How a request becomes a phone call, and who pays whom
FoundationMatch is a referral service. We are not a foundation company or an engineering firm, we employ no one who does the work, and we set no prices. We pass your request to one independent company, and that company pays us for it.
What happens when you send a request
- 01You tell us what you are seeing, your ZIP code and how to reach you.We keep what you type to run the match, to show the company what you asked for and to keep a record of your consent. The privacy policy lists each use.
- 02We look for one company that serves your ZIP.If none does, the form says so before it asks for your phone number, and you lose nothing by closing the page.
- 03That company calls or texts you.It calls from its own number, which may not match ours. Nobody else is meant to contact you about this request, and you can tell the company to stop.
How FoundationMatch is paid
The foundation company that receives your request pays us a fee for it. You pay nothing to use the site, to use the tools or to be matched, and you owe nobody anything if you say no.
The payment creates a conflict, and you should know about it. A company that pays for requests has a reason to like requests that turn into jobs. That is why the tools and guides here say, in plain words, to get an engineer's report from someone with no repair to sell before you agree to structural work, and why companies that pay us cannot see or edit a page before it goes live.
What we check, and what we do not
These are the checks we make, and the ones we leave to you.
- Every rule, fee and code statement on the site links to the statute, standard or government page it came from, and a fact we cannot source is left out. Where we could only read a source through a summary, the sentence says so.
- Cost figures are labeled as estimates, say how they were built and are never presented as quotes. The wage and permit rows beside an estimate say what they are.
- We do not inspect a company's work, rate it or publish reviews of it, and we do not rank companies.
- We do not diagnose your house. The tools describe what a pattern can mean and when to call an engineer; they do not replace one.
- We do not set or negotiate prices, and we do not promise that a company will call or that it serves your address. Check the license number you are given.
Checking a contractor before you sign
Rules for who may do foundation, waterproofing and crawl space work differ from state to state. We explain them on the state pages. Wherever you live, ask for the license number in writing, look it up with your state licensing agency yourself, and make sure the name on the license is the company on the contract.
Ask whether the company that looks at your problem is also the company that would repair it. If it is, ask for a second opinion from someone who is not, and for a written report on any structural finding. Our engineer tool shows when that report pays for itself.
What happens to your information
Your request goes to the one company described above and to the vendors that run our forms, hosting and call tracking. Privacy laws where you live may let you ask what we hold, ask us to delete it, or opt out of sharing. The privacy policy lists each use, and the do not sell page has the opt-out form.
Who runs this
FoundationMatch is run by a small editorial team that writes and checks every page. The editorial policy says how we research, source and correct what we publish, and the contact page is the way to tell us we got something wrong.