Plumbing is two phone calls, and one of them is standing in water
The first call is not shopping. Something is running that she cannot stop, or the hot water went and there are three people in the house, and she is ringing down the plumbers Google put at the top until somebody answers. She is hiring whoever picks up, and she is not leaving a voicemail to do it.
The second call has been put off for years. The pipe is grey polybutylene and the carrier has stopped writing around it, or the copper has pinholed twice this winter, and she wants to know whether the whole house is two thousand dollars or twelve before she books a morning off. They are not the same customer and they should not share a form. NapkinPrice™ runs them as separate services on one account — the repipe asks eight questions and puts a range on the screen, the service call carries your trip and diagnostic charge inside the number instead of springing it at the door, and a sewer line or a well system goes down a third path that never guesses a price at all.
The flow also asks for a photo of the water heater and of the pipe where it comes into the house, 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.
A missed plumbing call is not a lost call. It is a lost repipe.
Not answering is not rudeness in this trade, it is physics. Your hands are wet and inside a wall, or you are on your back in a crawlspace with a torch in your teeth, and the phone is in the truck forty feet away because it does not survive down there. Worse, the job you are on is somebody else’s water shut off at the main: you cannot walk out to the yard to take a call while a house sits dry with the ceiling open. Every one of those calls is ringing three other plumbers at the same time, and the one you missed at ten past eight on a Tuesday evening was the polybutylene house, not the dripping tap.
| What a missed plumbing call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| A whole-house repipe in PEX, two bathrooms, ceiling made good | $6,925 – $8,295 |
| A slow drain, one fixture, ground floor, next opening | $228 – $290 |
| The same call, water running and nobody can find the stop | $308 – $392 |
| One recovered repipe pays for | 34 months of the bundle |
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 phone runs 7am to 7pm, so that ten-past-eight call gets the after-hours version instead of one that says you are out on a job — and every version but the one that runs while the shop is shut tells her the thing that matters before anybody gets there: if water is running and she can reach the shutoff, turn it. Here is what is already true at 6am tomorrow:
Every missed call, in order, with the hour on it
You log the call and it takes its place in a list you can read down at six in the morning — who rang, from what number, at what time, and what was composed back. Nothing to reconstruct off a phone that shows eleven names and no times.
A blocked message says why it was blocked
When a rule stops a message it is recorded as blocked with the reason written out in plain English — quiet hours where the caller is, an opt-out, a suppressed number. You are never left guessing whether something went out.
Her call and her website quote in one thread
The key is the phone number, so the repipe questions she filled in at nine last night and the call she made at twenty past six this morning are one conversation on one screen, instead of two records nobody ever joins up.
A tally that leaves your own tests out
Every send is tagged with where it came from, and the dashboard count excludes the ones you fired at yourself while setting it up. What is on the screen is real calls, which is the only figure worth looking at.
Straight about where this stands. We have no SMS gateway on our side yet, so nothing we compose reaches a phone today — you log the missed call and the reply is written, compliance-checked and held in your outbox where you can read it. 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. Two things that wording usually leaves out, and both of them are permanent: texting runs 8am to 9pm where the caller is — we read that off their area code — and no setting on our side relaxes it, so a call outside that window is recorded as blocked with the reason rather than queued and nothing re-attempts it in the morning; and a reply held longer than an hour is retired rather than delivered when sending switches on, because nobody wants a month-old “sorry we missed your call” landing on a customer’s phone. The code that answers a forwarded call and texts the caller back is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks — it has no phone number to answer on yet, which is a paperwork problem rather than a software one.
Do not take our word for it. That ten-past-eight call is inside the window; move the clock on an hour and it is not. Set it to half past nine on a Tuesday evening on the example business and watch the same rules record it as blocked — try it on the demo (opens in a new tab) — or open that business’s real dashboard, no signup, at the example account’s own dashboard, then click CallMitt in the left menu and read its five text-back messages and its hours for yourself.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own NumbersThe eight things that set a plumbing number
What the job actually is
A water heater going in, one bathroom or the kitchen repiped, a whole-house repipe, the main water line from the meter, or a tankless heater with the gas and venting. A pick-one, with the money sitting on the option rather than on the rule — $1,850, $1,600, $4,200, $3,600 and $3,950 on the demo. Do not draw a per-unit distinction on a pick-one, because the engine has none: the option she chooses adds its dollars once for the job.
Bathrooms the new pipe has to reach
The one genuinely per-unit line on this service — your per-bathroom rate multiplied by however many the pipe has to serve, $690 each on the demo. Zero is a real answer and nothing fires at all on it: not the rate, not a flat amount, not a percentage. That is exactly what you want when she is only putting a water heater in and the bathrooms are not being touched.
