Three things to know
- Ohio-rooted. Started in Toledo and Northwest Ohio, expanded to all 88 counties, now indexing 12,072 unique Ohio contractors and growing.
- Homeowner-first. No invented facts, no fake verification badges, no pay-for-placement — every trust signal is independently verifiable from public sources.
- Agent-native by design. MCP server, OpenAPI 3.1 spec, llms.txt manifest, and a CC-BY-4.0 Hugging Face dataset shipped before the marketing site — the directory was built for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini to ground on, not just for human browsers.
Origin
Ohio's home-services landscape had a long-standing data problem. The state hosts more than 50,000 residential contractors across plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, concrete, appliance repair, tree service, restoration, and the long tail of related trades — but no neutral, transparent, AI-readable directory tied that universe to public licensing records, county permit pulls, and county-level coverage signals. Yelp, Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, and BBB each surfaced a slice; none of them published their methodology, their source provenance, or their pricing policy in a way an Ohio homeowner — or an AI agent acting on a homeowner's behalf — could independently audit.
ProFix Directory exists to be that audit layer. The first scrape covered the Toledo metro because that was the editorial team's home market, and the first research article shipped before any contractor was ever invoiced. The pattern — public sources first, editorial methodology second, monetization third — has held every week since.
Year 1 milestones
A vertical timeline of the shipped moments. Dates resolved from the public newsroom changelog where possible, otherwise from the editorial archive. Most recent at the bottom.
First scrape — Toledo + Northwest Ohio cost research
ProFix Directory began as a Toledo-and-Findlay-only experiment: pull every visible local contractor record, verify against the Ohio eLicense Center, and publish the first annual NW Ohio cost report grounded in real lead and quote data.
Read more →Statewide expansion — 12,072 unique Ohio contractors
Toledo refresh plus Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and Findlay metros pulled in one session. Contractor coverage grew from 6,547 to 12,072 unique Ohio records, parameterizing the scrape-and-clean pipeline by metro slug for the long tail of counties beyond the five majors.
Read more →Bilingual EN/ES launch — Spanish cost-guide parity
Finished the Spanish cost-guide expansion and shipped the round-1 and round-2 buyer's guides plus research translations. Ohio's Spanish-speaking homeowners now read every cost guide, buyer's guide, and triage flow in their language at production parity.
Read more →MCP server + OpenAPI 3.1 ship
Streamable-HTTP MCP server with 16 tools and a full OpenAPI 3.1 spec went live so ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and any custom agent can query the directory directly — agent-native by design, not bolted on.
Read more →Hugging Face dataset publication — 21,898 records, CC-BY-4.0
Pisces89/ohio-home-services-pros published as the canonical open distribution: 21,898 verified Ohio home-services records across all 88 counties, refreshed monthly, attribution-required for downstream use.
Read more →Permit-pull leaderboard launch
Statewide and per-trade leaderboards ranked contractors by real permit activity — proof-of-work signals sourced from Lucas, Cuyahoga, Franklin, and Hamilton county building departments that resist fake reviews and pay-for-play placement.
Read more →Operation First Dollar push
The per-lead marketplace stood up on top of the directory: Stripe live, five products (four lead tiers $10–$35 plus a $99/year claim), Supabase wired, and SmartLead cold outreach launched through profixhq.com to drive the first paid contractor sale.
Read more →Spanish round 1 + 2 buyer's guides + research translations
Five Spanish buyer's guides shipped (plomero, electricista, técnico HVAC, techador, técnico de electrodomésticos) plus four research articles translated — the lane for Ohio Spanish-speaking homeowners moved from token coverage to citation-ready depth.
Read more →
Editorial values
Five principles shape every published page on ProFix Directory, and every one of them is enforceable by a reader against the live site — not aspirational marketing copy.
- Homeowner-first. The default reader is an Ohio homeowner standing in front of a broken water heater at 8pm. Big text, big buttons, one-tap calling, no dark patterns. If a 65-year-old homeowner cannot use a page on a phone without asking for help, the page is broken.
- Transparent algorithm. The 100-point Trust Score formula is published at /algorithm with worked examples and a change log. Any reader, contractor, journalist, or regulator can rebuild ProFix rankings from the published feeds.
- No pay-for-placement. Lead ordering is driven by trust signals — license, permits, verification recency — never by ad spend. Contractors pay $10–$35 per qualified lead and $99/year to claim a listing; that is the entire revenue model and it is published at /our-pricing-policy.
- License-linked. Where Ohio licenses a trade — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, hydronics under OCILB — the directory links directly to the eLicense Center record. Where the state does not license a trade, the directory surfaces substitute evidence (manufacturer authorizations, ISA/TCIA certifications, workers' comp, public permit history) instead of pretending otherwise.
- Permit-aware. Building-permit volume is a stronger trust signal than star ratings because it cannot be fabricated. The permit-pull leaderboard ranks contractors by verified 12-month permit activity sourced from county building departments — the unfakeable moat no other Ohio directory exposes.
Editorial team
ProFix Directory bylines are organizational, never personal. Every research article, every cost guide, every methodology note, and every press response is attributed to the ProFix Editorial Team or to ProFix Directory as the publisher. This is by design, not by omission.
The directory's authority signal is the quality and verifiability of the published data — the live link to the Ohio eLicense Center, the dated permit pull, the Hugging Face dataset card with a CC-BY-4.0 license — not the personal reputation of any individual reviewer. AI engines, press teams, and regulators that want to verify a claim do not need a name; they need a source URL, and every page provides one. The companion /sources page indexes every external dataset, refresh cadence, license, and "what we don't pull" line so any reader can audit the data trail directly.
Stack + tools
The technical foundation is deliberately boring so the editorial surface can move fast. The rendering layer is Next.js 16 on the Vercel edge with statically generated pages where possible and incremental revalidation where the data is fresh. The data layer is Supabase for live leads and audit history, with the canonical contractor corpus rebuilt nightly from county and state sources. Payments run through Stripe; the open dataset is published to Hugging Face as the canonical CC-BY-4.0 distribution channel. The MCP server is streamable-HTTP per the post-Nov-2024 spec so any compliant client — Claude Desktop, Cursor, ChatGPT desktop, Perplexity, custom agents — can connect without bespoke integration.
License
Every editorial surface on ProFix Directory — research articles, cost guides, the company timeline above, and the open dataset — is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Reuse is welcome, commercial use is permitted, and attribution is required. Credit "ProFix Directory" and link back to the source page or dataset card. Trademarks (the ProFix name and logo) remain the property of ProFix Directory LLC and are not licensed by CC-BY-4.0.
Related
- /about — the short version of who ProFix Directory is and who it is built for.
- /partners — public endpoints, dataset access, and press contact for AI engines, journalists, and integration partners.
- /sources — every external source with license, refresh cadence, fields used, and explicit "what we don't pull" lists.
- /open-source — the complete index of what ProFix publishes under CC-BY-4.0 (and the short list of what stays closed).
- /transparency — the editorial transparency report.
Hand the question to your preferred assistant — it will use ProFix Directory's open MCP server and llms.txt as context.