Home Cost Kit

Who publishes this

Home Cost Kit is run by Alberto Cuitó Martín, a one-person business based in Spain. That is an odd thing to find on a site about US home improvement costs, so it is worth saying in the first sentence rather than burying it. What follows is why it does not affect the numbers, what it arguably improves, and what this site cannot tell you that a local contractor can.

Why the location does not touch the data

None of the figures here are local knowledge, and none of them are opinion. The wage that drives every labour line comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which surveys 530 metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas and publishes the result (May 2025). Benefit loads come from the same agency. Equipment rates come from FEMA. System sizing comes from published state code. All of it is public, all of it is linked, and all of it would say exactly the same thing to a reader in Ohio as it does to us.

A cost guide written by someone in Texas who does not cite a source is less checkable than a model built from federal data by someone in Madrid who cites all of them. Checkability is the thing that matters, and it does not have a nationality.

What being an outsider actually changes

Most US home-cost sites are owned by contractor lead networks, or funded by them. Their numbers exist to get you into a quote request. We have no relationship with any contractor, in any state, and no reason to nudge a figure up so a job looks worth quoting or down so it looks affordable.

There is also no regional favouritism to fall into. We have no home market, so every metropolitan area is treated the same way by the same formula — which is precisely what a wage-indexed model should do and what a writer with local habits often fails to do.

The relevant experience

The work behind this site is not knowing what a septic tank costs in Georgia. It is knowing how to build and maintain a construction pricing catalogue that does not contradict itself: how to structure line items, how to keep sources dated, how to stop totals drifting away from the breakdown that produced them, and how to publish it without inventing anything.

That came from building and running Motor de Presupuestos, a construction estimating tool for the Spanish market with its own priced catalogue. It is in Spanish and the prices there are useless here — the transferable part is the machinery and the discipline, which is why this site publishes an uncertainty band on every estimated line instead of a confident single number.

What we are not

We are not contractors. Nobody here has installed a septic system, and we do not pretend otherwise. That is exactly why every source is linked and every assumption is written out: this site cannot lean on “trust me, I have done a thousand of these”, so it leans on being checkable instead. If a figure is wrong, the reasoning is there to be argued with.

Where no public source exists — and for US residential material prices, none does — we publish our estimate labelled as an estimate, with the band it could move within, rather than dressing a guess up as a fact. The full method is here, including the parts that are weak.

Corrections

If you install these systems and a number here is wrong, that is the most valuable email this site can receive. Write to alberto@cuitodigital.com. Every estimated figure states the assumption behind it precisely so you can point at the one that is off. Changes are recorded with a date in the change log.

Publisher details

Published under Spanish law 34/2002 (LSSI), article 10, which requires a service provider established in Spain to identify itself.

Name:
Alberto Cuitó Martín
Tax identifier (NIF):
53498480C
Registered address:
C/ Virtudes 27, 28110 Algete, Madrid, Spain
Email:
alberto@cuitodigital.com
Legal texts last reviewed:
2026-08-25