, a range, a confidence level or a cost estimate. That is enforced in the software, not just promised here: the calculation engines cannot read anything from the commercial layer, and a test fails the build if that ever changes.
Every calculator on this site works identically with advertising, affiliate links and referrals all switched off. If they were all turned off tomorrow, you would lose some boxes at the bottom of the page and nothing else.
How to tell
Anything commercial is labelled where it sits, not only here. Paid links carry a sponsored attribute, open in a new tab, and go straight to the merchant — there is no redirect hiding the destination. Read more in our privacy policy and user agreement.