Tile is priced by the square foot, but not by the tile
Floor and wall, square feet times a rate: that part of a tile quote is easy, and it is most of the number. The part that is not is the tile itself. A ceramic she found on clearance and a marble she fell in love with can each cost more than your labor, and her choice lands on the same square footage. A form that pretends to know what she paid for the tile is a form that gets the number wrong for half the people who use it.
So this page does it the way a great many setters already work: the range is your labor and setting materials, and the tile is hers to buy. Thinset, grout, backer board and the membrane in a wet area are in it; the porcelain is not. What she picks still moves the number, because it moves how slowly the job goes: large format needs a flatter floor and two people to set it, a mosaic needs many more cuts, natural stone needs sealing.
The flow also asks for a photo of the room as it is, 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 tile number
Three areas, a count, three pick-ones, a yes or no and a ZIP. You build the set once in the dashboard and every rate in it is a field you own — you can change a per-square-foot rate the week your thinset goes up without touching your website.
Floor square footage
The floor area times your rate for setting floor tile. Tell her in the help text to add up length times width room by room and not to subtract for the vanity: you would rather she orders a box over than runs short two rows from the wall. On the demo it is $9 a square foot, labor and setting materials, and the tile is hers.
Wall square footage
Showers, tub surrounds, backsplashes and wainscot, width times height wall by wall. A separate question with its own higher rate, because tile on a wall goes up one course at a time and every course waits on the one below it. On the demo, $14 a square foot.
The tile she picked
Not its price: its size and type. Large format over 24 inches needs a flatter substrate and two people, a mosaic needs far more cuts, natural stone needs sealing. Each is a percentage on the whole job, because each slows everything at once: +15%, +30% and +25% on the demo, with ordinary ceramic and porcelain at the rate.
The pattern
Straight and offset at the rate, a diagonal +10%, herringbone and chevron +22%, because every row is cut at both ends. She knows which one she wants before she gets in touch, so ask it rather than finding out at the measure.
Tear-out, in two halves
The dumpster run is a flat fee for the job, a yes or no with your disposal amount behind it. The labor of getting the old tile up is by the square foot, a number question with its own rate. On the demo, $350 and $3.25. Ask only the first and you undercharge a whole bathroom of mortar-set tile; ask only the second and you eat the tip ticket.
The wet area
No wet area, a tub surround, or a walk-in shower with a new pan. A pick-one that adds dollars once: $450 for the membrane on a tub surround and $1,600 for a sloped pan, a membrane on every wall and a flood test on the demo. It is the line that tells her what keeps the water out, written down.
Niches and benches
Counted, and multiplied: $275 a niche on the demo. Each one is framed, waterproofed at every corner and wrapped in tile, and a homeowner who wants two should see two in the number.
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, as a flat charge, a percentage, or both. Our demo shop charges nothing in its home county and $85 out to the ring beyond it, so the same bathroom comes back $4,722 to $5,656 at home and $4,800 to $5,749 in Arlington. Set one zone to "outside my area" and it declines politely while still capturing the lead.
A real shower and bathroom floor, start to finish
Nine questions, about a minute. This is the exact sequence running on the instant service of our own tile demo account, answered for a walk-in shower and a bathroom floor in a Herndon house — and the total at the bottom is what the live engine returns for these answers, not a figure anybody typed into this page.
