Prep is the job, and it is never the conversation.

You are still not giving a price. You are giving a range with the walkthrough still in front of you, in exchange for the homeowner telling you the rooms, the wall condition and the color change before you burn an hour driving. If what they describe is not a job you want, you decline from your couch.

It makes you look specific. Your disclaimer line sits right under the range and says two coats, ceilings, 190 feet of trim and drywall repair, in your words. His number says nothing. The homeowner who wants the cheapest possible paint job was never going to be a good customer, and now she filters herself out at 8pm instead of at your kitchen table.

Yes. Add cabinets as a third service: door and drawer front count, boxes yes or no, spray or brush, current finish, and whether they want the interiors done, priced per door with a shop-time minimum. It is indoor work, so it can fill a winter week.

Ask the build-year question, and put the plain sentence about RRP-certified containment and what it adds into the disclaimer line that shows under every range. It is not a legal opinion — it is you setting the expectation in writing at the front of the job instead of arguing about it later.

Make it a yes/no with your own material credit attached, a negative flat amount, so the range drops when they say yes. Once the credit is on the screen and the homeowner sees she is buying nine gallons herself, the answer sometimes changes. Either way, you agreed on it before you started.

Run a second service with unit-count and turn-time questions instead of room tiers, and put commercial into site-visit mode so it captures the lead and the spec without ever showing a number. You choose, per service, which ones get a price.

It should not. It goes out from your own texting number, a local number in your area code registered to your business, and it names your business, which every text-back has to do before it can be saved. It answers only a call nobody picked up, it respects quiet hours and opt-outs, and it invites a reply instead of selling anything. Compliance-wise it is an existing-inquiry response, not marketing — details on our compliance page. We cannot show you reactions yet. And to be plain about timing: nothing is delivered until your carrier A2P 10DLC registration clears. Until then nothing goes out, and a message held in the meantime is retired rather than delivered late; the dashboard says so.

Its walls do, but the job does not. On the demo the stairwell counts as a room at $400, and a separate yes/no asks about a two-story foyer, a stairwell or a vaulted ceiling; yes adds no dollars and sets a $1,600 job minimum, because tall walls need staging and two painters for a day. The stairwell on its own, with 40 feet of trim, two doors and light prep, adds up to $618, and she sees $1,600 to $1,728. Put it in with the four rooms above and the minimum no longer bites.

On the demo it is, and the help text tells her what she gives up. Two coats is the rate; one coat over the same color is a plain 20% off the whole job. The four rooms above, kept the same color with light prep, are $2,565 to $3,011 at two coats and $2,052 to $2,409 at one, and the help text warns that one coat can look streaky over patched areas. The disclaimer under her range covers one coat where she chose it.

Because the siding, the stories and how much is peeling decide an exterior, and how much scraping and priming that means is easier to see than to ask. So the demo's exterior service is in site-visit mode: she says what the siding is, how many stories, how the paint is holding up and whether the house was built before 1978, adds a photo if she has one, and sees no number, only a line that you like to see a job like this first. You get her answers and her number.