How we make money

Most people who divorce sell a home, and many then buy one — sometimes two, because one household becomes two. If you ask us to connect you with an agent, our founder makes the introduction personally. She is a licensed real estate salesperson in Connecticut and Florida, and the licensing law in both states allows a referral fee to pass only between licensed brokerages. So the money works like this: when the sale closes, the agent’s brokerage pays a referral fee — currently 30% of the commission on your side of the transaction — to Compass, the brokerage she works under, and she receives a share of it. The Cusp itself is paid nothing on your sale. You are never charged anything, and nobody is introduced to you unless you ask.

We spell that out because it is the part of the model that could bias us, and we would rather you know exactly who is paid, by whom, and when — before you decide how much weight to give anything we say about your house.

We only refer you to agents who have completed our own divorce real estate training. Here’s why that matters more than it sounds.

Every other professional you’ll meet through this site already trained for divorce. Your attorney went to law school and practices family law. Your therapist is licensed and studied family systems. Your mediator holds a dispute-resolution credential and may sit on a court roster. Your financial analyst can hold a credential with the word divorce in its name.

Your real estate agent studied none of it. Licensing covers contracts, disclosure and fair housing. Not one hour of it addresses selling a house for two people who are divorcing — and that house is usually the largest asset in the entire case.

So a divorce sale gets handled by the one person in the room with no training for it. Two sellers who may not be speaking. A court-ordered deadline that doesn’t care what the market is doing. Someone still living in the house who doesn’t want to leave. And an agent who takes a side, or repeats to one spouse something the other said, can do real damage to a case that has nothing to do with real estate.

That’s the gap we exist to close. The training isn’t a badge we sell — we don’t sell it, and there is no certificate at the end of it. It’s simply the requirement. No training, no referral, regardless of how good an agent’s sales numbers are.

When we recommend a therapist network, a co-parenting app, a financial planning service or a moving company, some of those companies pay us a small commission if you sign up. It never changes your price, and it never determines what we recommend. Anything we earn from is labeled on the page it appears.

The uncomfortable version: these payments range from about $12 to $150 depending on the service. We’re telling you the numbers because the amount is exactly what you’d want to know before trusting a recommendation.

For people handling their own divorce, we sell a state-specific kit: which forms you need for your exact situation, the real deadlines, and the specific mistakes that get filings rejected. The forms themselves are free from your state’s courts, and we link you to them rather than reselling them. What you’re paying for is the sequence, the checklist, and not losing six weeks to a rejected filing.

If your state offers a free guided tool that covers your situation — Florida does, for simple cases — we’ll tell you so on the page, and you shouldn’t buy from us.

Today this is the only thing we sell, and we sell it because we want it to become the normal way people do this. We may add a paid tier later — tools we have not built yet, for people who want more than the free site. If we do, it will be described on this page before it goes on sale, and it will never be a way to buy a better position in the directory or a better answer out of the law.

Most divorces do not need to cost tens of thousands of dollars. An enormous number of them are two people who broadly agree, funneled into an adversarial system that bills by the hour and quietly rewards the fight. People come out the other side having bled their savings and their mental health into a process that, for them, could have been paperwork and a hearing.

We would like the do-it-yourself and mediated paths to stop being the exception. Every kit we sell is one household that kept its money and one less person who lost a year of their life to a system that didn’t need to have them.

Attorneys, mediators, therapists and financial planners can pay for an enhanced profile in our directory. What they are buying is presence and tools. What they can never buy is position, ratings, or a badge. (Real estate agents aren’t part of this public directory — see stream five, below.)

Every professional in your county is listed whether they pay us or not. The order is the one set out on the ranking page — state, then distance, then whether we have checked the license and how recently, then whether they answer, then alphabetically. Money appears nowhere in it. A firm that pays us nothing can outrank a firm that pays us monthly, and regularly will.

We don’t train these professionals — we check them. Licenses verified and re-verified annually, any disciplinary history surfaced rather than hidden, and ratings that come only from people who actually hired them. They already know how to do their jobs. Our contribution is telling you which ones did it well.

We certify real estate agents. We do not certify anyone else — and we won’t. Attorneys, therapists, mediators and financial analysts arrive already trained and licensed for this work; it would be presumptuous of us to hand them a credential. We verify their licenses, we surface any disciplinary history, and we let the people they served rate them. That’s it.

