Imagine needing to have some work done on your house. If a construction company claimed they offered a “free” quote, would you believe them, or would you assume there must be a catch?

In this story, one homeowner believes that the quote will be free, so he’s really caught off guard when the contractor and architect try to convince him to pay.

Keep reading for all the details.

AITA for not paying for a “free” quote on a home construction project?

I purchased my home six years ago and generally do all the work on it myself. There’s been a few projects where I hired a team to do things that were beyond my capabilities and I always make sure quotes on said projects are free.

My wife and I are looking into remodeling our kitchen and our plans involve taking a wall down and expanding.

The wall itself is something that I cannot personally do on my own – it’s a load-bearing wall and it happens to have vents running through that heat/cool the upstairs that would need to be re-routed.

You can’t lose with a free quote!

So I’ve been contacting people to do the job and responded to a craigslist post that advertised a free quote on any project.

I called the company and explained the project and set up a time for someone to come by and take a look at the wall we want to take down.

The next day the guy calls me and says that he doesn’t feel like he could give me an accurate quote without having an architect come in first to better assess the work that would need to be done. His words were “we need to take care of the architect first before I can give you a quote.”

But it wasn’t exactly “free.”

So the architect comes to my house, spends about 20 minutes or so doing measurements and calculations. When he finishes he tells me that I owe him $245.

Confused, I asked him what for, and he tells me that he “doesn’t work for free”.

I said “well, you just did…I never agreed to pay anything…this was advertised as a free quote.”

The architect then gets the contractor on the phone who then claims he told me there would be a charge for the architect. Apparently when he said “we have to take care of the architect first” that implied I would be paying him.

He refused to pay.

So I told the architect to get the funds from the contractor since there was never an agreed upon price up front and I never signed anything that acknowledged a price.

The architect tried to convince me to pay him by saying “$245 is not a lot of money, you can just write me a check.”

I refused and asked him to leave with the calculations he wrote down, which he then got annoyed and tried to guilt me into giving him something by claiming he drove out of his way to come to my house and it was an inconvenience for him to come.

He feels bad.

Truthfully I kinda felt like a jerk not paying the guy, but I also never agreed to pay any amount. I’m not sure I would have scheduled the guy to come at all if there was going to be a price associated with it.

AITA for not paying the architect?

This is either a scam the contractor and architect have going to guilt unsuspecting homeowners to pay for what they thought was a free quote, or the contractor really messed up but not telling the homeowner there was a fee for having the architect come out. Either way, he never signed anything or agreed to pay anything, so he has nothing to feel guilty about.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person thinks it might be a scam.

Yet, another person thinks it might be a scam.

I agree. If it wasn’t free, they needed to say that before doing anything.

It could be a very profitable scam.

They probably make a lot of money off of these “free” quotes.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.