The number goes first
Every competitor in this category puts a lead form where the arithmetic should be. We put the arithmetic there and ask for a name at step four, because a person who has seen a real number is a person who can make a decision.
About
We built a calculator, not a lead form
Every site in this category asks for your phone number before it tells you anything. That is a choice about who the site is for, and we made the other one.
The specific thing that annoyed us
In 2018 one of us watched a self-employed carpenter pay full price for a Silver plan for two consecutive years. He earned about $34,000. He was entitled to roughly $270 a month in premium tax credit and had no idea, because every site he tried made him submit a form and wait for a call, and he did not want a call. He wanted a number.
That is the entire origin story. There is no shortage of insurance expertise in this market. There is a shortage of sites that will just do the arithmetic in front of you.
So the estimator on the home page is not a lead magnet with a calculator skin on it. It runs the federal poverty level for your household size, applies the IRS schedule for the plan year, age-rates a benchmark Silver premium across your household on the federal standard curve, and prints all four intermediate values so you can check it. Nothing is gated. Nothing is emailed to you.
When the honest answer is that you should be on Medicaid, or that you should take your employer's plan, or that your income puts you over the subsidy cliff and there is no good news here, the tool says so.A calculator that only ever returns encouraging answers is not a calculator.
CoverBridge in numbers
9,140
Households enrolled
Illustrative demo figure.
12
States licensed
Demo scope.
2019
Founded
Fictional company.
$0
What we charge you
Carriers pay the commission.
Four rules we do not bend
Show the working
The estimator prints the poverty-level band, the applicable percentage and the benchmark premium it used. If our number is wrong, you should be able to see where it went wrong rather than take it on faith.
Sell nothing we would not buy
No short-term medical, no fixed indemnity, no health care sharing ministries. They are the profitable end of this business and they are sold hardest to people who just missed a deadline.
Stay after January 16
Most of this industry disappears the day Open Enrollment closes. Appeals, life events, network departures and mid-year income changes all happen in the other eleven months.
Who picks up the phone
Four people, all fictional, all written to describe the kinds of backgrounds this work actually requires.
Naomi Ferreira
Head of plan analysis
Built rate-comparison models for a regional carrier for nine years before deciding the models should point at the consumer instead. Writes most of the analysis on this site.
Wendell Okonkwo
Enrollment operations lead
Spent six Open Enrollments on the phone resolving data-matching issues. Holds the internal record for the fastest closed citizenship verification, which is a genuinely useful skill in November.
Sofia Marchetti
Licensed advisor, 12 states
Came to marketplace work from hospital financial counselling, where she watched what an out-of-network anaesthesiologist does to a family with a Bronze plan.
Idris Ballantyne
Engineering
Builds the estimator and the plan-matching pipeline. Responsible for the fact that this page loads in under a second on a five-year-old phone.
Try it before you trust it
The estimator takes about thirty seconds and asks for nothing. That is the fastest way to find out whether any of the above is true.