A sweep counts flues, not chimneys, and that is the whole of it
One stack on the roof is not one job. It often carries two flues and sometimes three — the fireplace, the furnace, the stove somebody put in the basement — and the count is the only genuinely per-unit number on the form. Everything else is a pick-one about the visit: what burns in it, how long it has been, how you get to the top, and whether anything is going on while you are up there. None of it is hidden under a layer of something else, which is why a sweep can put an honest bracket on a website tonight.
It is also why the boundary matters here more than on most trades. Everything from the damper up the inside of the flue is a sweep’s: the liner, the soot, the cap, the top-sealing damper. The outside of the stack above the roofline — the brick, the mortar, the crown and the flashing it sits in — is a mason’s, a different license and a different truck, and the masonry page says the same thing from its own side. Our demo account puts that sentence on a question and hands the stack over rather than quoting it. Most of the chimneys you look at need both, in that order.
NapkinPrice™ runs that shop as three services on one account. The sweep asks eight questions and puts a range on the screen, the inspection for a sale or a claim prices the thing that is actually urgent about it, and a liner — along with a chimney that smokes or one that has had a fire in it — goes down a third path that never guesses a price at all.
The flow also asks for a photo of the firebox and of the stack from the garden, and the lead tells you to ask for those pictures on the callback. Attaching the image itself to the lead is on the roadmap, which is why it is not a tick in that list.
The eight things that set a sweep’s number
One count, five pick-ones, a yes/no and a ZIP. The hardest question on the form is the one nobody expects — how many flues there are — so the help text does that teaching rather than pretending it is obvious. You build the set once in the dashboard and every rate in it is a field you own.
How many flues
The base number and the only per-unit line on the service: her count times your per-flue rate, $135 on our own demo card. Ask for flues rather than chimneys and say why in the help text, because one stack commonly carries two — a fireplace and a furnace, or one fireplace up and one down. Set a floor and a ceiling on the answer and the widget refuses a silly number instead of quietly clamping it. On the demo the count runs 1 to 4, and past four this is a commercial building rather than a house.
What burns in it
Open fire, a stove or an insert, a gas log set, an oil or wood furnace flue. A pick-one percentage rather than four rates, because the fuel changes how much comes out and how long it takes to get out, not the price of a flue. An open fire drops soft soot; a stove burns cooler, packs the flue harder and usually has to come forward; a gas appliance makes no creosote at all, so it comes off. Nothing, plus 22%, minus 20% and plus 15% on the demo — and the gas answer is the one that lands on the service minimum.
Years since the last sweep
A quarter inch of soft black soot is a year or two of normal burning; anything thicker is more passes with the brush and more time on the rods. Nothing, plus 18% and plus 40% on the demo. Its help text does two jobs: it tells her how to look, with a torch, up past the damper — and it says that hard, shiny, tar-looking glazed creosote is not this service at all. That is the third path, and naming it on the question is how she gets to the right form the first time.
How you get to the top
Most of a sweep is ladders and roof time, so height is labour rather than material and it belongs on a percentage. One story off a ladder, two stories with a longer ladder and a rope, or three stories and the slate and standing-seam roofs where it is a harness, an anchor and two people. Nothing, plus 15% and plus 40%. The honest note lives here too: a pooled percent lands on everything additive, so the roof band is charged on the cap as well — which is fair, because fitting one up there really is harder.
A cap, while you are already up there
A flat amount on a pick-one: nothing, $285 for a stainless single-flue cap, $720 for a multi-flue chase cover and cap on the demo. It is the line that pays for the visit, and it is worth doing on the trip she has already booked rather than on a second one. Say out loud that it is priced for ONE cap on the job and not once per flue — a flat adder is added once however many flues there are, so a second open flue on the same stack is trued up on site.
A seized or missing damper
A yes/no with your own flat amount behind it — $465 on the demo, for a top-sealing damper fitted at the crown with a cable down to the firebox. A throat damper that will not close is a hole in the roof of the house all summer and it is nearly always rusted rather than broken, so this is a real line rather than an upsell. Priced once for the job, on the flue she actually uses.
Nesting or a blockage
The answer that raises the job MINIMUM to $385 and adds no dollars at all. Removing a nest or an animal and then sweeping is a different visit from sweeping, and it has never come in under that figure — so one flue on an open fire, never swept since they moved in, one story off a ladder, no cap and no damper, and yes to this question, whose arithmetic is $322, quotes at $385 to $424 because the floor clamps the low end up rather than sitting under it. Say in the help text that swifts are protected while they are nesting; she would rather hear it from you than from a fine.
