About & Methodology
A directory is only worth using if you can tell where its information came from. Here is ours.
The problem we are solving
Search for a plumber and you get pages of listings with no way to tell which companies are licensed. Meanwhile every state that licenses plumbers publishes a roster of exactly who is - usually as a downloadable file almost nobody reads.
This site is that roster, made usable: browsable by state and city, searchable by licence number, and refreshed daily.
The rules we hold ourselves to
- Every number carries a source. If we cannot link to where a figure came from, we do not publish it. That is why our cost guides currently have no price ranges.
- Nobody can pay to change what the roster says. No paid placement, no paid removal, no paid status changes.
- We do not publish empty pages. A city needs at least three licensed companies before it gets a URL.
- We say what we do not know. A state we have not researched reads "not yet verified" - never "no licence required".
- Stale data fails the build. A roster older than 45 days blocks deployment rather than shipping quietly.
What we deliberately leave out
The rosters we import include licensees' mailing addresses, which for sole traders are usually home addresses. They do nothing to help you verify a licence, so we drop them at import. The full accounting is on our data sources page.
Where we are
Texas is live, built on the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners roster. Other states are added one at a time, each only after its roster has been fetched, parsed and validated to the same standard. Progress is on the states page.
Corrections
Found something wrong? Tell us. If the error is in the state roster, the durable fix is with the issuing authority - we re-import daily and would overwrite a local edit - but we want to know either way.
Common questions
Can a company pay to appear higher?
No. There is no paid placement anywhere on this site. Listings are ordered alphabetically within a city, and the ordering logic is the same for everyone.
Are you affiliated with any licensing board?
No. We republish public rosters that licensing boards make available for download. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any of them.
How do you make money?
We do not, yet. When we do it will be through optional paid features for plumbing companies - never through altering, hiding or re-ordering what the state roster says.