| # | What she is asked | What she answers | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | How many square feet of floor tile? | 60 | 60 × the floor rate, $9 on the demo, so $540 |
| 2 | How many square feet of wall tile? | 90 | 90 × the wall rate, $14, so $1,260: the shower walls, floor to ceiling |
| 3 | What tile are you putting in? | Large format, over 24 inch | +15% on the whole job. Ceramic or porcelain 0%, plank-look +8%, stone +25%, mosaic +30% |
| 4 | What pattern? | Straight or offset | Nothing. Diagonal +10%, herringbone or chevron +22% |
| 5 | Is there old tile or flooring to take out? | Yes | A flat $350 disposal fee for the job |
| 6 | If so, how many square feet come out? | 150 | 150 × $3.25 = $487.50, the labor half of the tear-out |
| 7 | Is any of it a shower or tub area? | Walk-in shower, new pan and waterproofing | A flat $1,600: the sloped pan, the membrane and the flood test |
| 8 | How many niches or shower benches? | 1 | 1 × $275 |
| 9 | Got a photo of the room as it is now? | Offered | Nothing. A photo never moves the price |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | $540 + $1,260 + $350 + $487.50 + $1,600 + $275 = $4,512.50, then the one percentage answer, large format at +15%, applies once to all of it: → $5,189.38 | ||
| She sees | $4,722 – $5,656 | ||
| What lands in your inbox, the second she submits | Name, mobile, ZIP, all nine answers, and the photo flag | ||
Every rate in that table belongs to the demo account, not to a Tailgate Office price list — you set all of them yourself, and you can change one without touching your website. What is not illustrative is the total: $4,722 to $5,656 is what the engine returns for those nine answers, for the labor and the setting materials, with the tile bought by the homeowner.
Would you rather try it than read about it? We keep a working example tile company website with NapkinPrice™ embedded — the real engine, quoting live, on a page that is not ours. Put in those nine answers and see the same number come back.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)The tile is hers, the labor is yours, and the leak is a visit
This is the one design decision that matters in tile, so here is the whole of it in plain words rather than a promise that it all just works.
There are five kinds of pricing rule in the engine and none of them multiplies one answer by another. A number question carries a per-unit rate — the floor, the wall, the tear-out, the niches. A pick-one adds dollars once for the job or takes a percentage of the whole job. What it cannot do is look up what she paid for her tile and apply it to her square footage, and a marketing page that pretended otherwise would be selling you a form that gets the number wrong.
That leaves an honest way to quote tile, and it is the way a great many setters already do it: price the labor and the setting materials, and let her buy the tile. The disclaimer on our demo says so in her words — thinset, grout, backer board and the membrane are in the number, the tile is hers to choose and buy, and you tell her how much to order. If you supply tile, run it as its own service with its own per-foot rate, the way the flooring page runs one service per material family.
The percentage answers have one seam worth knowing. They pool and apply once to everything additive, so large-format tile at +15% lands on the shower pan, the niche and the disposal fee as well as on the square footage — on the example above that is about $334 of the $5,189 midpoint. The help text says the tile is figured across the job, and the visit is where it is trued up.
Tile floors, showers and backsplashes — quotes instantly
$9 a square foot of floor and $14 of wall on the demo, with the tile size and the pattern moving the job, $350 and $3.25 a foot for the tear-out, $450 or $1,600 for the wet area and $275 a niche. A $950 minimum is the floor under the final number, applied after every rule and the travel zone, so a 30 square foot backsplash that works out at $420 comes back $950 to $1,036. Past $25,000 it stops pricing, hands you the lead and shows her a plain "bigger than we can price online" note.
Tile repairs, regrouting and leaks — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole request and shows no number at all, which is the only honest answer to a shower that leaks into the room below. Whether it is the grout, the pan or the valve, nobody knows until somebody looks. It asks what is going on and whether she kept spare tiles from the original job, because matching an old tile is often the hardest part of a repair. She gets a plain "we like to see it first" note; 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. The tile service carries no trip charge, so it is the minimum doing that job.
A tile setter cannot answer the phone with thinset on both hands
Nobody in this trade misses calls on purpose. You miss them on your knees in a shower stall with a bucket of mortar going off, or because the wet saw is screaming in the driveway. She is not ringing about an emergency: she is working down a list, and she books whoever sends her something first. In a trade where one bathroom is days of skilled labor, the call you could not take is a week of work.
| What a missed tile call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| A walk-in shower and a bathroom floor | $4,722 – $5,656 |
| The same bathroom laid in herringbone | $5,626 – $6,739 |
| 400 sq ft of plank-look porcelain, old floor out | $5,160 – $6,180 |
| A kitchen backsplash, at the minimum | $950 – $1,036 |
| One recovered bathroom pays for | 23 months of the bundle |
| One recovered floor pays for | 25 months |
Once texting is switched on, CallMitt™ writes back by text with your business name in the first words, so she replies into the same thread as her quote. The message is picked by the hour and the day, against the hours you actually keep — the demo crew runs 7 to 4, because the first batch of thinset is mixed before eight and nobody sets tile by worklight, so a 4:30 call gets the after-hours version rather than one claiming somebody is on site — and every version asks the two things that sort your week: which room, and roughly how many square feet.
