The bundle is the business. Quote it that way.
A washing company’s office is mostly the route. There are jobs to group by neighborhood so the trailer is not crossing the county twice in a day, rain days to reshuffle, chemical and surface-cleaner parts to reorder, a plan customer to fit back in from last spring, and a list of last year’s houses to work through before the pollen lands. Then the phone, from people who want a price on a driveway before they let anybody look at it.
A homeowner calls about the driveway. That is a $180 job and half a morning by the time you have driven, set up, and coiled the hose. The same house has 2,400 square feet of dirty siding, a north-facing roof full of gloeocapsa, and a deck the dog has not helped.
So build a “full exterior package” service that asks about all of it, prices each surface at your rate, and takes your multi-surface discount off with a percent rule. One range covers the lot. The homeowner who came for a driveway gets a price on a $1,420 exterior package, and you are on one property instead of four.
What actually drives an exterior cleaning price
Our demo washing company prices one exterior wash package and sends roofs to a walkaround. The cards carry its own rates where it has them, and every rate, percent and minimum on your own account is a box you fill in.
Square footage
The base number for each surface, multiplied by that surface's own rate. On the demo the siding is asked as outside wall area at $0.16 a square foot, and the driveway is a pick-one of sizes with a flat amount each, from a single car at $90 to a long rural drive at $400, so nobody needs a tape measure. Keep them apart: they are not the same number and not the same rate.
Surface type
Vinyl, fiber cement, brick, painted wood, stucco, pavers, stamped concrete, composite decking. Each has a different chemical mix, a different dwell time and a different risk of you buying somebody a new surface. On the demo vinyl is the rate, fiber cement adds 5%, brick 10%, painted wood 12% and stucco or Dryvit 18%, across the whole job.
Roof vs. driveway vs. house wash
Three different jobs under one truck. A roof soft-wash is low pressure, high chemical and high risk. A driveway is a surface cleaner and a rinse. A house wash is somewhere in between with more masking. Give each its own rate, not a shared per-square-foot number; the demo prices the house and the concrete and keeps roofs for a walkaround.
Number of stories
One story, two stories, three or a walkout basement. Ladder work, extension wands and a spotter are not free, and a form that never asks prices a two-story colonial like a rancher. The demo adds 35% for two stories and 55% for three, and the worked example further down applies the 35%.
Water and power access
Spigot at the front only, no working outdoor spigot, well water with low GPM, a gated back yard. A job where you bring your own water and run hose from the trailer is time before you pull a trigger. The demo asks one yes/no, is there a working outdoor spigot, and a no adds nothing but sets a $375 job minimum for the buffer tank.
Recurring plan interval
One-time, annual, twice a year, quarterly: the question that turns a job into a customer. The demo takes 10%, 12% or 15% off for a plan, priced per visit, and the interval comes through on the lead. Its two-story vinyl house with a two-car driveway and the front walk is $775 to $910 once, or $706 to $829 a visit twice a year, which is four visits booked across two years.
Site conditions
Heavy tree cover, algae, oxidation on the siding, rust stains from a well, or a driveway nobody has touched in years. On the demo heavy algae or black streaking adds 15% and a two-pass job 25%, so you charge for the second pass instead of eating it. The photo question tells you she has pictures to send; the pictures themselves coming through with the lead is on the roadmap.
Travel zone
Route density is the game in this trade. The demo washes Columbia, Ellicott City, Glen Burnie and Severna Park at no charge, adds $45 for Laurel, Rockville, Towson, Baltimore, Annapolis and Frederick, and 5% plus $85 anywhere else. Every lead carries the ZIP and the zone it matched, so you can batch a neighborhood into one day, and the $250 job minimum means a far-out driveway still pays for the drive.
A $180 driveway call turned into a $1,420 quote
This one is a sketch of a package that prices roofs as well, with a 5% band. The siding, driveway and two-story numbers are the demo’s; its roofs go to a walkaround, and its own priced examples are in the questions at the foot of the page.
