What supplement services charge, and what you get for it
Every roofing contractor who files insurance claims eventually asks the same question: do I write my own supplements, or do I pay someone to do it? The market has answered with three different business models, and they charge in three different ways. One takes a percentage of the claim. One charges a flat fee per file. One sells you software and lets you do the work. The dollar amounts matter, but the bigger differences are in what actually gets delivered, who sends it to the carrier, and who is in the loop when the desk adjuster calls back with questions.
This article walks through all three models using publicly listed prices only. No estimates of what "typical" services cost, because most of them do not publish pricing, and the ones that do are the only honest data points available.
First, what a supplement service is actually producing
Whatever you pay for, the deliverable is roughly the same shape: a line-item estimate. That phrase means a document where every piece of the repair is its own row, with a quantity, a unit price, and usually a labor and material breakdown, instead of one lump-sum number. Carriers work this way internally, and some say so in writing. TWIA, the Texas windstorm insurer, states on its own claims pages that it wants line item estimates that break down and show labor and material costs, and that it will review your estimates against its own. Citizens in Florida describes the same process in its 2023 Best Claims Practices: when a contractor submits a file, the adjuster prepares a comparative line-item estimate, and items that are accepted get added to the carrier's final estimate as individual lines.
So a supplement is not a letter arguing for more money. It is a competing estimate, item by item, that gives the adjuster something concrete to compare against. If an item is missing from the carrier's scope, it needs to appear in yours with a quantity and a reason. If you want a starting point on which items get missed most often, we keep a running list at the roofing supplement checklist.
Every service model below is a different way of getting that document produced. Keep that in mind as you compare prices, because you are comparing three prices for approximately the same artifact.
Model one: the percentage agency
The oldest model in this market is the full-service supplement agency. You send them the carrier's estimate, your photos, and your measurements. They write the supplement, submit it, and follow up with the carrier until the claim resolves. The Estimate Company, one of the visible names in this space, publicly describes exactly this workflow: they send the file themselves and run weekly follow-ups with the adjuster.
How do these agencies charge? Pricing varies and much of it is quote-based, but in industry discussion on RoofersCoffeeShop, a figure that comes up for some agencies is around 3% of the claim. Note the wording: of the claim, not of the supplement. That distinction is the single most important thing to understand about this model, and we will come back to it below.
What you get for the money is real. Follow-up is the part of supplementing that most contractors quietly stop doing. The file gets submitted, the adjuster goes silent, and three weeks later nobody has called. An agency whose fee depends on the claim closing has a direct incentive to keep calling. If your operation is drowning and the alternative is supplements that never get written at all, the percentage model buys you a department you do not have.
Model two: the flat-fee agency
The second model swaps the percentage for a fixed price per file. American Roof Supplements publishes its pricing openly: $150 for a supplement, $50 for an estimate, and the first job free. The deliverable, per their own site, is a PDF carrying your company's logo. You send them the claim documents, they write the file, and it comes back branded as yours.
Two things distinguish this from the percentage model. First, the cost is knowable in advance and identical whether the claim is small or large. Second, the submission usually stays with you. The document arrives under your logo, and you send it to the carrier yourself. That is not a small operational detail. The contractor of record stays in the conversation with the desk adjuster, which matters when the adjuster's reply is a question about site conditions that only your crew can answer.
The trade-off is that nobody is chasing the file for you. The weekly follow-up that a full-service agency performs is now your job again. A flat-fee service produces the document; the persistence still has to come from your office.
Model three: software
The third model is not a service at all. Xactimate, the estimating software most carriers use internally, sells subscriptions at publicly listed prices in the range of $150 to $200 per month, or roughly $1,500 to $2,000 per year depending on the plan. There is no per-file option. You are buying the tool, and the labor is yours: you build the estimate line by line, in the same pricing environment the carrier's own estimate came from.
For a contractor doing steady claim volume with someone in the office who knows the software, this is the model with the most control and, at scale, often the lowest cost per file. The catch is the learning curve and the fixed cost. A subscription priced by the month costs the same in February as it does in the week after a hailstorm, and an estimator who touches the software twice a quarter never gets fast at it.
