Deck quote widget showing a 320 square foot composite deck 42 inches above grade with railing and four stairs, estimated at $21,600 to $25,400

The gap between “pressure-treated” and “composite” is the whole conversation

A 16×20 deck is somewhere between $9,000 and $30,000 depending on four decisions the homeowner has not made yet. If your website says “contact us for a free estimate,” she has to make those decisions on the phone with a stranger. Most people would rather just close the tab.

NapkinPrice™ walks her through the four decisions and puts one honest range on the screen at the end of them. She learns composite costs more before you have to say it. You get a lead who already knows her own budget.

  • A material pick-one with your own PT / cedar / composite amounts behind it
  • Demo of the old deck priced as its own question, not a surprise
  • Separate services for new build, rebuild, and repair or restain
  • A photo prompt so she knows to send pictures of the back of the house

Six variables carry a deck bid

You know these cold. The point is that the homeowner answers them at 10pm instead of on a phone call you never got to take.

Square footage

Length × width, or a preset like 12×16 and 16×20 for people who have not measured. Everything else is a modifier on this base.

Decking material

Pressure-treated pine, western red cedar, or capped composite. The material line alone can swing the bid 2–3×, so it belongs in question two, not in a phone call.

Height above grade

Under 30 inches and you may skip railing entirely. Over that you are into guardrail code, taller posts, more concrete, and in many jurisdictions a permit and an inspection.

Railing type & linear feet

Wood pickets, black aluminum, or cable. Priced per foot and easily a fifth of the job. Ask for perimeter feet, subtract the ledger wall, done.

Stairs & risers

Every set of stairs is stringers, treads, a landing, and often a second handrail run. Count risers, not “a few steps.”

Demo of the existing deck

Tear-out, hauling, and disposal on a rotted 240 sq ft deck is a real day plus a dumpster. Quote it as its own line so nobody feels ambushed.

Also worth adding if you run them: permit handling, footing count for frost depth, under-deck drainage, built-in benches or planters, and a lighting package. Each one is a yes/no with your own price behind it.

The same deck, three materials

One 16×20 build, 42 inches up, 56 feet of railing, four risers, old deck torn out. Watch what the material choice does.

Decking What she sees Railing What you say on the call
Pressure-treated pine$11,400 – $13,200Wood picketCheapest in, needs a restain every 2–3 years
Western red cedar$15,800 – $18,600Wood picketLooks better, still wood, still gets sealed
Capped composite$21,600 – $25,400Black aluminumDouble the ticket, and she never sands it again

Illustrative figures using an example rate card — not Tailgate Office pricing and not a market survey. You set every rate in the dashboard, and lumber moves, so you change them when your supplier does.

Would you rather try it than read about it? We keep a working example deck builder website with NapkinPrice embedded — the real engine, quoting live, on a page that is not ours.

Try the live demo site
Illustration of missed-call text-back: the reply that goes out from the business’s own texting number, and the customer answering with the job details The rules behind that reply, drawn in the order they run: on a logged missed call, three stages. One, is there already a message to this number from the past hour — if there is it stops there, one reply per number per hour, and nothing is composed. Two, which of your five messages: vacation switched on gives the vacation message, one of six US holidays the holiday message, Saturday or Sunday the weekend message, and otherwise your own opening hours decide between the business and the after-hours message; they are tested in that order on your own clock, the first match wins, and a message you left blank falls back to your business one. Three, may it go at all — three gates, in order: not opted out, which is permanent and nothing overrides it; not on your own suppression list; and not in quiet hours judged where the caller is rather than where you are, 8am to 9pm in every zone their area code touches. Then one of two things. The reply is written and goes on her thread, and because the key is her number a later quote from her lands on that same thread. Or a rule stops it, and the reason goes on her thread in plain words: quiet hours where she is, she has opted out for good, her number is suppressed, a rule we could not check, or another compliance rule. Every rule above is built and running today, and you wrote the five messages yourself.

Decks are a three-bid trade. First bid wins more than it should.

Roughly 78% of home-service jobs go to whoever responds first. On a deck that is not because the first guy is cheapest — it is because he is the only one who felt real while the homeowner was still excited about the project.

What a missed deck lead is worth Typical figure
Typical new deck build$8,000 – $28,000
Typical repair, reboard or restain$900 – $4,500
Spring inquiries that never get called backThe ones you take at 4pm on a Friday
Voicemail callback rate~3%
One recovered composite build pays for9+ years of the bundle

CallMitt™ holds the reply that goes out from your own texting number, a local number in your area code registered to your business: “Sorry we missed you — this is Miller Decks. What are you looking to build?” You write it once, with separate versions for after hours and weekends, and quiet hours and opt-outs are checked before anything is queued. Being straight about it: no SMS gateway is live on our side yet, so today the missed call is logged by hand and the message waits on your carrier registration. When she does reply, it stitches into the same thread as her quote — and that thread is the bid you already won.

The deck builder’s year, honestly

Two months of chaos, six months of work, four months of wondering where everyone went.

March through May is your whole year

The calls that decide your summer arrive in an eight-week window, and they arrive while you are already on a build. That is precisely when your phone goes to voicemail the most.

Long consideration, short patience

Homeowners think about a deck for months, then decide in a week. If you are not reachable during that week you were never really in the running.

Budget mismatch eats your days

Two hours of driving and measuring for someone who wanted composite at pressure-treated money. A quote widget sorts that out before you burn the afternoon.

Winter is booking season

Quotes delivered in January book April. A widget that runs at 11pm in February is the cheapest sales rep you will ever have.

