One neighbor fighting extraction for ordinary households.
Pay only when I save you money.
"I always seem to be defending what's mine from the companies I pay to do business with."
If that sounds like you, you're not imagining it.
Cellular phone rates that quietly creep up. Subscriptions you forgot were still renewing. Bank fees that appear out of nowhere. The "covered" procedure that turns into a $400 bill anyway. The dentist's $4,000 treatment plan on a Tuesday. The mechanic's quote that doesn't quite add up. The advertised sale price that doesn't ring up at the register. Insurance renewals that are $300 higher than last year for no underlying reason. Property tax that nobody can really explain.
Most American households quietly lose $500-5,000 per year to bills, renewals, and quotes that are designed to be unreadable. The companies on the other end built the systems on purpose. The asymmetry — they pay full-time professionals to extract from you; you have ten minutes a year to defend yourself — is the entire problem.
My hypothesis: people are tired of being fleeced.
That's the bet of this whole thing.
I help ordinary households defend their wealth against extractive systems. Stop getting fleeced on the everyday things — medical bills, property tax, insurance, repair quotes, dental upsells, contractor estimates. Save the money that would have left your house anyway. Keep more of it local, where it does more good. Indie. No VC. Pay only when I save you money.
I had a $4,000 dental bill recently. Six fillings, a Curodont treatment I didn't know I needed, adult fluoride that insurance never covers, a thing about my gums that the dentist and the insurance company disagreed on by enough money to matter. I realized, sitting in the chair, that I had no way to evaluate any of it in real time.
That's the universal experience. Hospital bills, property tax assessments, mechanic quotes, insurance renewals — every one of these is a moment where ordinary people are asked to consent to spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on terms designed to be unreadable. And we mostly pay, because the alternative — fighting it — feels worse than the money.
The thing that's changed: the tools to fight back have gotten cheap enough that one person can do this at indie scale. I don't need a unicorn to make this work. I need to be useful, honest, and patient. The money is real (most American households quietly lose $500-5,000 per year to fleecings they don't have time to fight) and the wins stay in your house, where they can recirculate locally — not extracted to someone else's shareholders three time zones away.
A good poker player who wants to keep getting invited back to the table doesn't grind every dollar. They leave more on the table than they take off. The relationship is the asset.
That's how I want to do this work.
The customer's win comes first. My share is a slice of what I actually create for you, never more. If I can't recover any money, you owe nothing. If I recover $1,000, you keep $750 and I keep $250. Either way, you walk away strictly better off than when you started — which is the test for whether the work happened at all.
The fancy word for this is anti-extractive: the work has to leave the people I work with better off than it found them, with me taking only a fair share for the work itself. The plain word is neighborly. Either way, it's the opposite of how most of the systems extracting from you are designed.
Reasonable concern. Most "consumer advocacy" services that have existed before this one have been somewhere on a spectrum from useless to predatory. Here's how I'm different:
If after all that you still think it's a scam — fair, don't send me anything. But take a look at what I'm thinking about and tell me if any of these fleecings are happening to you. Even that helps.
Small, slow, capital-efficient, iterative. I'm not raising money. I'm not hiring a team. I'm not building a platform that needs millions of users to make sense. I'm building one neighbor's worth of work, one vertical at a time, charging only when I deliver, and adding a new thing only when there's real signal that someone wants it.
That means progress is visible and slow. The current state of this site is the most recent step, not the end state. If something here doesn't yet exist, it's because nobody's asked for it yet — and the way to make it happen is to tell me you want it.
The bill-audit thing above is the first specific service. But there are 20+ kinds of fleecing that I think one indie operator could fight — property tax appeals, insurance shopping, unclaimed-property recovery, class-action filing, refi alerts, contractor quote review, and more.
If one of those is what's happening to you right now, click through and tell me. Even the "tell me you want this" emails help me prioritize what to build next.
The simplest way to participate: forward me whatever's bothering you. I'll look at it within 48 hours and tell you what's recoverable. You pay nothing unless I save you money.
I'd like to stop getting fleeced.
And if I can help my friends, family, neighbors, and community do the same — wouldn't that be a something?
About: ourblocks.org is an early-stage indie project run by one person. If you have feedback, questions, or just want to tell me your fleecing story: .
Inspired by the local-economy traditions of Wendell Berry, Strong Towns, the co-op movement, and other folks who've been writing about anti-extractive economics for decades. This is one more practitioner.