No large team, no investors deciding what gets published, no contractor paying for placement. Here's exactly who's behind fairrateindex.com and how it gets built.
The Fair Rate Index is built and run by Nick Conenna, an applied AI architect based in Cornelius, NC, on the Lake Norman corridor. Nick built the pricing model, the task dictionary, and the site itself, and operates the index under Peaking Waters LLC.
The index grew out of an earlier home-services project — the deeper Nick got into how contractors actually price jobs, the clearer it became that the more useful thing to build was the price data itself, published free for everyone, not another marketplace.
The Fair Rate Index is built in an ongoing collaboration with Claude, Anthropic's AI model. Claude is used throughout — drafting and maintaining the site's code, helping structure the pricing methodology, and writing much of the content across these pages.
Claude is a build tool and a thinking partner, not a co-founder — every methodology decision, every published number, and every judgment call about what the index says is Nick's responsibility, not Claude's.
No contractor pays to be listed, ranked, or shown a friendlier number, and nobody can pay to change one.
Every band is a public estimate built from public data — not a quote, and not a promise of what your job will cost.
Every hub, every state, and the API are free to read, cite, and build on top of.
Home and car records, repair reports, and licensed data for businesses. Those customers fund the free index, and the index gets better every day because of them.
The methodology, the sources, and the version history are all published — see exactly what changed and why.
Know what's fair. Before the truck shows up.
The Fair Rate Index publishes independent estimates for homeowners and vehicle owners. Figures are modeled from public data and are not quotes, offers, or recommendations to any contractor about what to charge. Members and business customers fund the free index; nobody can pay to change a number. Always get a written estimate before work begins.
© 2026 Peaking Waters LLC · Cornelius, NC