Rénoculaire is live: one request, one contractor
The premise is a single rule: a request goes to one contractor, and once bought it leaves the board. That sounds unremarkable until you look at how the category actually works.
The problem with the standard model
A homeowner fills out a form on a lead site because water is coming into their basement. That one request is then sold to four or five contractors at once.
For the next three days the homeowner's phone rings. They didn't ask for four quotes; they asked for help, and now they're fielding calls from strangers who all know their address. Most people stop answering by the third call.
The contractor's side is worse than it looks. They paid for that lead. So did three competitors, who received the same phone number at the same moment. Whoever dials fastest usually wins, which means the contractor's return on a lead depends less on the quality of their work than on whether they happened to be near their phone. Everyone else paid for nothing.
The intermediary is paid four times either way.
We didn't invent this critique. Ask any contractor in Quebec who has bought leads and you'll get a version of it, usually with more profanity. It's the single most consistent complaint in the industry, and it's structural rather than accidental: selling the same lead four times is simply a better business for the platform than selling it once.
We wanted to find out whether the worse business was still a viable one.
What we built instead
One request, one contractor.
A purchased request leaves the board. Nobody else sees it, and it is never resold.
Every request is reviewed before it is published.
A person on our side checks the details, and gets in touch with the homeowner if something needs clarifying. Requests that don't hold up don't reach the board. This is slower and it costs us volume, which is the point.
The price is shown before purchase.
A contractor sees exactly what a request costs before deciding, on the request itself. There is no subscription and no monthly commitment. You pay for the requests you choose to buy and nothing else.
RBQ licences are verified against the public register.
For work that requires a licence under Quebec law, we check it before the contractor can receive that category of request. The number appears on their public page so a homeowner can verify it themselves in thirty seconds.
A free public page for every contractor.
Name, licence number, service areas, photos of finished work, and an address they can put on a truck. Homeowners can request a quote directly from it.
The tradeoff we accepted
Selling each request once means our revenue per request is a quarter of what it would be under the standard model. There is no version of this where that math works in our favour in the short term.
What we're betting on is that it works better over a longer horizon. A contractor who closes a reasonable share of the leads he buys keeps buying. A homeowner who gets one useful call instead of five unwanted ones might mention the platform to a neighbour. Neither of those compounds quickly, and both are worth more than a higher take rate on a transaction people resent.
We'll find out whether that's true or whether it's a comfortable story. The honest position right now is that we don't know.
Where it stands
Rénoculaire launched in August 2026. It is small, and we're saying so on purpose: a handful of trades, a defined territory, and the first contractors coming on now.
We chose foundation and drainage work to start because the problem is urgent, the job is significant, and the homeowner usually has no idea who to call. Someone with water in their basement in October is not shopping around for fun. Those are the requests where getting the match right matters most, and where the four-contractor scramble does the most damage.
More trades will open as the contractor side fills in. The platform already supports over eighty project categories; we're simply not pretending to serve a trade before there's someone to serve it.
Under the hood
Rénoculaire runs on Next.js and TypeScript with PostgreSQL, on infrastructure Unlicensed Studio owns and operates. Payments go through Stripe. Every transaction on the platform (request published, request purchased, credit applied, dispute filed) is written to a hash-chained ledger, so the record of what happened cannot be quietly edited after the fact.
That last part is unusual for a marketplace this size and it was a deliberate choice. When money changes hands over something as disputable as lead quality, both sides should be able to point at a record neither of them can alter.
The interface is available in French and English.
For contractors: signup is free,you only pay for the requests you buy.