Spatchr for Exterior Cleaning
One property, every exterior service you sell
Siding by the square foot, gutters by the linear foot, windows by the pane. Seven services ship with real tiers and minimums already in them, so your first quote is a correction rather than a blank page.
Unit economics
How a exterior cleaning job gets priced
Exterior work is the one category where a single property sells you four different units in the same visit, and that is exactly what breaks a spreadsheet. Siding is square feet. The gutter run is linear feet. Windows are counted. A roof is square feet again, but with a minimum three times the size and a pitch that changes the risk entirely. Spatchr ships all of it as one catalog. House Wash steps down from twenty cents a square foot through sixteen to twelve as the elevation gets bigger, on a hundred and fifty dollar minimum. Surface Clean runs its own ladder — thirty, twenty-two, sixteen — because flatwork and siding do not behave the same way. Gutter Clean bills the perimeter at a dollar fifty a foot to a hundred and fifty feet, then a dollar twenty. Window Clean is eight fifty a pane to twenty panes, then seven. Roof Wash carries a three hundred and fifty dollar minimum and starts at fifty-five cents. On top of every one of those sits a set of named modifiers rather than a gut feeling — stories, surface type, buildup, complexity, roof type, pitch. That is what turns a quote into something you can defend line by line eighteen months later, and something a second person can produce the same way you would have.
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Stories
+25% / +50% / +80%
Height is the single biggest driver of setup time and risk on the outside of a building. A second storey means ladders or extension wands; a fourth means a lift or a rope, and the price has to carry that.
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Surface type
Asphalt −10% to natural stone +40%
The same square foot behaves differently depending on what it is made of. Asphalt tolerates aggressive cleaning and goes fast; pavers have joints that trap growth; natural stone needs pressure low enough to protect the face.
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Buildup
+15% / +25% / +40%
A surface washed every spring cleans in one pass. One that has not been touched in six years needs dwell time, a second application and often a second pass, and that is labour you cannot recover if it is not in the quote.
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Roof pitch
Walkable to steep
Roof Wash carries its own pitch field because a twelve-twelve is not a slower version of a four-twelve — it is a different job with ropes, anchors and a second person, and it should never price off area alone.
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Complexity
+15% / +30%
Furniture to move, plants to protect, no nearby spigot, a gate too narrow for the rig. None of it shows up in the square footage, and all of it shows up in your day.
Minimum charge
Every shipped exterior service carries one — House Wash $150, Surface Clean $120, Pressure Wash $100, Wood Restoration $120, Gutter Clean $125, Window Clean $125, Roof Wash $350. Below those thresholds the drive, the setup and the teardown cost more than the surface is worth.
Schematic — Measured surface
Cadence and routing
Getting back there at the right time
Washing is mostly a once-a-year job that arrives as an enquiry rather than a standing appointment, so the surface that matters is the estimate, not the recurring schedule. Somebody asks what it would cost to do the house and the driveway; you measure, you quote, and the quote either converts or it does not. That makes routing loose rather than dense. A full house wash plus flatwork can eat most of a day, so you are not threading twelve stops together — you are protecting two or three good ones and making sure the drive between them is not absurd. Gutters are the exception inside this category: they are quick, they cluster, and a good autumn is a dense route of short visits rather than a thin route of long ones. The seasonal shape matters too, and it is weather-bound in a way a scheduling tool has to respect. You cannot chemically clean a wall in freezing temperatures, and you do not want to be on a roofline in high wind. Jobs move. Rescheduling a visit keeps the estimate, the measurements and the photographs attached to it rather than orphaning them somewhere.
Schematic — Tuesday, 5 stops
Your service catalog
What you start with
Spatchr ships a starter catalog that already contains exterior cleaning. Import it on your first run and you have priced services with tiers, minimums and modifiers before you have typed anything — then change the numbers to yours.
- House Washsq ft · $150 minimum
Soft washing for siding and trim, tiered from $0.20 down to $0.12 per square foot, with a stories modifier that runs to +80% on a four-storey elevation.