Travel zone
List your ZIPs by zone — whole ZIPs or three-digit prefixes — and the widget prices the trip from the ZIP she types, most specific match first. A flat charge, a percentage, or both. The demo shop charges nothing in Stafford, $25 down to Fredericksburg, $45 back up I-95 into Prince William, and 5% plus $85 for everywhere else it travels. Keep those numbers small and honest: a sweep drives a van, not a trailer behind a dump truck. Set one zone to "outside my area" and it declines politely while still capturing the lead.
A real sweep, start to finish
Eight questions, about a minute. This is the exact sequence running on our own chimney demo account — one open masonry fireplace flue in a two-story house in Stafford, three years since the last sweep, with a stainless cap fitted while the tech is already on the roof — and the total at the bottom is what the live pricing engine returns for these eight answers and nothing else, not a figure anybody typed into this page.
| # | What she is asked | What she answers | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | How many flues are we sweeping? | 1 | 1 × the per-flue rate — $135 on the demo. The only per-unit line here |
| 2 | What burns in it? | An open masonry fireplace, wood | The standard case: +0%. A stove or insert is +22%, a gas log set −20% |
| 3 | When was it last swept? | Three to five years ago | A percent on the whole job: +18%. Never since we moved in is +40% |
| 4 | How do we get to the top of it? | Two stories | A percent on the whole job: +15%. Three stories or slate is +40% |
| 5 | Fit a new cap while we are up there? | A stainless single-flue cap | A flat $285 for the job, not per flue. A multi-flue chase cover is $720 |
| 6 | Is the damper seized, missing or leaking? | No | Nothing. Yes adds a flat $465 for a top-sealing damper |
| 7 | Is anything nesting in it, or is it blocked? | No | Nothing. Yes would not add a dollar either — it raises the job floor to $385 |
| 8 | Got a photo of the fireplace, or of the stack? | Offered | Nothing. A photo never moves the price |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | $95 trip + $135 flue + $285 cap = $515, then the two percentage answers pool into one and +33% applies once to all of it → $684.95 | ||
| She sees | $616 – $753 | ||
| What lands in your inbox, the second she submits | Name, mobile, ZIP, all eight answers, the photo flag, and the disclaimer she was shown | ||
The $135, the $285, the $465 and the percentages above belong to the demo account, not to a Tailgate Office price list — you set every one of them in the dashboard. Three things about that arithmetic are worth reading twice. The percentages pool rather than compound, so plus 18 and plus 15 make plus 33 and not the plus 35.7 you would get by multiplying them out, which here would be about $14 more. The base fee sits inside the pool, so the $95 trip is marked up 33% too — about $31, which is a bigger share on a small ticket than it looks, and the roof question’s help text says so. And the pooled figure lands on the whole additive subtotal, so the soot band is charged across the cap as well: about $51 of this midpoint for creosote that is not on the cap. The roof band reaching the cap is fair, roughly $42.75, because fitting one two storeys up genuinely is harder. What is not illustrative is the total: $616 to $753 is what the engine returns for those eight answers, and you can reproduce it yourself on the demo in about a minute.
Would you rather try it than read about it? We keep a working example chimney sweep website with NapkinPrice™ embedded — the real engine, quoting live, on a page that is not ours. Put in those eight answers and see the same number come back.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)The sweep quotes cleanly. A liner does not, and says so.
This is the one design decision that matters in this trade, so here is the whole of it in plain words rather than a promise that it all just works.
A sweep is a known quantity before anybody arrives. You know how many flues there are, roughly how much is in them, how high the roof is and what you are fitting while you are up there, and those four answers really do carry the price. That is why this trade sits at the honest end of the estate: eight questions produce $616 – $753 for the job above, $207 – $253 for a plain annual sweep one story up with nothing fitted, and $437 – $534 for a two-flue house two storeys up with three years on both and no cap, and all three are numbers you would say on the phone.
A stainless reline is not that, and the reason is worth saying properly. A liner is priced by what is in the way — how many offsets the flue takes on the way up, whether the old clay tile has to be broken out and vacuumed before an insulated liner will pass, whether the tiles are cracked badly enough that the chimney needs work before a liner goes anywhere at all, and how far it really is from the damper to the top. That last one is the figure a homeowner is always wrong about, because she is looking at the outside of the stack from the garden. The market range for the work is two and a half to six thousand dollars, and the spread is not shyness about the number. It is the number.
So relining routes. It is the first case on the site-visit service, the soot question’s help text names glazed creosote and says where it went, and this page never prints a per-foot or per-flue figure for a liner, because the fixture cannot compute one. That is the same discipline the masonry page keeps for natural full-bed stone: the engine has five kinds of pricing rule and none of them can carry a job whose cost lives inside a flue nobody has looked up yet.