Straight about where this stands. The forwarded-call hook is built and waits on your texting number, 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 tile setter is hired on two questions, and one of them is about his knees
The first is not a skill question at all. Setting tile is a full day on your knees mixing thinset, carrying boxes up the stairs and kneeling in a shower pan, and a man who has not done it does not know yet whether he can. The second separates a setter from a helper: has he built a shower pan and waterproofed it himself? Anybody can float tile across a floor. A pan that does not leak into the kitchen ceiling three years later is a skill, and you cannot teach it on a customer’s job.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the van and the job-site sign. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he up for a full day on his knees mixing thinset and carrying tile, has he built and waterproofed a shower pan himself, how many years has he set tile, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three are knockouts — under 18, not up for the work, or living further out than you will drive — and the rest come back as a weighted fit score, years in the trade heaviest, the start date next and the shower pan after it.
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, because any non-empty answer scores full marks and a weighted text box inflates every candidate who typed anything. Both are set that way on our demo job, and all seven questions carry a Spanish translation.
One honest note on delivery. Text-to-apply waits on your texting number, 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 shower gets its review the first week she uses it
The grout has cured, the glass is on, and the first morning she steps into the new shower she stands there a minute longer than she needs to. That is the week she would write you a review. A month on it is just the shower, and the dust and the bathroom out of action are what she remembers about the job. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, the week the shower goes back into use.
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 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 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 worksOne recovered bathroom covers 23 months
A single tile floor covers 25 of them. In a trade where a bathroom is days of skilled labor and the shopper is pricing it at 9pm with a sample on the counter, the arithmetic is not close.
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.
Tile questions we get asked
You can price a range, and only a range — the widget never shows a single figure. The disclaimer under it is yours to write. On the demo it says the number is labor and setting materials, the tile is hers to choose and buy, the price is confirmed after you see the floor and the walls, and anything behind the old tile that nobody expected is shown to her and agreed in writing before you fix it. Nothing is started until she has that written number.
Because no rule in the engine multiplies one answer by another, so the price of the tile she picked cannot set the rate on her square footage, and one tile can cost a couple of dollars a square foot while the next costs many times that. Pricing the labor and letting her buy the tile keeps the range honest, and it is how a great many setters work anyway. If you supply tile, run it as its own service with its own per-foot rate.
On the demo, yes: $1,600 for a walk-in shower with a new sloped pan, a membrane on every wall and a flood test before grout, and $450 for the membrane on a tub surround. It is a pick-one that adds dollars once, because a pan is one piece of work however big the walls are; the wall tile itself is still priced by the square foot. If your pans vary a lot with size, add a third option for a large shower.
They are closer than you think on a floor, and the help text walks them through a wall: width times height, wall by wall. The lead records exactly what she typed, so when you measure 104 square feet of wall against her 90 the conversation is about the difference rather than the whole number. It also filters the man who wanted a marble shower for the price of a tub surround, and he was never your customer.
No, and you should not. Put cracked tiles, failing grout and leaking showers on a site-visit service: it asks what is going on and whether she kept spare tiles, shows no price whatsoever, and sends her a plain "we like to see it first" note. You get a lead worth bidding, and nobody has published a number against a shower pan that may be rotten underneath.
Our demo says no, and its instant service carries no season. Tile is set indoors and the crew works the same way in February as in July. The field is there if your costs genuinely swing: a season is a percentage on a date window you set, applied to the job before anything about her address. But inventing one to fill the box is the fastest way to end up with a number you cannot defend.
Call it fifteen minutes for your text-back messages and your working 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 nine questions and load one rate card — floor and wall per square foot, your tile and pattern percentages, your tear-out fee and rate, your wet-area amounts and your niche. 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.
Also lay floors, or run a remodel crew? See all the trade pages or ask us.
Quote the shower while she is still holding the sample.
Set it up tonight. Free for 30 days, no card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.