Why some jobs need a visit before a price
Price certainty against work nobody has looked at yet.
Context
"My heat pump stopped working" has no price. It could be a tripped breaker or a failed compressor, and the difference is two orders of magnitude. A marketplace that insists on an upfront number for this either forces pros to quote high enough to cover the worst case — which loses every easy job — or produces quotes that are wrong the moment somebody opens a panel.
What was on the table
Require an upfront quote for everything.
Simple checkout, systematically wrong prices, and it drives the careful pros out of the categories that need them.
Let pros quote ranges.
Pushes all the uncertainty onto the customer at the exact moment they are deciding whether to trust the platform.
- Chosen
A paid diagnostic visit that produces a real quote.
The decision
For work that needs eyes on it, the customer agrees to a visit fee first. The pro attends, diagnoses, and issues a real quote. The platform's cut of the visit fee is tiered and clamped so it can never approach the fee itself — a small diagnostic stays worth attending.
The principleCharge fairly for the look, instead of pretending a price already exists.
What it cost
A second commitment step before any work happens, and a whole parallel set of states — visit scheduled, awaiting final quote, final quote received, final quote accepted — that every surface showing a job has to understand.
Evidence
- The visit-fee split is tiered, and clamped so the platform cut never matches or exceeds the fee.
- A free estimate is a supported option at zero, with no platform fee and no charge.
- The diagnostic path has its own lifecycle states, distinct from the direct-quote path.
Enforced in the product code, not only described here.
What would change my mind
If customers abandon at the visit fee often enough, the honest version may be that the platform absorbs the diagnostic on first jobs as an acquisition cost. That is a pricing change, not an architecture change — the states still have to exist.