Four steps, about ten seconds of your time, and one honest conversation.
Get the itemised part of the page in frame. Paper, a screenshot, an emailed PDF — all fine. Before anything is sent, your personal details are blanked out on your phone and you get to check the result.
Each line is transcribed and classified — part, labour, fee, consumable. Then the lines are grouped into jobs, because a benchmark covers a whole job while a quote splits it up. Those groups are what we actually judge.
Each job gets a verdict, a typical range, and the source behind it. We check labour hours against what published labour costs imply for that job, and we check the hourly rate against the median for your area. Where two jobs share a strip-down we account for the overlap, because adding two published totals together overstates the real cost.
Where we don't hold enough data, we say so. That happens, and it is the honest answer.
A few plain sentences to read to the business. They ask questions and cite the number you are working from, so you are not saying “an app told me”. We also tell you what a good answer sounds like — because a lot of high quotes are high for perfectly sound reasons, and an honest explanation should end the conversation, not start an argument.
A note on tradespeople. The problem QuoteShield exists to fix is opacity, not dishonesty. Most quotes check out. Good businesses do not mind being asked a straight question about a price, and the ones who explain their reasoning well tend to be the ones worth going back to.