How this works, and how we make money

You are about to type your home address into a website you have never heard of. Wanting to know who we are and what we get out of it first is the correct instinct. So here is all of it, including the parts that don't flatter us.

Who runs this

What Hit My House runs out of Fredericksburg, Virginia. One small independent operation. No insurance company owns it. No roofing company owns it, and nobody here is brokering your details to either.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NOAA, the National Weather Service, or any government agency. We read their public data and put a decent interface on it.

Where the numbers come from

All of it is public-domain US federal data. Nothing proprietary, nothing guessed:

Hail, lightning and tornado history: NOAA's Severe Weather Data Inventory, which is NEXRAD weather-radar output going back to 1992.
Recent storm reports: National Weather Service Local Storm Reports, filed by trained spotters, the public and emergency managers.
Address lookup: the free US Census geocoder.

You can check us. Every answer names the dataset it came from and how many requests it took, and the whole thing runs on a free public API with no key, so you can pull the raw numbers yourself and see that we didn't massage them.

How we actually make money

Most free tools won't tell you this, which is a good reason to be suspicious of them. There is one way in, and that is the complete list.

1. Contractors pay us for introductions how we intend to earn most of it

Look up your address, find hail, and choose to ask for an inspection: we pass your details to one local roofing contractor, never a list of eight, and that contractor pays us a flat $49 for the introduction. You pay nothing, ever.

We don't resell your details to multiple contractors and we take no percentage of your job or your insurance settlement. Nothing goes anywhere unless you fill in that form on purpose.

The incentive, stated plainly: we get paid when you request an inspection. So read what the data says, not what we would like you to conclude from it. That is also why the request form only appears when radar genuinely found hail at your address, and never when it didn't.

2. Nothing is sold to you the record is free

The lookup is free and the CSV download is free, with no email asked for either. The numbers are public-domain federal data and were never ours to sell. Contractors paying for introductions, above, is the whole business.

3. Nothing else and this is the point

Your address, your email and your lookup do not go to data brokers, marketing lists or insurers. We run no ads. There are no affiliate links. There is no tracking pixel and no cookie banner, because we don't set a cookie.

What we know about you

Almost nothing, and only what you type:

If you just look up an address: we don't store it. The lookup runs, the answer comes back, and nothing about you is saved. No account, no signup, no cookie.
If you submit a form: we get what you typed, plus the address you looked up, because a request for a roof inspection is useless without the address. That is the whole of it.
Page counts: we count how many times each page is viewed, with no identifier and nothing stored on your device. We can tell that a page was loaded. We cannot tell that it was you.

The honest limits of what we can tell you Radar answers describe a 0.1° grid tile, a box roughly seven miles across. A detection means radar saw hail somewhere in that box. A blank result is an absence of evidence, not proof nothing fell. Where we can narrow it down we do, and we show the distance to the nearest detected storm cell, though that cell is a volume of air rather than a mark on your roof.

None of this is an insurance claim or a damage assessment. It tells you whether it's worth having someone look. Somebody still has to get on the roof.

Why it's free

Because it costs us almost nothing to run. The data is public and free to query, the site is static, and one person maintains it. Companies in this space charge $349 to $649 a year for three years of storm history. We show thirty-plus years for nothing. A free tool that's genuinely useful earns a contractor introduction better than an ad ever would.

If we get something wrong

Tell us and we'll fix it, and we'd rather hear it bluntly. If a number here looks wrong it matters more to us than anything else on this page. Tell us what's wrong.

What Hit My House · Fredericksburg, Virginia
Independent. Not affiliated with NOAA or the National Weather Service.

Hail history by address · Hail, lightning & tornado · Last 48 hours · Bulk lookup · Cities · For contractors · Free API

What Hit My House · Fredericksburg, Virginia · hello@whathitmyhouse.com
Independent. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NOAA, the National Weather Service, or any government agency. Built on public-domain federal data. How this works and how we make money.