Terms of Service

Who you are contracting with

TopQuote is not yet a registered business name in Ontario. Registration is in progress, and this line stays on the site until it is complete. We are telling you because you are entitled to know who you are dealing with before you pay anyone anything — which, incidentally, is advice we would give you about a contractor.

Until registration is complete, these Terms are an agreement between you and the individual owner operating under the TopQuote name.

What we sell

We sell opinions about cost and viability, in writing, for a fixed fee. There are four services. Prices are in Canadian dollars, are shown in full before you pay, and any applicable tax is shown separately at checkout.

• Consultation — $150. A written verdict on whether your project is viable, the reasoning behind it, and a realistic price range.
• Quote Service — $300. A detailed, itemised quote for the project you decided to go ahead with.
• Design Service — from $500. A full design and project plan, scoped to your site. Includes the quote.
• Contractor Comparison — $400. One standardised spec sent to vetted contractors, and a side-by-side report of what came back.

How the ladder works

The consultation is the front door and the only service you can book without talking to us first. Its $150 fee credits toward any of the other three, so starting at the bottom of the ladder costs you nothing extra.

Your verdict report recommends one next step, with the credit already applied to the arithmetic. It is a recommendation. You are free to take a different one, or none — nothing is locked, and there is no service you must buy to receive what you have already paid for.

The advice disclaimer — read this one

TopQuote provides cost and viability opinions. That is the entire product. We are not engineers, architects, lawyers, municipal inspectors or safety consultants, and nothing we give you is engineering, architectural, legal or safety advice.

Our price ranges are opinions about what work like yours has been costing in this market. They are not quotes, not bids, and not a guarantee that any contractor will price your project within them. A real contractor pricing a real site with real access, real soil and real timing may come in above or below our range, and may be entirely reasonable in doing so.

A verdict of viable is not a warranty that your project will succeed, come in on budget, or be approved. A verdict of not viable is not a prohibition — it is our honest opinion that the numbers do not work, and you remain free to disagree with it.

Where a project needs a permit, a stamped drawing, a structural design, a survey, a locate before digging, or professional advice of any kind, that remains your responsibility and the responsibility of the qualified professionals you engage. We will tell you when we think you need one. We cannot and do not take their place.

Every decision you make about your property is yours. You are entitled to weigh our opinion, test it against others, and ignore it.

Independence — how we are paid, and by whom

TopQuote performs no construction work and accepts no compensation from contractors. No referral fees, no lead fees, no commissions, no kickbacks, no advertising sold to trades, no equity, no discounts on our own work in exchange for introductions. We are paid by you, for advice, and by no one else.

This is a term of the agreement, not a marketing line. If we ever intend to change it, we will say so on this page before it happens, not after.

Where a service involves other companies — the contractor comparison sends one standardised specification out to contractors and reports back what came in — we are still paid only by you. The contractors pay us nothing to be included and nothing to be recommended.

Where we work

We serve the GTA and Peel Region, Ontario. The booking form checks your postal code against that area, and if you fall outside it we will offer to add you to a waitlist instead of taking your money. We would rather turn away a booking than sell you advice about a market we do not know.

Booking and payment

A booking is made when you choose a time, accept the consultation agreement shown at the last step, and pay. Choosing a time holds that slot briefly while you complete payment; if you do not finish, the hold lapses and the slot returns to the calendar.

Your booking is confirmed only when payment succeeds. You will get a confirmation email. If you do not, assume it did not go through and contact us.

Payment is processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your card details.

What you agree to do

Give us accurate information. A verdict is only as good as what it was based on, and a wrong measurement or an omitted slope is not something we can price around.

Have the right to commission work on the property you are asking about, or the permission of the person who does.

Only upload photographs you are entitled to share, and avoid including other people in them.

Give us safe access to the property if the service requires a site visit, at the time you booked.

Your photographs and project information

You keep ownership of everything you send us. You give us permission to use it for one purpose: delivering the service you paid for.

We will not publish your photographs, your address, your project or your verdict as an example, a case study or a featured project without asking you first, for that specific use, and getting a yes in writing. Silence is not permission and neither is a term buried in an agreement.

What we give you, and what you may do with it

Your verdict report, quote, design or comparison report is yours to use for your own project. Show it to your spouse, your contractor, your bank, your insurer — that is what it is for.

It is not licensed for resale, republication, or use as a pricing product by another business. The price guides, the site and its content remain ours.

Cancellations, refunds and rescheduling

Cancel at least 24 hours before your appointment and you get a full refund to your original payment method. No reason required, no questions.

Cancel inside 24 hours, or miss the appointment, and the fee is not refunded in cash. It converts to a credit on your account, and you get one free reschedule so the practical outcome is usually that you simply come back at another time.

Once a verdict has been delivered, the service has been performed and the fee is earned. That includes a verdict of not viable. Being told plainly that your project does not work at your budget is the service, not a failure of it — it is often the most valuable thing we will ever tell you, because it is the thing nobody selling you work has any reason to say.

If we cancel, or cannot deliver what you paid for, you get a full refund. That one has no conditions attached.

The Refund Policy sets the same rules out in more detail. If the two documents ever disagree, we will read the disagreement in your favour and then fix it.

Credits

A credit is money we owe you against future work here. It is applied automatically to your next booking with us, up to the value of that booking.

Credits have no cash value and cannot be withdrawn, transferred to another person, or exchanged for money. They expire 12 months after they are issued, and the expiry date is shown on your dashboard from the day the credit appears — we will not let it lapse quietly.

One booking produces at most one credit, and a credit cannot be used to pay for the booking that created it.

Emails you will get from us

At launch we send transactional email only: booking confirmation, an appointment reminder, your verdict, and confirmation of any refund or cancellation. You cannot unsubscribe from these while you have an active booking, because they are the service.

Marketing email — news, guides, offers — requires your express consent, collected separately with an unchecked box, as Canada’s anti-spam legislation requires. If you give it, every such message will carry a working unsubscribe link and we will honour it immediately.

The site itself

The price guides, ranges and examples on this site are general information, published free, and are not advice about your specific project. They are our best current estimates for this market; where a figure has not been verified against real local quotes, the page carrying it says so in a visible notice rather than pretending to a precision it does not have.

We aim to keep the site accurate and available, but we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or current at every moment.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of a service — in contract, in tort, in negligence or otherwise — is limited to the amount you actually paid us for that service. For a consultation, that is $150.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses: lost profit, lost opportunity, the difference between our range and what a contractor charged you, or the cost of work you decided to do or not do.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, for fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything the Consumer Protection Act, 2002 (Ontario) does not permit us to exclude. If any part of this section is unenforceable, the rest of it still stands.

This section is here because we sell opinions and opinions can be wrong. It is not a licence to be careless: if we get something wrong, tell us — we would rather refund a fee and correct the record than defend a bad verdict.

When we can decline or end service

We may decline a booking, or end a service in progress, if the project falls outside what we can competently advise on, if the property is outside our area, if the information given to us is materially wrong, or if someone is abusive to us. If we do, we refund what you paid for the part we did not deliver.

You can stop using the site at any time and ask us to close your account.

Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. The revision date at the top changes when we do, and the version that applies to a booking is the version you accepted when you made it — not a later one.

If a change is material and affects a service you have already paid for, we will email you about it.

Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. The courts of Ontario have jurisdiction, and this agreement does not take away any right you have under Ontario consumer protection law.

Contact

Questions about these Terms, a booking, a refund or anything else go to the contact page on this site. A real person reads it — there is only one of us.