About Fixadore
Every state licensing board publishes who holds a license, for which trade, at which address, with a phone number. It is public, it is free, and no owner with a warm walk-in has ever opened one. We turn those registers into something you can search by ZIP in ten seconds. Then you call the business yourself.
Compiled from public state license registers. Verify license status and insurance before hiring.
The problem
Something breaks at your shop. The walk-in is warming, or there is water across the back room, or the panel that runs the sign is dead. You open the contacts list on your phone, which is really a list of whoever answered the last time. The first number rings out. The second belongs to a guy who went to work for a bigger shop. The third does not do your kind of work and offers you a name he cannot spell.
Half an hour later you have made six calls, have one soft promise of first thing tomorrow, and no idea whether the person is licensed for the work, how far away they are, or whether the number you were handed is even current. Meanwhile the thing that broke is still broken.
The infuriating part is that the answer was already written down. The state knows who holds a license for that trade. It knows their phone number. It publishes both. It just publishes them in a shape built for auditors, not for somebody standing in a puddle.
What the register already holds
Fields the California CSLB publishes on its own data portal. Free, no key, no scraping.
What we actually do
None of this is clever. It is the unglamorous work nobody does because the register is free and boring, which is most of the reason the problem is still here.
State licensing boards publish their contractor lists as bulk downloads, free and without a key. We import the entire file rather than a sample, so the directory is not a selection somebody made.
Phone numbers go to E.164, addresses are upper-cased and USPS-abbreviated, and business names are reduced to a comparison key with the legal suffix stripped. Identity is the license number: a row's id is a hash of the register plus that number, so re-importing the same register updates the row it already has rather than adding a second one. Two license numbers stay two listings, because they are two license holders.
Every row is placed at the center of its ZIP, read from the Census ZCTA gazetteer, and the listing records that it is a ZIP centroid. Two businesses in the same ZIP therefore sit on the same point and show the same distance. You type a ZIP, so your own end of the measurement is already a centroid: geocoding the business to its rooftop would buy precision about the wrong point. Every card says the distance is approximate.
A California C-36 is a plumbing license and covers a burst pipe. A B General Building license does not, so it is never offered as a plumbing result. That mapping is the join that makes a search mean anything.
The radius filter runs first, starting at 25 miles and widening on a fixed ladder to 75 when a search comes back thin. What survives is ordered nearest first. There is no score, and no position anybody could buy.
Registers change. A row that disappears from a new export is marked lapsed rather than deleted, and every listing carries the date we last read that record, so you can see how old the fact is.
What this is not
A directory earns its keep by being straight about what it knows. These are the boundaries, written down so you can hold us to them.
Nobody applied, nobody signed up, nobody pays us and nobody owes us anything. There is no relationship of any kind between this site and the businesses on it. Several states that allow licensee data to be published restrict using it to solicit, so we do not call or email them either.
We do not inspect, interview, rate or endorse anyone here. A license line says exactly one thing: what a state register published about that license on the day we read it. The board is the authority on that, not this page, and it is worth checking before you hire.
Cost ranges are national bands we set for the category of work, multiplied by an urgency factor and nothing else. There is no survey behind them and no regional index, so the figure does not move with your metro. No business on this site has given us a rate, because we have never asked one for a rate.
We hold no first-party reviews, and redisplaying somebody else's would break their terms and tell you nothing checkable. License facts are what we have, and you can verify every one of them against the issuing board.
Where this stands today
1 register has finished importing. A search outside the states they cover comes back empty, and says so, rather than filling the space.
3,294 cities, 51 states
read from the register, with the date of the read
the number the board holds, not one we sourced
each one named on every listing it produced
Those figures are counts of rows that exist, read when this page was built. Nothing here is a traction number. There is no jobs-completed total and no money-saved claim, because we have completed no jobs and saved nobody any money. A directory has one honest measure, which is how much of the country it can answer for, and that is the number that moves as each register lands.
Straight answer
This is a small and new project, not a company with a floor of staff. There is no leadership team to introduce, no funding to mention and no founding story worth three paragraphs. What exists is the pipeline described above, the registers imported so far, and a short list of claims we have decided never to make. Anyone who has run a shop has had the forty-minute phone call, and the fix for it turned out to be janitorial work on public data rather than anything ambitious.
Listings are compiled, not curated. Nobody reads them by hand before they go up, which is the only way to cover a state holding more than two hundred thousand licensees, and it means the occasional row will be stale or wrong. When that happens the correction route is the fastest thing on this site, and the register is always the authority over anything we print.
Today a listing earns us nothing. There is no fee to appear, no fee to rank higher, no advertising on the results and no lead being sold behind the page. If any of that changes it gets written on the page it affects, in plain words, rather than folded quietly into the ordering. The ordering is distance, and it is a dozen lines of code.
Try it
Pick what has gone wrong, add the ZIP, and get the nearest trades licensed for that work with the numbers to call. Nothing to create, nothing to submit.