Agents are the exception because agents are the gap. The training, the assessment and the certification are free, and a place on a referral panel is free and cannot be bought by anybody at any price. What a certified agent may buy, and only after passing, is an annual license to display our mark in their own marketing — which buys them a graphic and a set of materials and not one referral. The course covers court-ordered timelines, dual-client dynamics when the clients are adversaries, occupancy and access disputes, working alongside attorneys and mediators, what an agent must never repeat to one spouse about the other, and how to price and market a home when the sellers disagree about everything including whether to sell at all.

Every certified agent also signs a conduct agreement, including our commitment that nothing a member shares in our community can ever be used against them.

Two things certification is not. It is not a rating — it means an agent was trained and agreed to our standards, not that they’re excellent. That’s decided by the members they serve. And it is not a way to buy referrals: certification puts an agent into the pool, and performance decides who actually gets referred out of it. An agent who ignores members, mishandles a case, or treats one spouse worse than the other stops receiving referrals, no matter what they’ve paid us.

Moving companies, self-storage operators and move managers can pay to appear in a strip headed “Paid placement”, outside the ranked professional results and visually distinct from them. This is the first use of a mechanism we published before there was any money in it, and it works exactly as described there.

We check exactly one thing about an advertiser, and it is not a vetting. Before a listing goes up we confirm two facts from public records and the company’s own website: that the USDOT number it gave us holds active federal household-goods authority, and — if that authority is a broker’s rather than a carrier’s — that its homepage carries the disclosure federal regulation requires it to carry, saying it is a broker and will not be transporting your things itself. A company that fails that does not go up, whatever it offers to pay.

The disclosure requirement is 49 CFR § 371.107(c). We explain it, and how to run the same check yourself in about fifteen seconds, on will the company you called actually move you.

That is the whole check, and everything else about an advertiser is unverified. We have not looked at their complaints, their insurance beyond what the federal record shows, their crews, their reviews or their contracts. A company can pass this test and still be a bad company. An attorney in the ranked directory had a license checked against the issuing body; a mover passed a one-minute test and bought an advertisement. Those are different things and blurring them would destroy the only thing the directory is worth.

A broker’s listing says broker. We publish every company’s federal authority type in the directory already, and we are not going to publish it there and hide it in the advertisement. And we would still rather you checked a mover yourself, using the government’s own free records, on the moving page, than trust any listing — including ours.

Every advertiser has to give readers a discount, and that is the price of entry. A company that will not offer our readers a better deal than it offers the street does not get to be here. It also makes the arrangement measurable in a way advertising usually is not: if nobody uses the code, the listing was worth nothing and we both know it.

And the discount has to be a real one. Here is the whole rule, so you can hold an advertiser to it as easily as we can. A code is rejected unless all five are true:

• It is money off the move, not off something that was free anyway. A free estimate is not a discount; federal rules already entitle you to one.
• It works on a telephone call, not only on a website. Most moving quotes happen on the phone, and a web-only code is a code most of our readers cannot use.
• It does not expire before the listing does.
• It has no minimum that excludes the typical reader. The move at the start of a separation is usually small — one bedroom, sometimes a car. A code written for a four-bedroom interstate job is a code aimed at somebody else.
• It is not a code already published on coupon sites. If you can find it in three seconds on a search engine, the listing gave you nothing.

If a code does not work, tell us. We tell the advertiser and they have seven days to put it right. Fixed in seven days, nothing happens. Not fixed, the listing ends and what is left on it is forfeit — which is the rule they agreed to in writing before they paid, set out in full on the advertiser terms.

What we can and cannot count, since it would be easy to imply more. We can tell an advertiser how many readers took their code. We cannot tell them how many used it, because we never touch the transaction and never will — no checkout, no payment, no reader details passed to anybody. Their own redemption count is the real number and we would rather hear it from them than estimate it.

The part of this we find uncomfortable, written down while it is still hypothetical. A discount is a reason to click, and a reader in the middle of a divorce is at their least able to shop around. Three things keep it a trade rather than something worse, and all three are checkable: the advertisement is labeled and never ranked, the same page teaches you to check the advertiser yourself against the government’s own records, and the reader gets something real, which is what the five rules above are for. If those three ever stop being true, the strip comes down.

And the removal rule is the agents’ rule. Reader reports end a listing, and money buys no exemption from that. A mover holding somebody’s furniture hostage, a storage operator selling a unit out from under a reader, a quote that triples on the day — tell us and the listing goes, whatever has been paid and whatever is left on it. They forfeit the balance rather than getting it back, and that is deliberate: these are named acts they agreed in advance not to commit, with notice on everything we could give notice on. A refund would turn ending a listing into a transaction instead of a consequence. The half of this that matters to you is the first half — the listing goes. Money buys no exemption in either direction.