01
The seven-second quote
The claim: a ranked home-insurance quote in about seven seconds
The most accurate home-insurance quote already exists — it lives inside each carrier's portal. The whole problem is how long it takes to get there, and how badly the comparison gets mangled on the way. Fetch closes that gap: a handful of consumer-answerable inputs, standardized across carriers, returns a ranked, apples-to-apples lineup in about seven seconds — roughly 80% of what agents write, across every policy type at once. The agent bridges into the winning carrier's portal and finishes a bindable quote in about a minute. Speed and accuracy stop being a trade-off.
Speed and accuracy stop being a trade-off.
Think of it as the PreCheck lane. Every agent has to clear the quote before they can get to the client — and that has long meant the full security line: forty-plus questions, carrier logins, a call to the underwriter, a wait. Fetch is the lane where you keep your shoes on. Same destination, none of the theater. But the speed was never the point — it's what the agent does with the time on the other side. Fetch clears the checkpoint so the agent can get back to being an advisor instead of a form-filler.
02
The legacy problem
Why does insurance quoting take so long?
Picture the consumer's side of it. They call an agent, answer 40 to 50 questions over the phone — and then hear, "let me run this and call you back." Not because the agent wants to, but because the legacy platform can't return a quote fast enough to answer while they're on the line. So the one thing they called to find out — what will this cost? — they still don't know when they hang up.
We wanted to see whether it still works that way, so we put it to the test the honest way: we called a good, large agency running the best legacy rating tool in Florida and asked for a quote, just like a consumer would. It took 26 hours to get a proposal back, and it came riddled with errors — roughly half of the twenty carriers failed to quote at all: invalid login credentials, no premium returned, carrier codes that wouldn't compute. And several of those weren't dead ends. We asked Ellie — our AI underwriting assistant — and she flagged them as winnable: competitive carriers a single pre-screening question opens, like whether that 18-year-old water heater is tankless.
And 26 hours was the fast end — that's an agency on the best rating tool in the state. Plenty take two or three days. The ones still quoting by hand are slower yet: one producer told us she spends 15 minutes per carrier, eight carriers per client — two hours of pure data entry for a single quote, which is exactly why it never happens while the customer is on the phone. Fetch does the whole job in under two minutes.
Why so slow, if it's automated? Because the whole industry still runs on an outdated foundation. Some of you remember paper applications; then came the ACCORD form to standardize them; there was even a stretch when a carrier would deliver a computer to your office for one purpose: to pull a quote from that one carrier. The tools on top have modernized — but the plumbing underneath is the same 1970s standard, built before software could talk directly to a carrier. It's like running modern appliances on knob-and-tube wiring: fine until you need real power. Quoting is where you need it.
The old approach
A robot with fingers
So the legacy raters lean on bots: programs designed to pretend to be a person, opening each carrier's website and typing the answers in one page at a time. It looks like an army of workers. It's one machine doing the slow manual dance — and you wait fifteen to thirty minutes for the slower carriers to come back. That's the real reason the old raters can't quote a client over the phone: nobody's going to sit on the line waiting for a robot to fill out a form.
The direct approach
Computer to computer
Here's the difference in plain terms. A bot is a robot with fingers — it still fills out every carrier's form and waits for each screen to load, the same way a person would. An API is a direct line between two computers: no form, no typing, they hand each other the file in an instant. The old raters automated the typing. Fetch removed the form.
03
The cost of waiting
You're losing money in three ways
01
First, the lead dies on the wait.
Speed of response is the single biggest driver of whether the risk gets written. In the Lead Response Management Study out of MIT (Dr. James Oldroyd, with InsideSales.com data across 15,000 leads and 100,000+ calls), an agent who responded within five minutes instead of thirty was 21 times more likely to qualify the lead — and the odds of even reaching the customer fell roughly tenfold in the first hour. Every minute the quote isn't in the consumer's hands, the odds fall — and a lead gone cold is revenue out the door.
02
Second, the comparison quietly goes apples-to-oranges.
Here's the mechanism. The moment an agent drops contents below the 50% standard — say, to 25% to shave the premium — some carriers switch that coverage from replacement cost to actual cash value. Others don't. So quotes that all read "25% contents" are secretly mismatched: the cheapest-looking quote is often the one that quietly stripped the coverage. It isn't that anyone's being dishonest — it's that the old process never takes the last step to confirm the coverages actually match. So the agent offers the "best price" in good faith, and the client can walk away with a policy that pays a depreciated fraction at claim time. That lands on your agency too: when the client learns at claim time that their "best price" left them underinsured, it's your reputation, your renewal, and potentially an E&O complaint on the line.
03
Third, and deepest: the agent becomes an order-taker.
When the system — or an agency's own quoting SOPs — filters the options down and buries the agent in data entry, it strips away the one thing that makes an independent agent worth calling: their agency. The whole value of a human agent is judgment — the person who, while still on the phone, can look at the situation and say: "If I could save you $2,000 a year on this policy, would it be worth $2,000 to put in a new water heater? You'd earn it back in a year, you'd have a safer home, and you'd be less likely to ever file a claim." That moment — where the agent stops taking the order and starts advising — is the entire point of the job. Speed to decision is what unlocks it: get to the answer in seconds, and the agent is free to spend the call being human. Filtering and forms don't just slow the quote. They rob the agency of its agency — and they carry a hard dollar cost. A CSR quoting even a couple of policies a day, at 15 minutes a carrier and eight carriers a quote, burns hours on data entry a machine does in seconds. Multiply that across every CSR and every location, and you're paying full salary for work that no longer needs a person.
