About American Build Rate
One engine, two audiences: homeowners who need a fair number, and contractors who need to produce one quickly.
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What American Build Rate is
American Build Rate is a set of concrete cost calculators and a lightweight estimating tool for small contractors. Both run on the same pricing engine: quantities × local prices → line items → total. A homeowner uses it to sanity-check a project or a quote. A contractor uses it to build a professional estimate in minutes instead of an evening in a spreadsheet.
We started with concrete (slabs, driveways, patios, foundations) because it is the trade where quantities are easiest to compute precisely and where the gap between "a number from the internet" and "a number for my ZIP code" is widest.
Who is behind it
American Build Rate (americanbuildrate.com) is operated from Riga, Latvia, for the United States market. One person, the founder, builds it and checks every page before it goes live. Nobody else is paid to write or check the pages, and they aren't signed.
If you work in the trade and a price looks wrong, email hello@americanbuildrate.com. We fix it and, if you'd like, credit you on the page.
How we make money
We are transparent about this because it affects how you should read our numbers:
- Contractors pay a monthly subscription for the estimating app and the embeddable calculator widget.
- Homeowners may be offered a way to request quotes from local contractors. If that is live on a page, the page says so next to the button, and we may earn a fee when you request quotes.
- Some do-it-yourself pages carry display ads or affiliate links to materials and tools. Those never appear on pages with a quote-request form.
None of these change the numbers the engine produces. Prices come from public wage data, one published ready-mix figure and our own estimates for other materials, not from advertisers or contractors.
What we do not do
- We do not sell your contact details unless you explicitly ask us to connect you with contractors, and we tell you exactly who receives them.
- We do not publish a location page unless we have real local data for it.
- We do not fabricate reviews, ratings or "trusted by" claims.
Contact
Corrections, data questions and partnership requests: see the contact page. Details on how numbers are computed are on the methodology page, and every dataset we use is listed on the data sources page.