She searches "driveway cleaning near me"
Lands on your site at 7:50 PM. Other companies are open in the tabs behind yours, saying "call for a free estimate."
Q1: Which service?
She picks your "full exterior package" — the one you built so the driveway, the house and the roof all get asked about in a single flow. She only came for the driveway.
Q2: How big?
900 sq ft driveway at your $0.20/sq ft concrete rate is $180. 2,400 sq ft of vinyl siding at $0.16 is $384.
Q3: How many stories?
Two. That answer adds 35% (a percent rule), because two storeys is the taller ladder and the spotter. Percent answers pool and land on the whole job, driveway included, so if a driveway should never carry the ladder percent, sell it as its own service.
Q4: Roof details
1,800 sq ft, asphalt shingle, heavy black streaking. Soft wash at $0.25/sq ft is $450, and the heavy-streaking option adds 15%, pooled with the 35%.
Q5: One-time or on a schedule?
She picks annual. Your recurring option takes 10% off the whole package, and the interval comes through on the lead so you can book it on the call.
The range appears: $1,349–$1,491
Follow the arithmetic: $180 + $384 + $450 = $1,014, then the pooled percentages, +35% + 15% − 10% = +40%, give $1,419.60 — the $1,420 in the headline above, rounded — and the band either side of it, 5% here, is a width you set. What is in it — roof, house, driveway, the recurring discount — is spelled out in your disclaimer line right underneath.
In your inbox at 7:56 PM
Full spec, her mobile, her ZIP, and her photo answer flagged so you know to ask for pictures. You call her back at 8:15 with the job in front of you.
The part that matters
She never asked for a roof wash. She did not know you did roofs. The questions asked, because a package service costs you one extra screen to build and turns a one-surface call into a whole-property job on the same stop.
Our example washing company has a website of its own, and NapkinPrice™ quotes its exterior wash package there live, on the real engine, on a page that is not ours.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)You cannot hear the phone over a 4 GPM machine. Nobody can.
This trade has a specific problem: the tool that makes the money makes it impossible to answer the phone. Ear protection, a running engine, a wand in both hands, and you are usually 30 feet from wherever you set your phone down.
Meanwhile the caller is not committed to you at all: if you do not pick up, she is calling the next company off the map pack. Only 52% of callers to home-service businesses speak with a person (Invoca, 2026 (opens in a new tab)), and fewer than 3% of callers sent to voicemail leave a message (Invoca, 2024 (opens in a new tab)). In a trade where most jobs run $213 to $449 (HomeAdvisor, June 2026 (opens in a new tab)), a missed call can be a job that was ready to book.
CallMitt™ is where that reply gets written once, in your own words: “Sorry we missed you — running a machine. Text us the address and what you need cleaned and we’ll send a price today.” You keep one version for business hours, the demo’s 7 to 6, one for after hours, one for weekends and one for the week you are away, and quiet hours and opt-outs are checked before any of them goes. Where it actually stands: no SMS gateway is live on our side yet, so today the missed call is logged by hand and nothing is sent: a message queued now is retired rather than delivered when your carrier registration clears. Once texting is switched on, her reply lands in the same thread as her quote.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own Numbers
Pollen season pays for the year. December does not.
Exterior cleaning is brutally seasonal wherever winter is real. The phone goes off the day the pollen lands and stays hot through the summer. Then the leaves drop, the freeze warnings start, and you are winterizing pumps and staring at a quiet calendar.
Three things you can do about that. Set a seasonal date range — 15 March to 30 June at plus 12%, as the demo does — and the widget prices your peak weeks that way by itself instead of you discounting the weeks you are already booked solid; set it once and it repeats every year. The demo’s two-story house wash above is $775 to $910 in November and $868 – $1,019 on 15 April. Turn on waitlist mode in February so off-season leads are captured with a note that she is on your list and you will be in touch with timing and pricing, instead of a voicemail. And use the quiet weeks to sell recurring plans, which is the steadiest way out of the feast-and-famine cycle you have.