- Surface Cleansq ft · $120 minimum
Flatwork — driveways, walks, patios. Carries the full set of condition modifiers — surface type, buildup and complexity — each independently adjustable.
- Roof Washsq ft · $350 minimum
Low-pressure roof cleaning from $0.55 down to $0.30 per square foot, with roof type, stories and pitch as separate fields rather than one lumped judgement.
- Gutter Cleanlinear ft · $125 minimum
Billed off the perimeter of the same polygon you drew for the roof — $1.50 per foot to 150 feet, then $1.20, with brightening as an option on the same line.
- Window Cleaneach · $125 minimum
Counted rather than measured, at $8.50 a pane to twenty panes and $7.00 beyond, with a two-sided toggle for inside-and-out work.
- Pressure Washsq ft · $100 minimum
General high-pressure work at $0.35 per square foot down to $0.28, with stories and buildup modifiers for the awkward jobs.
- Wood Restorationsq ft · $120 minimum
Decks and fences, priced with per-square-foot adders for washing and brightening rather than a tier ladder, plus a finish option for sealing or staining.
Proof and paperwork
Showing the customer what they paid for
Nothing sells exterior cleaning like the difference, and nothing settles a dispute faster. The photographs you take attach to the job itself, not to a camera roll you will scroll through in November trying to work out which grey driveway belonged to which customer. Take the before from a fixed spot — a corner of the garage, the end of the walk — and take the after from the same spot. Both live on the record beside the measured area and the line items. When a customer says a section was missed you can look rather than argue, and when a neighbour asks what you charged you have the actual quantities in front of you rather than a guess. Roofs earn a second kind of photograph. A soft wash frequently uncovers damage that was there before you arrived, and a shot of it taken on the day, stored on the job, is the difference between a conversation and a claim.
Why square feet stopped being enough
Every washing operator starts by pricing per square foot, and every one of them eventually discovers the same thing: the square footage is the easy part. Two driveways of identical size can differ by a factor of two in what they cost you to clean. One is four-year-old broom-finished concrete with a bit of algae on the north edge. The other is exposed aggregate that has not been touched since it was poured, under a maple, with a gate too narrow to get the surface cleaner through.
Price them the same and you have quietly agreed to lose money on the second one. Price them both high and you lose the first one to somebody cheaper.
The usual fix is a mental adjustment — you look at it, you feel that it is a harder job, and you add something. That works while you are the only person quoting. It stops working the moment you are busy, or tired, or trying to explain to a customer why their number is higher than the one their neighbour got, or trying to teach somebody else to quote the way you do.
Modifiers make the judgement explicit
What Spatchr does is take the adjustment out of your head and put it in the pricing profile, where it has a name and a number. Surface type is a dropdown that runs from asphalt at minus ten percent through concrete at baseline, brick, exposed aggregate and pavers, up to natural stone at plus forty. Buildup runs light, moderate, heavy, severe. Complexity covers everything that is about access rather than the surface itself. Roof Wash gets its own three — roof type, stories and pitch — because a steep slate roof and a walkable asphalt one are not the same job at the same rate.
None of that is a new idea. It is how experienced operators already think. The difference is that once it is written down as configuration, three things become possible that were not before.
The quote becomes explainable. When a customer asks why, you are not defending a hunch. You are pointing at exposed aggregate and heavy buildup, and the arithmetic is visible.
The quote becomes repeatable. Somebody who has been washing for three weeks can produce the number you would have produced, because the judgement lives in the profile rather than in your experience.
And the quote becomes reviewable. Six months of jobs later you can see whether your severe-buildup premium is actually covering the extra hours, or whether it is a number you invented once and never checked.
Four trades, one truck, one property record
Washing rarely travels alone. The customer who wants the house done frequently wants the gutters cleaned. The one who calls about a black-streaked roof needs a soft wash rather than pressure, and while you are up there the gutters are right in front of you. Windows get added because you are already on the ladder.
