ben_fisher•8d agoTop Commenter

That coffee chat with a plumber in Denver made me rethink my whole pricing strategy

I was complaining about a client who nickel-and-dimed me over a $500 project, and this plumber named Dave at a coffee shop said he charges $150 just to show up and look at a pipe. He told me I was selling value short because people think cheap work is bad work. Has anyone else had a random stranger totally shift how you look at your rates?

3 comments

3 Comments

ruby_bell477d ago

The same thing plays out everywhere if you pay attention. A mechanic near me charges $100 just to plug in a diagnostic computer and people lose their minds, but they'll drop $600 on a new phone without blinking. Or think about haircuts - a $20 chop and a $80 cut at a real salon, same amount of hair comes off but one of them actually knows how to work with your texture. Cheap prices train people to expect cheap results. I see it in my own work where the clients who push back on the estimate the hardest are usually the same ones who complain about the quality afterward. Dave might have been random but he was right about one thing - if you're not confident in your rates, neither is your customer.

mason_murray88d ago

$150 to look at a pipe seems crazy high though.

david_palmer8d agoTop Commenter

I get why it seems steep, but you're really paying for the knowledge and the truck full of specialized tools... a decent snake machine alone costs more than most people's rent. And if it's something like a cast iron stack that needs cutting and replacing, that's a whole different skill level than just snaking a sink. Sometimes the $150 is cheap if it saves you from a $3,000 dig-up later.