And when it is genuinely dead, pause the plan instead of cancelling. You keep your rate card, your lead history and your applicant pool. Unpause the week the pollen starts. There is no setup fee waiting for you on the other side, because there was never a setup fee in the first place.
One-time jobs are a treadmill. Plans are a business.
The recurring question belongs in the quote, not in an awkward ask at the end of the job when you are tired and sweaty.
Ask while they are deciding
The moment a homeowner is looking at a price is the moment she will consider a schedule. "Annual plan" with the 10% already in the range is an easier yes on a screen than the same sentence said out loud through a respirator.
Plans build your routes
Twelve annual customers on the same three streets is a day you did not have to sell, and a day with far less driving in it than one put together from one-off calls.
The re-quote list, eleven months later
Re-quote reminders are built (on a job, choose "Remind them again in N months"; the templates are under Customers, then Reminders) but are not switched on for new accounts yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What you have today is the list: export every customer and the interval they picked to CSV in one click, any date range, even while your plan is paused. Working forty names in an evening is booked work that costs you nothing but the evening.
It fills the shoulder season
Recurring customers can be scheduled in March and October when your one-time phone is quiet, which is one way to keep a crew busy into the autumn.
Hire for April before April
The wand can be taught. What cannot is showing up at 7 AM, not putting a wand through a window screen, and being comfortable at the top of an extension ladder, so the hiring problem is not skill — it is finding that person.
The work is seasonal, so you are hiring in the same spring weeks as the landscapers, roofers and fence companies around you, and plenty of the people worth hiring have never written a resume.
“Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the trailer and the truck. CrewFunnel™ asks the questions you set. The demo job asks seven: 18 or older, comfortable working from an extension ladder, a valid driver’s license, years of pressure washing, miles from Columbia, start within two weeks, and the last job he worked on. Under 18, not comfortable on the ladder or more than 30 miles out ends it; the rest come back scored 0–10, the years counting most, then the license and the start date.
Today those questions are answered on your screening page rather than over text — we have no SMS gateway yet, and the keyword takes over when your carrier registration clears. The questions, the scoring and the pool do not change when it does. You get a screened list and book interviews in two taps. Team Engine’s Growth plan is $400 a month billed annually or $500 billed monthly (Team Engine pricing page, checked October 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Indeed bills a sponsored post per click or per started application, and the price depends on your market and the job (Indeed, checked October 2026 (opens in a new tab)); it can still send you people who have never held a wand.
See how CrewFunnel works
The before-and-after is the review, and it is drying on the driveway
The hose is back on the reel, the driveway is drying out two shades lighter than the neighbor’s, and she is on the porch looking at siding she had forgotten was white. That afternoon is the one to ask about. By next week she has stopped looking at either one, and the before-and-after is a photo on your phone instead of a review with your name on it. The washing company with sixty reviews does not wash sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, while the driveway is still drying.
HurraBell™ does the asking. Once review requests are switched on, you 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 since texted you, messaged you from your website or had a call logged on her thread.
Review requests aren’t switched on for new accounts yet. 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 ticked the box on your quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, 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 worksHow we compare with ResponsiBid
ResponsiBid was built in this trade and it is a genuinely good product. The rows below set its pricing page beside ours, as both read in October 2026.
| Tailgate Office | ResponsiBid | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $199 all four tools | $179–229 for paid plans |
| Setup fee | None | One-time fee (amount not published) |
| Time to live | ~30 min, self-serve | Setup meetings with a coach |
| Off-season pause | Yes, and nothing is lost | $50/mo, up to 4 months a year |
| Missed-call text-back | Included, sending once your texting is live | Not on its price page |
| Keep your current CRM | Yes | Yes: it connects to Jobber, Housecall Pro and others |
Prices from each company’s own pricing page, checked October 2026: ResponsiBid (opens in a new tab) and QuoteIQ (opens in a new tab). ResponsiBid lists a one-time setup fee but does not print the amount; the same page, checked November 2026, says that fee covers your account’s setup with a dedicated coach, in setup meetings, and names Jobber, Housecall Pro and other tools it connects to. QuoteIQ’s instant-quote tool (InstaQuote) starts on its Elite plan, at $299.99 a month. More detail on the ResponsiBid comparison.