Finding a carpenter who can cut stairs

Deck work is real carpentry. Anybody can screw down boards; laying out a stringer, flashing a ledger, and setting posts plumb is a different hire — and that person already has a job.

CrewFunnel™ makes applying five questions instead of a résumé. “Text CREW to your texting number” goes on the yard sign at every build you finish, which is where the good carpenters actually see it. Years framing, own tools, can you lay out stairs, truck, start date — knockouts drop the ones who fail a hard requirement, and the rest come back scored.

Where that stands today: we have no inbound SMS yet, so he answers on your screening page rather than by text. Same questions, same knockouts, same scoring, same pool. The keyword on the sign takes over when your carrier registration clears.

  • Screens for framing experience and layout skill, not résumé formatting
  • Yard-sign and truck-door codes so applicants come from finished work
  • Part of the Tailgate Office Bundle — Indeed is pay-per-click now, typically $150–300/mo for a shop your size
  • Team Engine runs $400–500/mo for the enterprise version of this
See how CrewFunnel works
Text-to-apply hiring flow showing an applicant texting CREW to a business’s texting number and answering screening questions about years on a crew, license and start date The applicant one-pager in the owner’s dashboard, on any trade — the detail behind an interview that is already booked. The card carries the applicant’s name, a status of interview, the role and the job keyword, and the date they applied, beside the fit score the dashboard shows in its orange tile, 8.4 out of 10 here. A strip under the header records the interview against one of the owner’s own open slots, with the calendar invite ready to download. Then every answer is listed in three columns — question, answer, and what it scored. Years in the trade, answered six, carries weight four and scores sixty per cent, because a number answer is measured against a ten-point ceiling. A driver’s license question and a start-date question carry weight three each and score full marks on Yes. The age question and the free-text question show a dash. Three notes explain the scoring rather than leaving the dash to be guessed at: a dash means the weight is zero, and only weighted questions move the number; knockout and weight are separate settings, one ending the conversation and the other moving the score; and a text answer earns full marks whatever it says, so graded scoring has to come from a yes/no or a number question. Underneath sit the decisions the dashboard still offers once an interview is booked: re-book to another of the owner’s own open slots, keep the applicant in the talent pool, or pass. The screening also lands on the owner’s inbox thread for that phone number, beside everything else from it. The questions, the weights and the knockouts are the owner’s own; the set drawn here is only an example
Illustration of a review request, drawn as a text from an example plumbing business: a phone showing a short message asking the customer to share her experience, with a link to the business’s Google review page, beside a card that reads Write a review. On a real account the request goes by email; a text goes as well where the customer agreed to texts, once the account’s texting registration clears The HurraBell log for the same example business, drawn as it appears in the owner’s dashboard: every finished job with what went out and what happened next. One customer was asked by text and by email and opened the link, so no reminder was needed. One had not agreed to texts, so the request went by email only and the one email reminder followed. One job was skipped, and the log shows the reason and who skipped it. Every finished job is either asked or skipped with a reason

The review gets written the first evening she sits out on it, or not at all

The last board is screwed down, the stair treads are on, and the first warm evening she carries two chairs out and sits on it. That is the evening she would write you a review, while she is still sending pictures of it to her sister and the neighbors are leaning over the fence. A month later it is just the deck. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, while the deck is still new.

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.

  • Every finished job is asked — skipping one needs a logged reason, because asking only the happy ones is review gating
  • Nothing offered for a review, and wording that steers is refused when you save it
  • A log of every request and every open, with a CSV export — and every skip with its reason
  • Part of the Tailgate Office Bundle — Podium’s entry plan is about $399/mo, on an annual contract
See how HurraBell works

Cheaper than the lumber for one set of stairs

The Tailgate Office Bundle

$199 PER MONTH · ALL FOUR TOOLS AND THE OFFICE

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.

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Only need one of the tools? After the trial you can keep just that one at its own price; the office stays with the Bundle.

Deck builder questions

No. Your rates live in the dashboard as per-square-foot and per-linear-foot numbers. Change your per-square-foot rate, or the composite percentage, once and every quote from that minute forward uses it. Nobody touches your website.

They only see a range, and only after answering six questions about their own yard and leaving a real phone number. You can also widen the range band, set a minimum job size, or group your ZIP codes into travel zones and mark the ones you do not serve "outside my area" so the widget declines instead of quoting.

Add a permit yes/no with a flat fee, or put a line in your disclaimer saying permit cost is passed through at actual. Ask height above grade regardless — it is a price question in its own right, since it decides guardrail, post length and concrete, and in most jurisdictions it is also what decides the permit.

Then quote the standard 80% and route the rest. Wraparound decks, multi-level builds and anything over a certain square footage can skip the price and go straight to “this one needs a site visit” — you still capture the lead and the spec.

No, and it does not want to. NapkinPrice sits in front of them. Every lead lands in your shared inbox, exports to CSV, and queues an HMAC-signed webhook (live in beta: deliveries wait for the worker, which is being scheduled) — point that at Zapier or Make and it reaches Jobber, Housecall Pro or a sheet. Native push to those by name is on the roadmap, and the integrations page says which is which. QuoteIQ makes you migrate your whole CRM and gates the instant-quote widget behind its $299/mo Elite tier; we do not.

About 30 minutes for the widget script tag, an hour or so to write your questions and load your rate card, five minutes to set your text-back messages and business 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. No onboarding call, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.

Also build fence or do exterior painting? See all the trade pages or call (301) 268-1943.

Give her the first number, get the build.

Free for 30 days, no credit card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.

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