Home repairs are out of reach for many lower-income homeowners

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies documents a hard reality: rising repair costs are putting basic home and appliance fixes out of reach for many lower-income households, forcing people to live with broken essentials or take on debt.

This is the inequity OwnWise was built to chip away at. Much of what makes repairs unaffordable isn’t the part — it’s the diagnostic visit, the overcharging that thrives on not knowing, and the coverage people never realize they had. OwnWise removes those costs: it diagnoses the likely fault for free, points to a safe DIY path when there is one, estimates a fair price when there isn’t, and surfaces any warranty, protection plan, or recall that should cover the repair.

For a household where every dollar counts, knowing what’s wrong and who should pay is the difference between a fix and a write-off.