The same service is where the boundary with the mason is drawn, and it is drawn to agree with masonry rather than to argue with it. “A stack to rebuild above the roofline — brick and mortar” is one of the seven things the first question offers, and its help text hands it straight over: the liner, the soot, the cap and the damper are ours; the brick, the mortar, the crown and the flashing are a mason’s. Neither account quotes the other’s work, and a homeowner who lands on the wrong one is told so on the question rather than after the visit.
Sweep and safety inspection — quotes instantly
The work that fills the book from October, and the one that carries the season. The trip, the drop cloths and setting a HEPA vacuum up in somebody’s living room live in the base fee — $95 on the demo — so it is added once however many flues there are and cannot be answered around. On a $230 sweep that trip is 41% of the ticket, which is exactly why it belongs inside the number she is shown. A plain annual sweep — one flue, an open fire, swept a year or two ago, one story off a ladder, nothing fitted — is $207 to $253. The visit most people actually book, the same single flue two storeys up with three years of soot on it and no cap, is $275 to $336; swap the open fire for a wood stove and that same visit is $321 to $392; replace a seized damper on it and it is $832 to $1,017. The cheapest answer set possible — one gas flue, one story, swept last year, nothing fitted — floors at $185 to $204 rather than at the $184 its arithmetic works out to. And there is a ceiling: four flues, an insert, never swept, three stories, a chase cover and a damper reaches $3,676.40, so past $2,500 the widget stops pricing and hands you the lead to quote by hand.
Inspection for a sale or a claim — quotes instantly
A Level 2 to the national standard: every accessible flue scanned on camera joint by joint, and a written report with the stills in it. Its own base fee of $145 for the trip and the camera, its own $345 minimum, and a band of plus or minus 8% — TIGHTER than the sweep, on purpose, because a fixed time and a fixed report is a better-known job than a flue nobody has looked up. One flue on a two-story house for a sale, on the lender’s own form, wanted inside five business days, quotes at $515 to $605; change nothing but the date and say you are at the settlement table this week and it is $592 to $695; two flues on an insurance claim after a fire, on the insurer’s form, inside five days, is $923 to $1,083; the cheapest report possible — one flue, one story, our own form, any time in the next fortnight — floors at $345 to $373 rather than at its $320 arithmetic. Four flues post-fire on three storeys on their form reaches $1,833 and routes, because past $1,500 that is a survey and a survey gets a visit first.
Relining, smoke problems and chimney fires — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the only honest answer to a failed liner, a fireplace that smokes back into the room, glazed creosote or a chimney that has had a fire in it. It asks what it is doing, what the flue serves, roughly how far it is from the damper to the top, whether anybody has already put a camera down it and whether anybody is burning in it right now — and not one of those answers moves money. The height question says out loud that the answer is for loading the van and not for the price, which is the whole argument for this service in one sentence. She gets your own "we will come and look" message; you get a lead worth bidding. This is also the only place a stack rebuild appears on the account, and it is handed to a mason on the question.
One service carries the first-fire season. The other refuses it, and that is the harder decision.
The event is real and it is dated. People light the first fire of the year on the first cold weekend, smell smoke, and call. From the first of October every sweep in this county is booked out for weeks and stays that way until Christmas. That is a capacity constraint on scheduled, deferrable work — which is the one thing a seasonal percentage can price honestly, and the same test the gutter page applied to leaf fall. So the sweep carries plus 15% from 1 October to 31 December, and the disclaimer says what it is: a scheduling signal, not a weather charge. The same flue swept in July is 15% less because in July there is a slot. The job above comes back $709 – $866 booked on 15 November, the plain annual sweep goes from $207 to $253 up to $238 – $291, and it all comes off again on 1 January.
The inspection service carries no season at all, and that is a decision rather than an empty field. An inspection before a house sale is not the same demand curve as a sweep in November: it is set by a settlement date, and a settlement date does not care what the weather is doing. Charging a seller 15% more in October because other people are lighting fires is a surcharge dressed up as a season. What that service prices instead is the thing that genuinely is urgent about it — how soon the report is needed, at nothing, plus 20% or plus 40% — as its own visible question she can see and answer. Run the same sale inspection in the middle of November and it is still $515 to $605, to the dollar. Its disclaimer says so in words: no seasonal rate applies here at any time of year.
