Price the Gap

Your price has one job: cover the cleaner's cut, the acquisition cost, the systems, and your margin, in that order. Beginners price backwards, from what sounds cheap on the phone. Price from the bottom up and you never sell a losing job.

Bottom-up first

Call three experienced cleaners in your city, the same way you called competitors. Ask what they charge to clean a two-bedroom, two-bath, fifteen-hundred-square-foot home, recurring. Their number is your floor. Corpus operators describe the method plainly: find what providers need to be happy, then add thirty to forty percent for yourself before you even look at the market. Say cleaners quote you ninety dollars. Thirty to forty percent on top puts your floor at one hundred seventeen to one hundred twenty-six.

Then check it against the market from your five-call survey and the national bands: one hundred twenty-five to two hundred twenty-five dollars for a standard visit is the going range (HomeGuide). If your bottom-up number lands inside the market band, good. If it lands below, raise it; you are not trying to win on price, because the cheapest operator attracts the worst customers and cannot afford the ad spend that keeps the phone ringing. One corpus operator puts it as pricing in the top fifth of the local market and selling the convenience instead: online booking, instant quotes, card on file, a guarantee. That is the right instinct, and it is the only advantage a brand-new remote company has.

The recurring ladder

Price one-time cleans high; they are practice runs with no future. Price the recurring plan as the deal. A typical structure from the corpus, unverified but consistent with what live operators report, discounts the per-visit rate as frequency rises: roughly ten percent off monthly, fifteen off biweekly, twenty off weekly. Build your rate card as a table before you take a single call.

| Service | One-time | Biweekly (15% off) | Weekly (20% off) | |---|---|---|---| | 2 bed / 2 bath, to 1,500 sq ft | $169 | $144 | $135 | | 3 bed / 2 bath, to 2,000 sq ft | $189 | $161 | $151 | | Each extra bathroom | +$30 | +$26 | +$24 |

Those example numbers are illustrative, not gospel; run your own bottom-up math. The structure is the lesson: price by home size, charge bathrooms as add-ons, and make the biweekly column look like the obvious choice, because it is, for both sides. A biweekly client is twenty-six visits a year at close to zero marginal acquisition cost.

Quoting a home you have never seen

This is the skill that replaces the walkthrough. You cannot see the house, so you ask six questions that predict the job, and you quote from the rate card live on the phone. Hesitation reads as incompetence; the rate card exists so you never hesitate.

"Happy to give you an exact price right now, it takes a minute. How many bedrooms? And bathrooms, counting half baths as halves? Roughly what square footage, even a guess? Any pets? How will we get in if you're not home, garage code or lockbox? And is this a one-time clean or would you like the biweekly rate, which is what most people do?"

Six questions, ninety seconds. Then the price, stated flat, then silence:

"For your home, the first clean is one hundred eighty-nine, and after that one hundred sixty-one every other week, supplies included, same crew each visit, and we hold the day and time. Cards are on file so there's nothing to handle at the door. Want me to hold Thursday morning?"

Two things in that close are doing heavy lifting. "Same crew each visit," because consistency is what customers actually buy. And the assumptive hold: you offer a specific slot, not a callback. If they waffle, do not discount. Offer the monthly tier instead, once, and otherwise let them go with a follow-up scheduled for two days out.

What if the home is unusual? Oversized, hoarder-adjacent, post-construction: those get a "first clean at hourly, then we set the flat rate after we've seen it." You take the unknowns out of the fixed price, never into it.

Price set, rate card built. The numbers are the easy half. The people who do the work are the business.