04
A comparable baseline
Ask less, standardize the rest
Fetch's core design move is to ask the minimum and standardize everything else. The agent enters only what a consumer can actually answer — first name, last name, email, date of birth, phone, and roof shape. Our AI populates the rest, pulling from the Wind Mitigation report, the 4-Point Inspection, and the declarations page — we even pull property data from Zillow through APIs. Then Fetch presets every rating variable to a fixed, carrier-neutral standard so all carriers rate identically. Trace Meek, Fetch's founder, calls this quoting "in a vacuum."
This is the PreCheck lane made real: we skip the security line — the forty questions — by fetching the answers ourselves, so the agent walks straight through. It isn't a convenience feature. It's what makes a fast quote trustworthy — the difference between a ranked lineup you can act on, every policy type, all comparable, and a pile of numbers that can't be compared.
Carrier-neutral defaults — scroll horizontally for full detail
| Parameter | Fetch default | Why it's set there |
|---|---|---|
| Contents | 50% | The replacement-cost standard; below 50%, carriers flip to actual cash value and the comparison breaks. |
| Hurricane deductible | 2% | A value every carrier accepts; a $500 hurricane deductible isn't written by all and gets force-defaulted. |
| Other structures | 2% | Checked for consistency across carriers. |
| AOP deductible | $2,500 | Part of the fixed set so every carrier rates the same. |
| Liability | $300,000 | Standardization. |
| Credit | Assumed good | Carriers charge per real pull; the indication shows a best-reasonable case up front. |
| Coverage A | Homeowner-sourced | Agent can override; a deck-page upload overrides. Avoids replacement-cost-estimator disagreement. |
Because the defaults hold — no carrier's terms can drift from another's — the lineup that comes back is genuinely comparable. The standard is built into the software, not left to agent discipline.
05
Speed without the trade-off
Why a fast ranking is a reliable ranking
First, the elephant in the room: not every agency quotes the same way. One writes contents at 50%, another at 25%. So whose standard should a shared, comparable lineup use? Fetch's answer is to start from a gold-standard baseline — the same fundamentals they teach you in insurance school — so every carrier is rated on identical, defensible terms. That baseline is what produces a trustworthy ranking in seven seconds.
The most common objection is that a quick, defaulted quote can't be accurate enough to trust. But Fetch isn't handing you the final dollar — it's handing you the ranking, and the ranking is stable. When you adjust a rating parameter, every carrier's premium moves the same direction together. The winner stays the winner.
So the baseline gets you the honest comparison fast — then, in the sixty seconds it takes to complete the quote in the carrier's portal, you apply your agency's own variables. The gold standard gets you the ranking; your expertise customizes it after.
25 hours, 59 minutes ahead — Even after you spend a full minute layering in your agency's unique variables, you're still that far ahead of the old way.
06
Protect the customer
The honesty dividend
Standardizing at 50% contents isn't only about comparability — it protects the client, and it's the cure for the apples-to-oranges mismatch above. Drop a policy to 25% contents and the premium can fall by roughly $1,200, but the coverage silently flips to actual cash value. If the house burns, that's the difference between an $80,000 depreciated check and the $160,000 it actually costs to replace everything. A cheaper-looking quote that fails the customer at claim time isn't a better deal — it's a hidden liability. Fetch's defaults keep the comparison honest and the customer covered.
07
How it works
How Fetch delivers it
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01
Six inputs.
Only what the consumer can answer; the AI fetches the rest.
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02
Locked-in defaults.
Every carrier rated in a vacuum, identically — no drift.
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03
The seven-second lineup.
A ranked, apples-to-apples comparison across ~80% of what agents write.
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04
Bridge to the portal.
One click into the winning carrier's system; complete a bindable quote in about a minute, and apply your agency's own variables there.
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05
The keys to the back door.
Fetch holds the carrier integrations — real APIs, not bots — so the agent moves from indication to bindable quote without re-keying the risk.
08
Give people the human work
So what does your team do now?
The first question every agency owner asks is the honest one: if a quote takes two minutes instead of two hours, what do all my CSRs do with their day?
That's the whole point. You stop paying people to be order-takers and pencil-pushers, and you start paying them to do the work only a human can — solving problems, reading a client's situation, asking the questions that land better coverage at a better price. The repetitive job disappears; the human job grows. Retrain your former data-entry staff to serve clients better, and the ones who take to it become your top producers. The ones who remain are supercharged — AI hands a small team the bandwidth of a big one, so you write more business at lower cost.
And it's better for the people doing the work. Nobody grew up dreaming of typing the same fields into twenty carrier websites. Lift that off their plate and you hand them back the rewarding part of the job — solving real problems, using judgment, helping real people. You don't just get more productive employees. You get ones who actually like their work.
That's the competitive advantage, and it arrives without a trade-off: speed, efficiency, accuracy, the best price, and the best coverage — all at once. No sacrifices.
09
The operating shift
The bottom line
Speed and accuracy were treated as opposites for decades because the industry kept front-loading questions onto a 1970s form and running them through pre-API technology. Fetch inverts it: ask less, fetch the rest, standardize to a gold-standard baseline, rank in seven seconds, then bridge to the portal for the bindable number a minute later. The agent stays on the phone, wins the lead while it's warm, gets back to advising instead of being a form-filler, and hands the customer honest coverage — in the time the old way spent loading the first screen.