The travel zones stack on top of all of it, and they are the same engine run on the same eight answers with nothing changed but the ZIP: Stafford 22554 is $616 to $753, Fredericksburg 22401 is $639 to $781, Woodbridge 22192 back up I-95 is $657 to $803, a ZIP in the catch-all zone is $724 to $885, and a ZIP outside every zone you serve gets no price at all — a polite decline, with the lead still captured. On a small job that trip is a much bigger share and it should be: the same $207 to $253 annual sweep quotes $294 to $359 out in the catch-all ring, and the sale inspection goes from $515 to $605 up to $619 to $727. A service that quotes will not go live until it carries a real base fee or a real minimum. That is deliberate: a service with neither would happily return $0 to a homeowner, and one bad number on your website costs more than a day of setup.
In October the phone rings all day and you are on a roof
There is nowhere in this trade where answering a phone is a judgment call: you are on a ridge in a harness, or you are under a firebox with a vacuum running and a set of rods in your hands. Roughly 62% of contractor calls go unanswered, about 78% of jobs go to whoever responds first, and voicemail gets a callback around 3% of the time. In the twelve weeks when every sweep in the county is full, those three numbers decide how much of the autumn you actually keep.
| What a missed chimney call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| One flue swept and inspected, two stories, stainless cap fitted | $616 – $753 |
| Two flues swept on one visit, two stories, three years on, no cap | $437 – $534 |
| A Level 2 for a sale, two stories, lender’s form, inside five days | $515 – $605 |
| Two flues inspected after a fire, insurer’s form, inside five days | $923 – $1,083 |
| Voicemail callback rate | ~3% |
| One recovered sweep pays for | 3 months of the bundle |
| One recovered post-fire inspection pays for | 4 months |
CallMitt™ writes back from your own texting number, a local number registered to your business and not a stranger’s 800 line, and the text opens with your business name, so she replies into the same thread as her quote. The message is picked by the hour and the day, against the hours you actually keep — the demo shop runs 8 to 5, because the first appointment is inside somebody’s living room with drop cloths down and nobody wants that at seven, and by five the van is unloaded and the vacuum filters are out. A 5:20 call honestly gets the after-hours version instead of one claiming somebody is up a ladder.
Straight about where this stands. We have no SMS gateway yet and there is no automatic missed-call detection, so today you log the missed call and nothing is sent: a reply queued now is retired rather than delivered when your carrier registration clears. Everything around it is built and running now: the five messages, the business-hours, weekend, holiday and vacation rules, the quiet hours, the opt-out handling, and the thread her reply lands in beside her quote.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own NumbersA sweep is hired on one question, and it is about December
The man you want is on a roof edge in a harness in the last week of November, in the wind, with a set of rods over his shoulder. Plenty of people will tell you they are fine with heights in August. Finding out on day two that they are not costs you the day and the appointment behind it. The second thing a résumé never makes clear is the credential: CSIA certification is the one homeowners and insurers ask for by name, and somebody partway to it is worth more than somebody who has never heard of it.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the van and the yard sign. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he up for ladders and roofs in all weather, is he CSIA certified or working toward it, how many years has he swept, inspected or lined chimneys, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three of those are knockouts — under 18, not up for the roof work, or living further out than you will drive — and three come back as a weighted fit score, years in the trade heaviest and the start date next.
Two things about that scoring are worth copying. Distance is a knockout and never a weight, because a number answer scores higher the bigger it is, so weighting miles would rank the man furthest away at the top. And free text carries no weight at all, because any non-empty answer scores full marks and a weighted text box quietly inflates every candidate who typed anything. Both are set that way on our own demo job, and every question on it carries a Spanish translation.
One honest note on delivery. There is no inbound SMS on our side yet, so today he answers those seven questions on your screening page rather than by text — same questions, same knockouts, same scoring, same pool. The keyword on the van takes over the day your carrier registration clears.
See how CrewFunnel works
A sweep gets its review the evening of the first fire, not in January
The flue is swept, the cap is on, and the drop cloths are back in the van before dark. That evening she lights a fire for the first time since the Saturday the room filled with smoke, and this time it all goes up the chimney. That is the evening she would write you a review. By Christmas it is just the fireplace again, and that Saturday is a story she has stopped telling. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, before that fire burns down.
HurraBell™ does the asking. Mark the job done — from the inbox, from your phone, or from your job software through Zapier — and the customer gets one request in your words, with your own Google review link, after a delay you pick: an hour, unless you change it. Three days later, one email reminder, unless the link has been opened or the customer has got back in touch.
Review requests aren’t switched on yet, so none is sent today. When they are, the request goes by email once your Google review link is saved on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. A text goes as well where the customer agreed to texts, and only once your carrier registration clears, the same wait as every text on this site; until then it is email only.
See how HurraBell worksOne recovered sweep covers 3 months
And a single recovered annual sweep off a ladder covers 1 of them. In a trade of small tickets booked twelve weeks deep, that is the arithmetic that matters.