Those are genuinely different economics — gutters bill by the linear foot, windows are counted, a roof carries a minimum nearly three times a house wash — and Spatchr ships them as separate services with separate rate cards for exactly that reason. What they share is the property. Draw the roofline once and the roof reads the area while the gutter run reads the perimeter. Measure the driveway once and it is still there in two years when they call back.
That is the part that compounds. Most exterior work is annual or biennial, which means the majority of your quoting in year three is requoting places you have already been. If the shapes are stored, the requote takes two minutes: pull up the property, check whether anything has changed, push the buildup modifier up a notch because it has been two seasons, send it. If they are not stored, you are out there with a measuring wheel doing work you already did.
Otto quotes the second service while you are still on the first
The half of this that is genuinely hard is not the arithmetic — it is the admin that happens while your hands are wet. You are on a driveway, the customer walks out and asks what the gutters would run, and the honest answer most days is that you will work it out tonight. Half of those never get sent.
Ask Otto instead. He reads the property you already have open, pulls the perimeter off the polygon that is already drawn, applies the gutter rate card, and hands you the estimate to look at before anything is saved. You approve it or you change it. Nothing lands on the customer’s record until you say so — and that gate is the point, because a quote that goes out wrong is worse than a quote that goes out late.
He works the same way on a roof that turns out to be steeper than the satellite view suggested, or a second elevation nobody mentioned on the phone. The measurement, the rate card and the modifiers are already in the app. Otto is the part that assembles them without you taking your gloves off.
Questions people actually ask
- Can I measure a wall, not just the ground?
- You measure the footprint on the map and use the stories modifier to account for height, which is how most washing quotes are actually built. It is faster than trying to trace an elevation, and it matches the way the shipped pricing profile is set up — square footage times a rate, adjusted by how far up you have to reach.
- What happens when a customer wants the driveway but not the house?
- They are separate services on the same job, each with their own measured area and their own line item. Drop the house wash and the total recalculates, with the surface clean minimum still applying on its own. The estimate the customer sees shows exactly what they did and did not buy.
- Do I have to use the pricing that ships with the app?
- No. The shipped catalog exists so you have something working on day one instead of an empty screen. Every rate, tier boundary, minimum and percentage is editable, and most operators spend twenty minutes on their first evening replacing the numbers with their own and then never think about it again.
- How does one polygon price both the roof and the gutters?
- A closed shape carries two numbers — the area inside it and the distance around its edge. Roof Wash reads the area in square feet; Gutter Clean reads the perimeter in linear feet. You draw the roofline once and both services take the figure they need from it, which is why the two are quoted together so easily.
- How do I handle a job where I quote before I see it?
- Quote from the measured area alone and leave the condition modifiers at their baseline, then adjust on arrival. Because the modifiers are separate multipliers rather than baked into a single rate, revising a quote on site means changing one dropdown, not rebuilding the estimate from scratch.
- Does it track how much chemical a job used?
- The catalog carries materials — sodium hypochlorite by the gallon, surfactant by the ounce, degreaser, oxalic acid — so you can attach consumption to a job and see what a wash actually cost you. It is optional; plenty of operators price on labour and surface alone and never touch it.
Neighbouring trades
Curated by real overlap — shared routes, shared ladders, shared customers — not by an alphabetical list of everything else.
Put your exterior cleaning pricing on the phone
Before you download
Android and the browser do different jobs
Sign in once. After that the Android app runs on the phone's own database — measure, photograph and price a job in a basement or a dead zone, and it syncs the moment you have signal again.
The web app is a live connection to your data, so it needs a signal and a sign-in.
| Capability | Android app | Web browser |
|---|---|---|
| Works with no signal | Yes — after your first sign-in | No — needs a connection |
| Sign-in required | Yes, once | Yes, every session |
| Measure on site, camera, GPS | Yes | Limited |
| Invoices, estimates, reports | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | The truck, the roof, the yard | The office desk |