Building A-du: Part Eight

Update, October 2026: this post was revised to describe how A-du works today. A-du does not run a bidding process and does not check professional licenses. You hire, sign with, and pay each professional directly.

Here's the moment that keeps people up at night.

You've decided to build the ADU. You've got a plan. Now you have to choose the people who'll actually do it, an architect, an engineer, a general contractor, and you're about to hand one of them a six-figure project, a building permit, and months of access to your own property. And you have almost no reliable way to tell whether the confident, friendly person across the table is a true professional or just very good at sounding like one. Pick wrong on the architect, and you'll lose months to redesign. Pick wrong on the engineer, and you'll be stuck in plan check. Pick wrong on the contractor, and you'll lose months and a frightening amount of money digging out of it.

This is the eighth post in my series on building A-du, the ADU platform I started, and it's about that fear, and about what A-du does, and deliberately does not do, to help with it. The last post helped you find a plan. This one is about the people who'll build it.

The honest trouble is that the people you're choosing between don't have any consistent way to show you they're qualified, and you don't have any consistent way to check. One contractor hands you a glossy brochure. The next one is a guy a neighbor swears by but who communicates entirely in texts. A third has a beautiful website and you have no idea if a word of it is true. You're left comparing apples, oranges, and vibes, on the single biggest purchase most people make outside their actual home.

I wanted A-du Build to make that easier without pretending to make the choice for you. We don't pick winners, and we don't stand between you and the people you hire. What we can do is point you to the facts that actually matter and to the public records where you can check them, so you can make a real decision instead of a hopeful guess.

That's harder than it sounds, because "verified vendor" is a phrase a lot of marketplaces throw around, and it usually means nothing more than "we confirmed their email works." When the project involves a real building permit, real money, and real safety, a sticker like that is worse than nothing. So A-du doesn't put one on anybody.

Check the license yourself

Every licensed trade on an ADU project in California has a public license lookup, run by the state board that issues the license. Architects are licensed by the California Architects Board. Engineers and land surveyors are licensed by the Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists. General contractors are licensed by the Contractors State License Board, the CSLB, and that license is the whole point of hiring a licensed builder. Each board lets you search by name or license number and see whether the license is active and what it covers. For a contractor, the CSLB lookup also shows whether a bond and workers' compensation coverage are on file.

A-du does not check those licenses for you today. When a business on A-du lists a license number, treat it as the business's own statement until you look it up on the board's site. Do that the day you sign, not the week before, because a license that was active last month can be suspended this month.

Every plan page on A-du says where the plan came from: a city's published program, or the firm that listed it. That tells you who published the plan. It does not tell you whether their license is current, so the same rule applies: look it up.

Proposals go straight to you

When you're ready to build, ask several licensed contractors for proposals on the same permit set. Proposals on the same drawings are comparable; proposals on a sketch are not, which is why this step comes after the permit set and not before it.

A-du does not collect, compare, or rank bids, and it does not schedule or supervise construction. You sign with the contractor you choose, under your own contract, and you pay them directly. That line matters. The person who builds your ADU should answer to you, under a contract you can read, not to a platform standing in the middle of the deal.

The permit-fee handoff, made visible

Here's a corner of building that quietly bothers a lot of people. Permitting an ADU involves real fees paid to the city, and those are often paid through whoever is taking your plans through permitting rather than by you directly. The normal version goes: they give you a number, you write a check, they pay the city, and you cross your fingers that the receipts come back and the number was honest.

On A-du Build, the permitting provider you hired proposes each fee through the platform, you pay it through Stripe, and both of you can see where it stands: proposed, paid, completed. There's no question about what you paid, or when. That's the kind of small, dull, deeply reassuring thing the platform earns its keep on.

And your plan's permitting moves through visible stages, from requested to in progress to permitted, so you're not texting "any update?" every two weeks, and nobody has to repeat themselves to an anxious homeowner every two weeks either.

What it means for you

If you're a homeowner planning an ADU, A-du Build gives you a plan you can see on your lot, permit fees you can track, and a straight answer about who does what. You hire licensed professionals directly, you check their licenses with the state the day you sign, and you compare their proposals yourself.

If you're an architect, engineer, or contractor who does honest, licensed work, A-du Build is a place to publish your plans and be found by homeowners who are serious about building. Setting up a vendor profile is free, and so is uploading a plan.

What I keep coming back to

A single handshake deal can run on personal trust; you know a guy, your neighbor vouches for him, it works out. A marketplace can't run on that, and the honest way to replace personal trust at scale isn't a "verified" sticker. It's checkable facts: a license number you can look up yourself, on the board's own site, the day you sign. License numbers are the most boring possible version of that idea, and they do most of the heavy lifting.

The other thing, and this goes all the way back to the architect's lens I opened the series with, is that building an ADU is much more like a small civic project than like buying something online. There are real permits, real licensed professionals, real safety codes underneath it. The platform's job was never to wave a wand and make all that seriousness disappear. It's to make it legible, to take the parts that feel opaque and intimidating and lay them out in plain sight, so an ordinary homeowner can navigate a serious construction project with their eyes open and their shoulders a little lower.

---

Next time: the ADU is built and rented; now it needs caring for. The local cleaners, handymen, and landscapers every working unit depends on, the small businesses that are great but invisible, and how we put them on the map without ever pretending they signed up for something they didn't.