Garage doors are two businesses sharing one phone number
One of them is a replacement. She has looked at a dented, rattling door for two years, and tonight she finally wants a number. The other is an emergency: a torsion spring let go with a bang you can hear from the street, and the car is behind the door.
They are not the same customer and they should not share a form. NapkinPrice™ runs them as separate services on one account — the replacement asks eight questions and puts a range on the screen, the repair carries your trip charge inside the number instead of springing it at the door, and a commercial opening goes down a third path that never guesses a price at all.
The flow also asks for a photo of the door and the wall above it, 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 garage door number
Every one of these is a countable unit or a pick-one, which makes this the easiest trade on the site to quote honestly. No area arithmetic, no guessing at square footage. You build the set once in the dashboard and every rate in it is a field you own.
Door count
The base number, and the only genuinely per-door line on the service: your per-door rate multiplied by how many openings you are replacing. Ask for openings rather than cars — a two-car opening with one wide door is one door, and homeowners get that wrong about half the time if you do not say it.
Opening size
Single, double, or oversize past 16 feet wide or 8 feet high, as a flat step per size. One honest note belongs in the help text: that step is added once for the job, not once per door, because no rule in the engine multiplies one answer by another. The per-door rate is a standard single, so a second wide door is trued up when you measure. Say that plainly and nobody is surprised on the visit.
Material and insulation
Steel, insulated steel, carriage house, full-view aluminium and glass. This one is a percentage on the whole job rather than a line item, because material and insulation change the door, the hardware and the spring sizing together. Full-view glass is not "a bit more" — set the percent your supplier actually charges you.
Opener
Keep the one she has, chain drive, belt drive, or belt with a camera and phone control, installed and programmed. Priced once for the job, on the door she uses most; a second opener is trued up on the visit. A chain is fine over a garage nobody sleeps above and a belt is worth it under a bedroom, and the help text is where you say so.
Windows and hardware
Glass across the top course, or wrought-iron handles and hinges. A yes/no with your own flat amount behind it, priced once for the job on the door she is dressing up. It is a small line that closes a surprising number of replacements, because it is the part she has been picturing.
Haul-away of the old door
Sections and track off a double door fill a trailer and cost you a dump ticket. Ask it as a yes/no with a flat removal and disposal fee. Say no and you stack the old sections where she wants them — either way it is a decision she made rather than a line she finds later.
Headroom and side room
Less than a foot between the top of the opening and the ceiling, or less than four inches of wall beside it, means low-headroom track and a rear-mounted shaft. That is labour, not parts, so it belongs on a percentage rather than a fee. It is also the single most common reason a garage door quote gets revised on site.
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. Set one zone to "outside my area" and it declines politely while still capturing the lead. A job minimum backs it up, so a single-door call 40 minutes out still pays for the drive.
A real replacement flow, start to finish
Eight questions, about a minute. This is the exact sequence running on our own garage door demo account — and the total at the bottom is what the live pricing engine returns for these answers, not a figure anybody typed into this page.
| # | What she is asked | What she picks | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | How many doors are we replacing? | Two | 2 × the per-door rate — $1,650 each on the demo, so $3,300 |
| 2 | What size are the doors? | Double, 12 to 16 ft | A flat $900 for the job, not per door |
| 3 | What kind of door are you after? | Insulated steel | A percent on the whole job: +18% |
| 4 | Opener | Belt drive, quieter | A flat $625, installed and programmed |
| 5 | Add windows or decorative hardware? | No | Nothing — the rule only fires on yes |
| 6 | Take the old door and track away? | Yes | A flat $180 removal and disposal fee |
| 7 | Is headroom or side room tight? | No | No low-headroom percent on this one |
| 8 | Got a photo of the door and the wall above it? | Offered | Nothing. A photo never moves the price |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | $3,300 + $900 + $625 + $180 = $5,005, then the one percentage answer applies once to all of it: +18% → $5,905.90 | ||
| She sees | $5,374 – $6,437 | ||
| 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 per-door rate, the size step 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 and you can change a per-door rate without touching your website. What is not illustrative is the total: $5,374 to $6,437 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 garage door company 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)Three services, and only two of them ever show a price
A replacement, a spring call and a loading dock are three different conversations. Running them through one form is how you end up quoting a warehouse like a two-car garage.
Replacement — quotes instantly
No trip charge on this one: the visit sells the door. Instead it carries a job minimum, so a single steel door with no opener never comes back under it — $1,750 on the demo, and the low end of the band is that floor rather than 9% below it. The range shown is the midpoint plus or minus a percentage you set. Above the ceiling it stops pricing: past $14,000 on the demo the widget routes the lead to you rather than publishing a number that big off eight answers.
Spring, cable and opener repair — quotes instantly
The trip charge lives in the service base fee, so it is added once however many doors you look at and cannot be dodged by answering nothing to everything. On the demo that is $89, and it sits inside the range rather than appearing at the door. There is a job floor underneath and a ceiling above, because past a certain number the honest answer is a new door instead of a repair. One question raises the floor on its own: a door off its track or a bent section means straightening or ordering a panel, so it lifts the minimum rather than pretending to be cheap. A snapped spring on one double door, next available, quotes at $449 to $549.
