How much do you charge?
What trades and home service businesses need to publish
Trades that will not indicate price are assumed expensive. The quote request never happens.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “How much do you charge?”
- “call out fee”
- “hourly rate”
- “do you give free quotes”
- “what will it cost”
What a complete answer contains
For trades and home service businesses specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
Your call-out fee, and whether it is deducted from the final bill
- 2
Hourly or day rate, with what a minimum charge covers
- 3
Whether quotes are free and whether they are fixed or estimated
- 4
Typical price ranges for your three most common jobs
- 5
Out-of-hours and emergency rates, stated as a multiplier or a number
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
£65 call-out, which covers the first hour and comes off the final bill if you go ahead. £45 an hour thereafter. Quotes are free and fixed — the price we quote is the price you pay unless the job changes. A typical boiler service is £90; a full replacement £1,800-£3,200. Out of hours is time and a half.
Which page should own it
Pricing page
What silence costs
Homeowners get three quotes. Not publishing a starting point means you are frequently not one of the three.
More questions trades and home service businesses get
Related
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
use case
Answer customer questions from your own content
Answering questions well means answering them from something true. RubyRep retrieves the relevant passages from your site before it writes anything, and cites the page it used, so an answer can always be checked.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.