TerraQuotes

To give a homeowner a price before anyone comes out, I had to know how big their yard is without visiting it. The riskiest hypothesis was that a free source of lot sizes existed at all, and was good enough to price from. The whole product depended on it, and no national service offered one.

The hard part was never showing a buyer a range of numbers. It was resisting the urge to build a giant do-it-yourself landscape design tool, and staying on one question: which prices do people say yes to? In the trade that is called conversion, how often a quote turns into a paying job.

Before building anything, I wrote each guess down as a hypothesis I could test, with what would prove me wrong. Then I ranked them by how much it hurts if I am wrong and how much a customer gains if I am right, and built in that order.

I went to the county records first: the city of St. Louis, St. Louis County, and Maricopa County in Arizona. St. Louis publishes every lot's land and building square footage for free, and the same approach worked in the other two. I showed an early build to Jeff Haring of Sundown Landscaping, and when Quiet Village came on, I tested the idea against their real price list.

The homeowner measures nothing. You type your address and pick your house from a list. The app takes the lot, subtracts the buildings, and shows what is left as a green tag beside the address. The price is that area times the contractor's own rate per square foot.

It only prices addresses picked from the list. If yours is not there, it says so and offers a waitlist instead of guessing. The code that turns county records into that list is patent pending, not granted.

The first version was install-first. You typed an address and picked one of three one-time packages, Curb Appeal, Full Lawn or Dream Lawn, and an isometric drawing of a house redrew its yard to show what you were buying. Full Lawn at one address came to $106,564, or $16.30 a square foot.

It priced the wrong job. Jeff Haring saw an early build and said: “This is great for maintenance; not quite ready for installation. That’s complicated as soon as you start digging.” Five months later my first pilot drew the same line unprompted. So the packages became monthly upkeep: Quiet Village rewrote its maintenance prices as one flat rate per square foot, its packages became the GEM monthly plans, and digging moved to its own opt-in tab.

Some lessons came the hard way. Sending the whole address list to a phone, six megabytes of it, made the page slow and broke on iPhones, so now the server answers each search. A partner's website rewrote the address of my code and broke the quote form, so now the app knows each partner by name instead of guessing.

The October 2025 calculator asked the homeowner to set how much of the yard needed work, with a slider. People got it wrong, and the price looked just as believable either way. A wrong answer that looks right is worse than no answer, because nobody notices it.

So for mowing and upkeep I stopped asking and measured the lot myself, from the county's property records. The area picker moved to the add-ons, where choosing an area is the right thing to ask.

TerraQuotes is live. A homeowner gets a priced maintenance package in about a minute, with no sales call, and the leads go to the pilot operator, Quiet Village Landscaping. On one contractor's sales view, all 38 leads got a number back the same minute; nine booked a visit and four became work.

What I cannot tell you yet is how close the price comes. I threw out my accuracy test before scoring it, because 215 of 347 old sales rows mixed a monthly price with two one-time prices, with nothing to tell them apart. On July 14, 2026 I set the bar the model must clear before it is worth building, from a simulation rather than a guess. A test model I trained in July picked the winner 47 times in 100, against a coin flip's 50 and my cutoff of 60, and no model has ever priced a real quote.