Who sends the file, and why it matters
This is the axis that most price comparisons skip entirely.
When a full-service agency submits the claim itself and negotiates it with the carrier, that activity has a name in insurance regulation, and in most states that name comes with licensing questions. Public adjusting, which broadly means negotiating an insurance claim on behalf of the insured for compensation, is a licensed activity nearly everywhere. Where the line falls for supplement agencies varies by state and by how the agency structures its work, and reputable agencies have thought about this. But it is worth asking any percentage-based service directly: who holds what license, and in which states? An agency that answers crisply has done its homework.
The flat-fee and software models mostly sidestep the question, because the contractor sends the file. And there are cases where the contractor cannot even delegate the submission if they want to. TWIA states that claim documentation comes to them from the policyholder, which means the homeowner, not a third-party agency, is the channel of record. There is also no back door through the carrier's own systems: uploading a file into XactAnalysis, the network carriers use to move assignments, requires an assignment from the carrier. If no carrier assigned you the claim, there is no address for you to upload to. In practice the supplement travels the ordinary way, as a PDF attached to an email to the adjuster, which is exactly the artifact the flat-fee services and the software tools produce.
The hidden cost inside the percentage
Now back to the phrase of the claim.
A percentage fee scales with the size of the claim, not with the amount of work the service performed. Writing the supplement for a large, steep, multi-layer roof is somewhat more work than writing one for a small ranch house, but it is not proportionally more work, and the fee does not care either way. Three percent of a claim is simple arithmetic you can run on your own last ten claims: take each final claim value, multiply by 0.03, and compare the result against a flat fee of $150 per file. On small claims the percentage can come out cheaper. On large claims the gap runs the other direction, and it widens with every additional dollar the claim settles for, which produces the odd situation where the service's fee grows precisely because the supplement succeeded.
There is a second, quieter cost in how the fee interacts with claim payment mechanics. Most claims pay in two stages: the first check is ACV, actual cash value, which is the replacement cost minus depreciation, and the second check releases the recoverable depreciation after the work is completed. When a supplement is approved, the approved items enter the carrier's revised estimate and the difference flows through those same two stages. A fee calculated on the whole claim is calculated on money that arrives across that entire timeline, so read any percentage agreement carefully for when the fee is due relative to when the checks actually land. None of this makes the percentage model wrong. It makes it a model you should price against your own claim sizes, not against a brochure.
How to choose between them
Three questions sort most contractors into the right model quickly.
How many claim files do you touch in a month? At low volume, fixed costs are your enemy: a software subscription used twice a month is expensive per file, and per-file pricing, whether $150 to an agency or lower to a software tool, matches cost to activity. At high volume the logic reverses, and the subscription or in-house route usually wins on unit cost.
Do you already have Xactimate and someone who is fast in it? If yes, you own the most direct path and the outsourcing question is mostly about time, not capability. If no, be honest about whether you will actually climb the learning curve, because a subscription that goes unused is the worst price in this article.
Who do you want in the loop with the adjuster? If you want to hand off the entire conversation, only the full-service model does that, and you should ask the licensing question before you sign. If you want the carrier relationship, and the answers to the adjuster's follow-up questions, to stay inside your company, choose a model where the file goes out under your name. Whichever way you go, the file is only as strong as what backs it: the photo documentation and measurements have to come from your crew regardless of who formats them.
One last note on comparing deliverables rather than prices. Ask any service you are evaluating to show you a sample file. Look for line items with quantities and unit pricing, a stated reason attached to each added item, and labor and material visible in the breakdown, because that is the format carriers themselves say they review against. A cheap file that arrives as one paragraph and a lump sum is not a discount; it is a document the adjuster has nothing to compare.
This is written for contractors preparing their own supplements. It is not legal advice and it is not a reading of anyone's policy. Verify the adopted code edition and your carrier's submission channel for the property in question.