When should you charge for a quote?

You drove forty minutes each way, spent half an hour crawling about in a loft, wrote the whole thing up that evening, and heard nothing. Then it happened again the following week. By the end of the month you'd given away most of a working day and had nothing to show for it, and somebody in a forum told you that you should be charging for quotes.

It's one of those pieces of advice that sounds obviously right and obviously wrong at the same time. Charging filters out time-wasters. It also filters out customers, including good ones, and nobody can tell you in advance which effect will be bigger for your business.

So rather than answering yes or no, it's worth working out which situation you're actually in.

Free quoting is a marketing cost, and it's fine to treat it as one

Start by pricing what it costs you now. Not vaguely — actually work it out.

Take the quotes you did last month. Count the hours, including the driving and the writing up. Count how many turned into work. If you did twelve quotes at ninety minutes each and won four, that's eighteen hours for four jobs, which means roughly four and a half hours of unpaid time sitting behind every job you got.

Now decide whether that is acceptable. For many trades it plainly is — it's how you get work, and the alternative is advertising, which also costs money and converts worse. The number only becomes a problem when the win rate drops or the visits get longer.

That arithmetic is the whole decision. A one in three win rate on short local visits is a healthy business. A one in eight win rate on hour-long drives is a business subsidising other people's research.

The four times charging genuinely makes sense

When the visit is the work. Diagnosing an intermittent fault, surveying a roof, working out why the damp keeps coming back — if the customer walks away with useful knowledge whether or not they hire you, that's a service, and giving it away teaches people it's worthless.

When the travel is significant. Anything over about forty minutes each way is half a day gone. A call-out charge that comes off the bill is completely normal at that distance and almost nobody objects.

When you're the third quote. Some customers collect quotes the way other people collect brochures. You can usually tell from the questions. A small charge changes who bothers.

When you're busy. This is the one people miss. If you're booked six weeks out, free quoting isn't winning you work you wouldn't otherwise have — it's filling the diary you already had while costing you your evenings.

And the times it doesn't make sense: small local jobs, anything where the visit is two minutes of looking, and any market where every one of your competitors quotes free and customers know it.

The middle option almost everybody should use

You don't have to choose between free and charged. The version that works for most small businesses is a charge that disappears if they go ahead.

The visit's £60, which comes off the bill if you decide to use me.

That sentence does something clever without being clever. To a serious customer it costs nothing, so it isn't a barrier. To somebody gathering five quotes for a job they might do next year, it's a reason to think twice. You've filtered by intent rather than by price, which is exactly what you wanted.

It also changes the tone of the visit. Paid attention is attention people take seriously, and you'll find they've cleared the space and found the paperwork, because they've got something at stake now too.

How to say it without losing the job

The wording matters more than the number, and most of the damage is done in the first phone call.

Say it early, say it plainly, and say why in one short clause. Don't apologise and don't over-explain, because both make it sound negotiable.

Happy to come and look. There's a £60 call-out for the visit, which comes off the price if you go ahead — it's a fair drive out to you and it keeps my prices down for everyone else.

Then stop talking. The silence is uncomfortable for about two seconds and then most people say fine.

The ones who react badly are, reliably, the ones who were going to be difficult about money later. That's not a comforting cliché — it's the most consistent thing owners report after making this change.

What you owe them if they're paying

If you charge, the quote has to be worth the money, and this is where people undo their own decision.

A paid visit should end with something written. Not just a price: what's wrong, what you'd do about it, what happens if they do nothing, and what the alternatives cost. That's a document they could hand to somebody else, which feels risky and is actually the point — it's what makes the charge defensible.

Do that well and a decent share of people go with you regardless, because you've just demonstrated the thing everybody else is only claiming.

Most of the filtering happens before the visit

Here's what gets missed in this whole debate. The best way to cut wasted visits isn't charging. It's answering enough beforehand that the wrong people never book one.

Half the pointless visits come from someone who didn't know you don't cover their area, or didn't know the smallest job you take, or had a budget of £200 for a £2,000 job. All of that could have been settled in writing before anybody got in a van, and none of it ever is, because the answers live in your head and get given out one phone call at a time.

That's the gap we built hailera around: you write those answers once — the areas, the ranges, what a visit costs, what you won't take on — check them yourself, and publish them as an agent so your website and the AI apps people now ask can answer before anybody books anything. A plain page on your site headed "how we work and roughly what things cost" does much of that for nothing, so write that before you do anything else.

Try it on a subset

You don't have to change everything at once. Pick the category that hurts most — the long drives, or the surveys — and charge for those only.

Run it for two months and count. Fewer visits, and probably about the same number of jobs, is the usual outcome. If the jobs drop off sharply, you've learned something real about your market and you can go back, having lost very little.

Today: count last month's quotes, the hours they took, and how many became work. Divide the hours by the jobs won. That number is what you pay per job, right now, in unpaid time.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.