How this works, and how we make money

You are about to type your home address into a website you have never heard of. It is completely reasonable to want to know who we are and what we get out of it before you do. So here is all of it, including the parts that don't flatter us.

Who runs this

What Hit My House is run out of Fredericksburg, Virginia. It is a small independent operation, not a division of an insurance company, not a roofing company, and not a lead broker for either.

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

Where the numbers come from

Everything on this site is public-domain US federal data. Nothing is proprietary and nothing is 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, which are observations filed by trained spotters, the public and emergency managers.
Address lookup — the free US Census geocoder.

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

How we actually make money

This is the part most free tools won't tell you, which is exactly why you should be suspicious of them. There are three ways, and that is the complete list.

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

If you 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.

Three things we will not do, because they are the standard complaints about this industry: we do not resell your details to multiple contractors, we do not take a percentage of your job or your insurance settlement, and we do not pass anything on unless you fill in that form on purpose.

Being straight about the incentive: we get paid when you request an inspection. So read what the data actually says, not what we'd like you to conclude from it. That's also why the request form only appears when radar genuinely found hail at your address, and never when it didn't.

2. A documented report, if you want one occasional

If you're filing a claim and want the record as a dated PDF with the exact query and the limitations written into the document, that's $19. A person checks every request before anything is charged, and if the record can't support a report worth paying for we say so and there's no charge.

Everything in that PDF is also on the screen for free, and you can download it as a CSV without giving us an email address. You're paying for the document, not the data.

3. Nothing else and this is the point

We do not sell your address, your email, or your lookup to data brokers, marketing lists, insurers, or anyone else. We do not run ads. There are no affiliate links. There is no tracking pixel, no advertising network, and no cookie asking for your consent, because we don't set one.

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's 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 — not a rooftop. A detection means radar saw hail somewhere in that box. No detection 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 — but that cell is a volume of air, not a mark on your roof.

None of this is an insurance claim, a damage assessment, or an engineering inspection. 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. 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, because there is no reason not to — and because a free tool that's genuinely useful is a better way to earn a contractor introduction than an ad ever would be.

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 and the paid report is free for your address.

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.