The Tailgate Office Bundle
Instant quotes on your website, missed-call text-back and text-to-apply hiring (texts go out once texting is switched on), and, once switched on, a review request after every job, plus 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.
Pressure washing questions
Yes, and the demo does exactly that. Its roof soft wash is a service of its own in site-visit mode: she says what the roof is, roughly how many square feet, how bad the streaking is and how many stories, adds a photo from the street if she has one, and sees no number, only a line that you like to see a job like this first. You get the lead and the full spec. Price everything but roofs, or nothing over two stories; it does what you tell it.
Then the question has to help her. The demo asks for the outside wall area, not the floor plan, and says to enter 0 to skip the house and just do the concrete. For the driveway it asks no number at all: single car, two car, two car with an apron, or a long rural drive, each with your own amount behind it. A tier is easier to answer than a blank number box.
Nothing, and it does not matter. You are showing a range, not a contract, and the confirmation screen says the final price is set after you see the property. If she says 900 sq ft and it is 1,600, you show her the tape and the number moves. She already picked you to come and look, which was the point.
You should. Set a floor per service — $175, $250, whatever covers your drive and setup — and the widget will never show a number under it, no matter what she enters. The floor is applied last, after the percentages and the travel zone, so it really is a floor on the final number. (A prompt that nudges her toward adding a second surface to make the trip worth it is on the roadmap; today the honest move is to build the package service and let her see it.)
Yes, and you should add them. Each one is its own service with its own rate card, and the visitor picks which she wants before she answers anything. Gutter cleaning priced by linear foot, window cleaning by pane count or tier. Same account, no extra charge per service.
Pause instead. Your rate card, your customers and your applicant pool stay put. Export last year’s customers to CSV in one click and work the re-quote list yourself over the winter — exports keep working while you are paused, and after you cancel. Come back in March and unpause. Nothing to rebuild.
No. Every lead lands in your shared inbox, exports to CSV, and queues an HMAC-signed webhook (delivered within about two minutes) — 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 so plainly. This is a quoting widget and a text line, not a platform you have to move your whole business onto.
On the demo she pays for the trip with the tank. A no to the spigot question adds no dollars but sets a $375 minimum, and its help text says why: you bring your own water in the buffer tank. A single-car driveway on its own is $250 to $270 with a spigot, which is the $250 job minimum, and $375 to $405 without one.
Each visit. The demo takes 10% off for an annual plan, 12% for twice a year and 15% for quarterly, and the range she sees is for one visit at that rate; the interval she picked comes through on the lead so you can put the dates in on the first call. Its two-story vinyl house with a two-car driveway and the front walk is $775 to $910 once, or $706 to $829 a visit on the twice-a-year plan.
It asks. The siding question is a percentage on the whole job: vinyl at the rate, fiber cement plus 5%, brick plus 10%, painted wood plus 12%, stucco or Dryvit plus 18%. The same two-story house with a two-car driveway and the front walk is $775 to $910 in vinyl and $878 to $1,031 in stucco. The percentage lands on the driveway and the walk as well, so if your concrete price never changes with the siding, sell the concrete as a service of its own.
Also run a lawn crew or a painting side? Those have trade pages too, and for anything else, ask us.
Stop pricing driveways over a running machine. Let the site do it.
Thirty days free, with no card and no setup fee. Pause it for the winter and keep everything you built.