What you are running it in
PEX, CPVC or copper throughout. This is a percentage on the whole job rather than a line item, because copper changes every joint, every fitting and every hour in the house at once rather than adding a part. Zero, 6 and 26 percent on the demo — set the ones your own material and labour actually cost you.
How you get at the pipe
An open crawlspace or basement, a finished basement ceiling, two storeys through finished walls, or under a slab. That is the difference between a two-day job and a five-day one, and it is priced once for the job rather than once per bathroom — $0, $780, $1,650 and $2,400 on the demo. If the house is a mix, the form tells her to pick the hardest of them.
Grey polybutylene supply pipe
A yes/no that raises the job minimum instead of adding a fee, which is a rule kind worth understanding. It cannot be patched and no carrier will write around it, so the whole system goes: on the demo a yes means the quote never comes back under $6,400. It adds nothing to the arithmetic. It puts a floor under the finished number, and the bottom of the published range sits flat on that floor.
Making the ceiling good afterwards
A yes/no with your own flat amount behind it — $1,250 on the demo — priced once for the job. Most plumbing quotes stop at the last joint and leave her holding an open ceiling, which is the single most common reason a repipe price gets argued about at the end. Ask it on the form and the answer is in writing before anybody cuts.
How soon she needs somebody
Urgency is something the customer declares, so it is a dropdown carrying a percentage: next opening, tomorrow morning, or today with the water off at the street — 0, 0 and 26 percent on the demo. A percentage rather than a call-out fee on purpose. A flat amount is added first and is then multiplied by every other percentage, by the season and by the travel zone, so a flat figure you state stops being that figure by the time she sees it.
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 one-fixture call 40 minutes out still pays for the drive.
A real repipe flow, start to finish
Eight questions, about a minute. This is the exact sequence running on our own plumbing 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 | What are we doing? | A whole-house repipe | A flat $4,200 for the job — every supply line, meter to last fixture |
| 2 | How many bathrooms does the new pipe have to reach? | Two | 2 × the per-bathroom rate — $690 each on the demo, so $1,380 |
| 3 | What are we running it in? | PEX | Nothing; copper would be a percent on the whole job, +26% |
| 4 | Where does the pipe have to run? | A finished basement ceiling | A flat $780, once for the job |
| 5 | Is the house on grey polybutylene supply pipe? | No | Nothing — the rule only fires on yes, and even then it adds nothing |
| 6 | Do you want the drywall patched and painted after us? | Yes | A flat $1,250, once for the job |
| 7 | How soon do you need us? | Next opening | No urgency percent on this one |
| 8 | Got a photo of the water heater, or of the pipe where it comes in? | Offered | Nothing. A photo never moves the price |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | $4,200 + $1,380 + $780 + $1,250 = $7,610, and then nothing multiplies it: PEX is 0% and the next opening is 0%, so the midpoint stays $7,610.00 | ||
| She sees | $6,925 – $8,295 | ||
| 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-bathroom rate, the job options 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-bathroom rate without touching your website. What is not illustrative is the total: $6,925 to $8,295 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 plumbing 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 repipe, a blocked drain and a sewer line out to the street are three different conversations. Running them through one form is how you end up quoting a sewer replacement like a running toilet.
Repipes, water heaters and main lines — quotes instantly
No trip charge on this one: the visit sells the repipe. It carries a job minimum instead, so a single bathroom 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. One question raises the floor on its own: answer yes to grey polybutylene and the minimum goes to $6,400, which is a floor and not a fee. It adds nothing to the arithmetic, it flattens the bottom of the range — the same job that quotes $2,084 to $2,496 with a no comes back $6,400 to $6,976 with a yes. Above the ceiling it stops pricing: past $13,750 on the demo the widget routes the lead to you rather than publishing a number that big off eight answers.
Leak, drain and fixture call — quotes instantly
The trip and diagnostic charge lives in the service base fee, so it is added once however many fixtures you end up looking at and cannot be dodged by answering the cheapest thing to everything. On the demo that is $129, and it sits inside the range she sees rather than appearing at the door. A slow drain, one fixture, ground floor, next opening quotes at $228 to $290. There is a job floor underneath and a ceiling above at $1,500, because past a certain number the honest answer is the main line or a repipe rather than another hour under the sink.
Sewer lines, well systems and commercial — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the right answer for a sewer line that has to be dug up or lined out to the street, a well pump and pressure tank, or a building that has to keep its water on while you repipe it. The service still asks the building type, how many fixture groups, what the water and waste are, and whether the water can go off — that last one moves no money, it just tells you whether this is a night job. She gets your own "we will come and look" message; you get a lead worth bidding.
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.
