How this site is made.
Who writes it, where every number comes from, what we have taken down, and how to tell us we got something wrong.
Who writes this
BillFighter is written by its two co-founders, Ali Miller and Alejandro Canto. We started this after our son was born and the bills arrived for weeks — some with errors, some inflated, some we paid only because we did not know we could push back.
That is the whole of our authority, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up.
- We are not attorneys. Nothing here is legal advice, and no page on this site creates a lawyer-client relationship.
- We are not certified medical coders or clinicians. When we describe a coding pattern, we describe what the published rule says and link it — we are not rendering a clinical judgment about your care.
- No page on this site carries a "reviewed by" badge, because no outside professional has reviewed it. If that changes, the reviewer will be named, with their credential and the date.
Where the numbers come from
Every statistic on this site is typed once, in one file, with its printed source attached. If a number has no source we can name, it does not ship. The three below are the only aggregate statistics we use, and they appear identically everywhere.
One guardrail travels with the third number, always: 38% describes people who challenged a medical bill. It is not a BillFighter success rate, it never sits beside our own counters, and we have never published an outcome statistic about our own users — because we do not yet have enough resolved cases to make one honest.
The top of a contested 7–80% range, and the high end traces back to companies that audit bills commercially. We were quoting the most flattering number in a range, sourced to people with an interest in it.
2021 credit-report data, distorted by the credit bureaus removing most paid and small medical collections in 2022. True when written, misleading by the time we were still printing it.
KFF, whose survey it is, reports 4 in 10. We were citing a source while misstating what it said.
Flatly false, and it was on several pages. The FDCPA sets collectors no deadline to reply at all. The 30 days is YOUR window to demand validation; what their silence does is stop them collecting, not lose them the debt. Corrected in English and Spanish, and the AI that drafts letters now carries an explicit rule against restating it.
The debt collector directory
Every collector page is built from the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, a public federal record. The current pull covers complaints received between August 2023 and August 2026, retrieved August 26, 2026. We refresh it when the underlying window moves far enough to change what a page says, and the retrieval date is printed on every page so you can see how old the figure is.
What these counts are, and are not, matters more than the number itself:
- A complaint is something a consumer reported. It is not a finding of wrongdoing, a lawsuit, or a regulator's conclusion. A large company will draw more complaints than a small one for reasons that have nothing to do with conduct.
- We exclude the three national credit bureaus. They attract debt-collection complaints but are not collection agencies, and leaving them in would have put them at the top of a directory they do not belong in.
- “I do not know” is a real option on the CFPB complaint form, meaning the person did not identify what the debt was for. We keep it in our stored data because it is what the source says, but we never render it as though it were a kind of debt.
- We do not editorialise the counts. If a company has few complaints, the page says so.
The state law pages
Every statute of limitations, medical-debt protection and mini-FDCPA reference on this site was checked against the primary source — the statute itself or the state attorney general — before the page shipped. A state with no verified data gets no page rather than a thin one. The set was last reviewed 2026-08-26.
Statutes change, and a limitations period can turn on facts specific to your account, such as when the last payment was made. Treat these pages as a starting point and a citation to check, not as a ruling about your situation.
Where AI is used, and where it is fenced in
The bill analysis and the first draft of every letter are produced by AI. It can be wrong. Every analysis says so, and every letter is yours to read before it goes anywhere — nothing is sent without you choosing to send it.
The model is also constrained on the points where a confident wrong answer would cost you something. It is instructed not to tell you a collector owes you a reply on a schedule, not to say an unvalidated debt automatically comes off your credit report, not to promise an itemised bill is a blanket federal entitlement, and not to imply a missed 30-day window ends your right to dispute. Those rules apply in every output language.
Corrections
If something on this site is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it up. Point us at the page and what it says; if we cannot substantiate it, we take it down rather than soften it — that is what happened to all four claims listed above.
Substantive corrections to a page are reflected in that page's update date, which is what our sitemap reports to search engines. We do not backdate.