Commercial and custom — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the right answer for duty cycles, three-phase operators and fire-rated rolling steel. The service still asks what kind of building, how many openings, how high the opening is and whether there is a commercial operator or three-phase power — that last one moves no money, it just tells you which tech to send and whether to bring a meter. She gets your own "we will come and measure" message on the confirmation screen, and you get a lead you can actually bid.
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.
The spring call is the one you cannot afford to miss
A snapped torsion spring is the closest thing this trade has to a burst pipe. The car is shut in, somebody has to be somewhere in twenty minutes, and she is dialling down the search results until a human picks up. 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. On a spring call those three numbers are the entire job.
| What a missed garage door call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| Two double doors, insulated steel, one belt opener | $5,374 – $6,437 |
| A snapped spring on one double door | $449 – $549 |
| Voicemail callback rate | ~3% |
| One recovered replacement pays for | 27 months of the bundle |
| One recovered spring call pays for | 2 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 — the demo shop’s counter runs 8 to 6, so a 6:15 call gets the after-hours version instead of one that says you are out on a door — and every version asks the question that sorts your afternoon: is a car shut in?
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 door tech is hired or lost on one question
A torsion spring holds a few hundred pounds of stored energy over somebody’s head, and a door coming down is how this trade sends people to hospital. So the question that matters is not “tell me about yourself.” It is whether he is willing to wind springs under tension, and whether he has done it before.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the van and the counter. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he up for winding torsion springs, has he wound one before, how many years in the trade, 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, unwilling to do spring work, or living more than a set distance away — and the rest come back as a weighted fit score.
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 of those 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 new door gets its review the first morning it opens and nobody wakes
The old door shook the bedroom above it every time it went up. The new one goes up before dawn the next morning and nobody in the house stirs. That is the morning she would write you a review. By the end of the week it is just the garage door again, and the tech who hung it is a van she could not describe. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, while the quiet 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.
See how HurraBell worksOne recovered replacement covers 27 months
And a single recovered spring call covers 2 of them. This is a trade where the arithmetic is not close.
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.
Garage door questions we get asked
You can price a range. The widget only ever shows a bracket, and the disclaimer under it says the final number comes after you measure the opening and check the headroom, the side room and the framing. Write it in your own words: new track, springs sized to the door and programming the opener are included, painted finishes and glass are quoted on the visit, and nothing gets ordered until she has the written number. That is a range you can stand behind at the kerb.
It is a simplification, and the help text says so in the visitor’s own words rather than hiding it: the per-door figure is a standard single, so a second wide door is trued up when you measure. The reason is in the engine — a flat amount on a pick-one is added once per job, because no rule multiplies one answer by another. If that bothers you, run single-door and multi-door replacements as two services with their own per-door rates. Both work today, and the visitor picks the service before she sees a single question.
That is exactly what the base fee is for. Put your trip and diagnostic charge on the repair service and it is added once per visit, before any answer, so nobody can answer their way down to nothing. It is inside the range she sees rather than appearing at the door, which is the whole point — you are not surprising her with it, you are telling her up front. Put a job minimum underneath it as well, so a call-out never comes back under what a call-out costs you.
She is shopping you either way. The difference is whether she does it with your number in front of her or with nothing but the other guy’s. A homeowner who sees a real bracket at 9pm, with an honest note about what the visit confirms, stops calling down the list — and the person who wanted a $600 door for a $2,000 opening never fills in your callback form at all, which is a kindness to both of you.
No, and you should not. Put commercial and custom on a site-visit service: it captures the building type, the opening count, the height, the operator and the photo, shows no price whatsoever, and sends her your own "we will come out and measure" message. You get a lead with enough in it to decide whether the job is worth a bid, and nobody has published a number against a duty cycle nobody has seen.
Here is the honest state of it. The design is that your business line stays exactly where it is and keeps ringing as it does now. You turn on forwarding for unanswered calls once, with a code the setup guide gives you, and from then on a call nobody answers in about twenty seconds passes to your own texting number, a local number in your area code registered to your business. A short greeting, in place of your voicemail, tells the caller a text is on its way, and the reply goes out from that texting number. The caller dials one number and hears back from another. It works because the text opens with your business name and thanks them for calling. A ring group or a second phone is no obstacle, because the text only fires when nobody picks up. An answering service is one or the other for any given hour, since an unanswered call can only forward to one place: the forwarding is your own setting, a code switches it off, and the service keeps whatever hours you give it. What is running today is the half that needs no carrier: you log the missed call, CallMitt picks the right message for the hour and the day, checks your quiet hours, opt-outs and suppression list, and queues it. Automatic detection and actual delivery switch on for your account when its A2P 10DLC registration clears. Better you read that here than find it out in week two.
Call it fifteen minutes for your text-back messages and your counter 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 questions and load your per-door rate, size steps, material percentages and opener prices. 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.
Also hang windows, or side in fencing? See all the trade pages or call (301) 268-1943.
Answer the 5:40 call. Quote the 9pm shopper.
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