A plumber is hired or lost on the ticket
You cannot send an unlicensed man to a water heater or a gas line, you cannot bill his hours out at a plumber’s rate, and the county inspector will know inside a minute. The scarce input in this trade is not a willing body, it is a ticketed tech — which changes the first question you ask and changes who you stop giving an afternoon to.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the van and the job box. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, does he hold a current plumbing license in your state, has he repiped a house in copper or PEX and pressure-tested it before the walls closed, how many years has he done plumbing work, 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, no current licence, 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 plumber is reviewed the evening the water comes back on, or not at all
The water is back on at the stop and nothing under the sink is dripping. That is the evening she would write you a review, while the relief is still fresh and the bucket is still sitting in the kitchen. By Thursday it is a tap that works, and nobody reviews a tap that works. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, the evening the water comes back on.
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 repipe covers 34 months
And a single recovered service call more than covers the month it happened in. This is a trade where the arithmetic is not close.
The Tailgate Office Bundle
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Plumbing questions we get asked
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 runs 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 hours, the quiet hours, your opt-outs and your suppression list, and the message is composed and held in your outbox where you can read it. The code that answers a forwarded call and does all of that without you touching it is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks — it has no phone number to answer on yet. Better you read that here than find it out in week two.
It is recorded as blocked, with the reason, and that is the end of it. Texting runs 8am to 9pm where the caller is — read off their area code — and there is no setting on our side that relaxes it, so a two o’clock message is never queued in the first place. Nothing re-attempts it at eight either: a blocked record is final by design rather than by accident. And a message that did queue and then sat is retired rather than delivered once it is more than an hour old, because a "sorry we missed your call" that lands the next afternoon does more harm than silence. So say it plainly: if you advertise round-the-clock, a text-back is not your night shift — a human is. What this gives you at six in the morning is the list — who rang, at what time, and why nothing went out — so the two o’clock caller gets a call back from you before she has finished ringing round.
It stops pricing and hands you the lead. Every instant service carries a ceiling, and on the demo the repipe service is set at $13,750 — a seven-bathroom house in copper with the pipe under a slab goes straight past it, and she gets your own "this one needs a plumber standing in front of it" message instead of a number. The ceiling is tested against the midpoint before the range is ever drawn, so it is a decision about the job rather than about the top of a band. Set yours where you would stop quoting over the phone.
Not through the engine, and we would rather say so than fake it. The pricing engine cannot read a clock at any scale — not the hour, not the day of the week, not the weather. The only temporal thing it knows is a seasonal date range that repeats every year forever, which is why this demo carries no season at all: a burst pipe arrives on a cold snap, and a cold snap is weather rather than a calendar, so a winter premium would charge on every mild January and nothing at all for the March freeze. What does exist is a question on the form. Urgency is something the customer declares — next opening, tomorrow morning, or today with the water off at the street — and the answer carries a percentage on the whole job, 26% on the demo repipe and 35% on the demo service call. That is honest, it is yours to set, and she agrees to it before she submits. A flat call-out fee is the thing to avoid: a flat is added first and is then multiplied by every percentage, the season and the travel zone, so the figure you typed is not the figure she gets.
You can price a range, and only a range. The widget shows a bracket and the disclaimer under it says the final number comes after somebody has opened a wall or a ceiling and seen what the existing pipe, the shutoffs and the drains actually are. Write that in your own words: permit and inspection in, making good out unless she asked for it, anything behind the plaster priced on the day. A homeowner who gets an honest bracket at nine at night stops calling down the list — and the person whose budget was never going to reach a repipe finds that out on your website rather than on your morning, which is a kindness to both of you.
It works, and it works best if you stop pretending the software is the night shift. The moment you log a missed call the right message for that hour and that day is composed — the after-hours one at ten past eight, the weekend one on Sunday lunchtime, the holiday one on Christmas Day — and between 8am and 9pm where the caller is, quiet hours do not stand in its way. Outside that window it records the call and tells you why nothing went out, which is what you want a phone system to do at three in the morning rather than what a lot of them do, which is nothing. The five messages are yours to write, so the after-hours one can say when you actually start and ask whether she can reach a stop tap, and the genuine emergency identifies itself instead of going somewhere else.
Call it fifteen minutes for your five text-back messages and your 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 repipe questions and load your per-bathroom rate, your job options, your material percentages and your travel zones. A service that quotes will not go live until it carries a real base fee or a real minimum, which is deliberate. No onboarding call, no setup fee and no contract: $199 a month buys all four tools.
Also run drain cleaning, or sub to a builder? See all the trade pages, read the compliance page, or call (301) 268-1943.
Answer the ceiling leak at ten past eight. Quote the repipe her insurer is asking for.
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