The Tailgate Office Bundle
Instant quotes on your website, missed-call text-back, text-to-apply hiring, review requests, and customers, jobs, estimates and invoices in one place. 30 days free, no credit card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.
Start Free TrialOnly need one of the tools? After the trial you can keep just that one at its own price; the office stays with the Bundle.
Chimney questions we get asked
You can price a range, which is all the widget ever shows. On this trade the range is tighter than most, because the four things that set the price — how many flues, what burns in them, how long it has been and how you get to the top — are all knowable before the van leaves. The disclaimer underneath says the rest in your words: a Level 1 written up before you leave, the firebox and smoke shelf vacuumed, the drop cloths in and out with you, and that if you open it up and find hard glazed creosote or a cracked liner you stop, show her, and quote that separately. She stops shopping, and the person who wanted three flues swept for eighty dollars never fills in your callback form at all.
Because the engine cannot carry it honestly, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a product that does not do what the website said. A reline is priced by what is in the way — the offsets, whether the old clay tile has to come out before an insulated liner will pass, whether the chimney needs work before anything goes up it, and the real distance from the damper to the top, which nobody can see from the garden. Two and a half to six thousand dollars is the honest market spread, and the spread is the answer. So it routes to a site visit, the help text on the soot question names glazed creosote and says where it went, and nothing on this page prints a per-foot figure for a liner. The same shape the masonry page uses for natural stone.
No, and the demo says so on the question rather than quoting it. Everything from the damper up the inside of the flue is a sweep’s work: the liner, the soot, the cap, the top-sealing damper. The outside of the stack above the roofline — the brick, the mortar, the crown and the flashing it sits in — is a mason’s, a different license and a different truck. It appears on our demo account exactly once, as one of seven options on the site-visit service, and the help text hands it to a mason. The masonry page draws the same line from its own side, in its own words, and the two accounts meet at the flashing without either one crossing it. Most stacks need both trades, in that order, and telling her that is worth more than a quote she has to unpick later.
It would be, if the season were weather. This one is a calendar and a capacity problem: from 1 October every sweep in the county is booked for twelve weeks, so the plus 15% is a scheduling signal, and the disclaimer says both halves out loud, including the date it comes off. Book the same flue in July and it is 15% less, because in July there is a slot. The part worth copying is where it is NOT. The inspection service carries no season at all, because a settlement date does not care what the weather is doing and a seller is not the one lighting fires. That service prices the thing that actually is urgent — how soon the report is needed — as its own question she can see and change. An empty season field is a decision you are allowed to make.
Because that is what the rule kind does, and the help text says so rather than leaving her to find out. A flat amount on a dropdown or a yes/no is added once for the job however many flues she entered — so a $285 stainless cap is one cap, priced for the flue that is open to the sky, and a second cap on a two-flue stack is trued up on site. Only the flue count multiplies. The seam worth naming is the other direction: a pooled percentage lands on the whole additive subtotal, so the roof band and the soot band are both charged across the cap. The roof band belongs there — fitting a cap two storeys up really is harder — and the soot band does not, about $51 of the worked example above. If that is not how you price a cap, a per-unit rate on its own question is a field you own.
It handles it the way you would on the phone: by refusing to quote it like a sweep. Nesting is a yes/no that raises the job MINIMUM to $385 and adds no dollars at all, because removing an animal and then sweeping is a different visit and it has never come in under that. One flue on an open fire, never swept since they moved in, one story off a ladder, no cap and no damper, with yes to the nesting question, has an arithmetic of $322 and comes back at $385 to $424 — the floor clamps the low end up rather than sitting under it. The help text is also where you tell her that chimney swifts are protected while they are nesting and that you will say so if that is what she has got. She would much rather hear it from you in October than from somebody else in May.
Call it fifteen minutes for your text-back messages and your working hours, a minute, once review requests are switched on for your account, to paste your Google review link on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page, and about an hour to write the eight sweep questions and load one rate card — your per-flue rate, your fuel and soot percentages, your roof access bands, your cap amounts and your damper. Then most of another hour for the inspection service, which has its own base fee, its own per-flue rate, its own urgency question and a tighter band. A service that quotes will not go live until it carries a real base fee or minimum, which is deliberate. No onboarding call, no setup fee and no contract: $199 a month buys all four tools, and ResponsiBid’s reported $400–600 setup, as published in August 2026, is not a thing here.
Rebuild stacks and repoint as well? See the masonry page, all the trade pages, or call (301) 268-1943.
Give her the number before the first cold weekend.
Set it up tonight. Free for 30 days, no card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.