The problem
Every homeowner starting a repair asks the same first question — “roughly what does this cost?” — and there’s no honest, fast answer. Contractor quotes mean scheduling a visit; online calculators want your email and still guess. So people stall before the project even starts.
What we built
Ballparkly. Snap or upload a photo of the repair, add an optional ZIP to make it local, and it reads the image, checks typical costs for the work, and returns a rough price range in about 15 seconds — with an honest confidence note and a plain-language “what we saw” breakdown (for a stucco repair: $3,200–$5,800 · medium confidence · hairline cracks, ~120 sq ft, single-story wall). Eight project types (stucco, exterior paint, fence or deck, windows, junk removal, pressure washing, garage door, and more), free, no signup, and photos stay private — location data is stripped on upload.
How we shipped it
A Laravel + Inertia/React front end with an Anthropic-backed vision pipeline reading the photos, deployed on AWS. Direct upload with normalize-at-intake, so a photo straight off a phone just works.
Outcome
Ballparkly is live — a free instant estimate that hands homeowners a number they can trust before they ever pick up the phone, and hands contractors warmer, better-informed leads.
