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Changelog

Rule changes land here within 48 hours, with the ruleset version and the citation. The full citation list is on sources.

An entry has to name the ruleset it changed, the version it moved to, and the source that justified the change. A correction that cannot point at a document is not a correction, it is a preference — and the entries below include several where the finding was that a cite pointed at a subsection which did not say what the clause claimed. Those are logged in the same voice as the improvements, because a reader deciding whether to trust the output needs to see the misses at the same size as the hits. What counts as verified in the first place is set out in the editorial policy.

Standing position

9 prescribed notices are still untranscribed, and that blocks 4 states

Across the 5 state rulesets there are 23 required clause categories, of which 9 carry wording a statute prescribes and nobody has transcribed. Contract generation fails closed for California, Texas, Florida, New York; Pennsylvania still generates: the one launch state where no provision prescribes wording.

On the pricing side there are 3 rulesets covering 5 job types and 25 priced assemblies. Every figure in them is placeholder reference data: the citation URL is a reserved domain that can never resolve, and no public wage figure has been captured to anchor the labor rates, because the statistics host blocked every request made to it. What would replace them, and in what order, is on pricing methodology.

  • New York is the cheapest to unblock: its one prescribed notice needs bold face type and nothing else, and the state’s own legislative site answers, so transcription alone would clear it.
  • California, Florida and Texas stay blocked even after transcription. Their notices carry point sizes, capitalisation, front-page placement, an owner signature belonging to the notice itself, and in one case a detachable duplicate form — all recorded in the rulesets and none of it renderable yet.
  • Texas and Florida citations still point at legislature hosts that did not answer, so both states rest on secondary sources; Pennsylvania’s citation points at a consumer-information page rather than the statute, which is the wrong kind of source even when it loads.
  • The warning string “UNVERIFIED — ATTORNEY REVIEW REQUIRED” still sits inside the text field of drafted clauses — the field that renders into a document. Latent for the states that fail closed, live for Pennsylvania.
  • No construction attorney has reviewed the clause language, and no working contractor has sanity-checked the pricing. Both are launch gates and neither has been met.

State rulesets corrected against primary sources

  • State contract rulesets bumped to states-ca-2026-08.2 states-tx-2026-08.2 states-fl-2026-08.2 states-ny-2026-08.2 states-pa-2026-08.2 .
  • Bracketsight no longer generates contracts for California, Texas, Florida, New York. Those states prescribe notice wording word-for-word — with type-size, placement and signature rules attached — and Bracketsight had been shipping paraphrases of it, or omitting the notice entirely. A paraphrase of prescribed text is not a weaker clause; it is a non-compliant contract. The generator fails closed until each notice is transcribed from the statute. Every affected clause is listed with its statute and source on its state requirements page.
  • New York: the statewide licence-display flag was wrong. Gen. Bus. Law §771(1)(a) requires the licence number “if applicable”, and New York has no universal state contractor licence — licensing is county and municipal. The flag is now jurisdiction-scoped and off at state level.
  • Pennsylvania: the down-payment cap cited 73 P.S. §517.7(e), which contains no down-payment limit. Corrected to §517.9, and the trigger now matches the rule it describes — one-third of the price (plus special-order materials) on contracts over $5,000, using exact thirds rather than 33%. It no longer fires on contracts of $5,000 or less, where no cap applies.
  • Texas: the bills-paid affidavit clause carried a $5,000 threshold that Tex. Prop. Code §53.259 does not impose, suppressing a required clause on every smaller contract. The threshold is removed.
  • Three required clauses were missing altogether and now exist as first-class entries: the Texas disclosure statement for residential construction contracts, the separate Texas notice of cancellation form — which the cancellation clause had been telling customers was attached to a document that never produced it — and the New York mechanic’s lien notice, which no New York contract had ever carried.
  • Every clause now declares whether its wording may be drafted or must be transcribed, and carries the statute’s typography, placement and execution requirements alongside it: point size, boldface, capitalisation, where the notice sits, whether the owner signs it, how many copies, whether it must detach. The rules loader rejects a file where a clause marked as prescribed carries any text at all, because a paraphrase in that field is a paraphrase that gets rendered.
  • California cites were narrowed from the subsection to the paragraph — the lien warning, the cancellation notice, the licence-board notice and the down-payment sentence each live at a specific paragraph of §7159, and the file had been pointing at the subsection above them. The down-payment rule itself, the lesser of $1,000 or 10% of the price, was checked and left alone.

v1 launch rulesets

  • Pricing rulesets published for decks & carpentry, interior painting, bathroom remodel — trades-decks-2026-08 trades-interior-paint-2026-08 trades-bathroom-remodel-2026-08 . All pricing is placeholder reference data pending licensed cost data and contractor review; estimates carry the warning until re-verified.
  • State contract rulesets published for California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania — states-ca-2026-08, states-tx-2026-08, states-fl-2026-08, states-ny-2026-08, states-pa-2026-08. Clause language is unverified template text pending construction attorney review.
  • Each pricing ruleset ships with a 120-day stale window measured from the latest date on its citations. Past it, every estimate the ruleset produces is flagged as resting on data nobody has re-checked — the window is enforced by the engine rather than by anyone remembering.

This is an independent estimating and paperwork tool. It is not a quote, not a contract until you and your customer sign one, and not legal advice — a state’s required clauses change, and a contract that matters is worth an hour of a construction attorney’s time. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.

Pre-launch build, and the prices are the part to be careful with. Every unit cost, labour hour, labour rate, waste factor, access multiplier and regional multiplier in all 3 rulesets is placeholder reference data, modelled rather than licensed, and none has been sanity-checked by a working contractor. Each file also sets its own staleness window of 120 days from , which has already elapsed. Use the structure — the takeoff, the assemblies, the ranges, the clause list — and put your own numbers over the top. The state contract requirements are a different matter: those are cited to statute, and where a statutory notice has not been transcribed word for word the generator refuses to produce the document rather than paraphrase it. What is settled and what is not is on sources and pricing methodology.