Spatchr for Gutter Cleaning
Bill the edge, not the area inside it
Draw the roofline once and Spatchr keeps the perimeter as well as the area. Gutter work bills off that outside number, at a rate that steps down as the run gets longer.
Unit economics
How a gutter cleaning job gets priced
Gutters are the one exterior service that bills off the outside of the shape rather than the inside. When you trace a roofline, Spatchr keeps both numbers from that single polygon — the enclosed area and the distance around its edge — and gutter work reads the second one. The shipped Gutter Clean service runs at a dollar fifty per linear foot for the first hundred and fifty feet, then a dollar twenty beyond that. The step exists because the fixed cost of the job — getting there, setting the ladder, moving it, bagging the debris and hauling it away — is spread over more footage on a bigger house. A two-hundred-and-forty-foot roofline is not twice the work of a hundred and twenty. Height then multiplies the whole thing. A second storey adds thirty percent, a third adds seventy, and that is about ladder moves more than anything else. On a single-storey ranch you set up perhaps four times. On a three-storey with dormers you are repositioning constantly, often on uneven ground, and the footage on the invoice looks identical. Brightening — removing the oxidation tiger-striping from the gutter face — is a separate per-foot adder at a dollar seventy-five, not a percentage, because it is genuinely a second pass with its own chemistry rather than a harder version of the first one.
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Stories
+30% / +70%
Gutter work is ladder work, and the number of times you move and re-level a ladder scales with height far faster than the footage does. This is the modifier that most often separates a profitable job from a break-even one.
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Brightening
+$1.75 per foot
A per-foot adder rather than a percentage, because removing oxidation streaks is a distinct second pass with its own product and its own dwell time. Half the customers who see the difference on one elevation buy it for the rest.
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Roof pitch and overhang
Access adjustment
A steep roof with a deep overhang means the ladder cannot lean where you want it, so you work at arm's length from a less stable position. It is slower and it is worth pricing rather than absorbing.
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Debris load
Volume adjustment
A house under mature oaks after a hard autumn holds compacted, wet, heavy debris that has to be bagged and taken away. A house with no overhanging trees may be a rinse. Same footage, very different afternoon.
Minimum charge
The shipped catalog sets a $125 minimum on Gutter Clean. At a dollar fifty a foot that is roughly eighty-three feet of gutter, which is a small house — and below that number the drive and the setup consume the job. The minimum is what makes a tight route viable rather than a series of small losses.
Schematic — Gutter run
Shipped pricing profile
Gutter Clean
- Up to 150 ft $1.50 /ft
- Beyond 150 ft $1.20 /ft
- Minimum charge $125
Cadence and routing
Getting back there at the right time
Gutter cleaning is the most seasonal thing on this list and the most route-dependent. The work arrives in two compressed windows — after leaf drop in autumn, and again in spring for what the winter put in — and in those windows you are doing several houses a day, ideally several on the same street. That makes density the whole game. Twelve stops within a few blocks is a good day; the same twelve spread across a county is most of a day spent driving. Spatchr holds territories and recurring service plans so the autumn round is a list that regenerates rather than a list you rebuild from memory every year — and the customers who had it done last October are exactly the ones who need it this October. The scheduling risk specific to this trade is timing against the trees rather than the calendar. Go too early and you are back in three weeks; go too late and it has frozen in the trough. A plan whose visits you can shift as a group, rather than one appointment at a time, is what makes that adjustable. Because most of this work happens with nobody home, the schedule also has to carry access notes — the gate code, the dog, the side of the house where the ladder will not sit.
Schematic — Tuesday, 10 stops
Your service catalog
What you start with
Spatchr ships a starter catalog that already contains gutter 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.
- Gutter Cleanlinear ft · $125 minimum
Debris removal and downspout flushing at $1.50 per foot for the first 150 feet then $1.20, with a storey modifier reaching +70% and an optional brightening pass at $1.75 per foot.
Proof and paperwork
Showing the customer what they paid for
Most gutter jobs are done while the customer is at work, which means the only evidence they ever have that you were there properly is what you send them. The proof that actually convinces is not a clean trough — it is water leaving the downspout. A short clip or a photo of flow at the outlet says the whole system is clear, including the elbow and the underground run, which a photograph looking into a clean gutter does not. Attach those to the visit alongside a shot of the bagged debris and you have answered every question a customer might raise before they raise it. Where the job included brightening, one before-and-after pair on the most visible elevation does more for your next sale than any description. The invoice then goes out the same evening with the footage on it, and paid work turns into a receipt the customer can find later.
The same shape, the other number
Every other exterior service on this site bills from the space inside a boundary. Gutter cleaning bills from the boundary itself, and that single difference reorganises everything about how the trade is quoted.
It is not a special feature. When you draw a polygon, the enclosed area and the length of its edge both fall out of the geometry for free. What matters is that the software keeps both and lets a service decide which one it consumes, because otherwise a gutter quote means measuring the same house a second time with a different tool.
Practically, this means an operator who washes and does gutters measures a property once. The house wash reads the area. The gutter clean reads the perimeter. Neither one knows or cares that the other exists.
Why the rate steps down and the height steps up
A hundred and fifty feet is the boundary in the shipped profile, and everything past it drops from a dollar fifty to a dollar twenty.
That reflects something true about the work. The costs that do not scale — driving there, unloading, setting up, bagging, hauling to the tip — are a large share of a small job and a small share of a large one. Charging a flat per-foot rate either overcharges big houses or undercharges small ones, and in a trade where customers on the same street compare notes, the first is a real risk.
Height moves the other way, and harder. Thirty percent for a second storey, seventy for a third, because the constraint is not the gutter but the ladder. On a bungalow you might set up four times in an hour. On a three-storey with dormers and sloping ground you are repositioning constantly, each move needs to be right, and the footage on the invoice is identical to the bungalow across the road. Operators who lose money in this trade almost always lose it on tall houses priced by the foot.
Density is the business model
Gutter cleaning has the tightest seasonal window and the smallest average ticket of anything here. The only way it works is volume in a small radius.
Twelve houses within a few blocks is a strong day. Twelve houses spread over thirty miles is six hours of work and three hours of driving, at the same revenue. That gap is the entire difference between a profitable autumn and an exhausting one, and it is decided when the week is planned rather than when the work is done.
So the tools that matter are territories and recurring plans, not the estimate. Last autumn’s customers are this autumn’s route. If the plan regenerates the visits and the territory groups them geographically, the round plans itself and you spend your energy on the ladder instead of the spreadsheet.
Proof for an empty house
This trade has an unusual problem: the customer almost never sees you work.
They come home to a house that looks exactly as it did that morning, because a clean gutter is invisible from the ground. Whatever you send them is the entire evidence base for the invoice.
The photograph that does the work is water running out of the downspout. It proves the trough, the elbow and the underground run in one image, which a picture of a tidy gutter does not — a blocked outlet under a perfectly clean trough is the most common callback in the trade. Send flow, send the bags, and the invoice stops generating questions.
Questions people actually ask
- How does the app get linear feet from a map?
- You trace the roofline as a shape, and the same polygon yields both its enclosed area and the distance around its edge. Gutter work reads the perimeter. It is the identical measurement gesture the other exterior trades use, just consuming the other number that falls out of it — which is why measuring a property once serves every service you sell there.
- What about gutters that do not run the whole way around?
- Trace the runs that exist rather than the full outline. Most houses have a gutter on two or three elevations, not four, so the traced shape is a set of edges rather than a closed loop around the building. The footage is what it is; do not let the roof footprint flatter the quote.
- Is brightening worth offering as standard?
- It is the most reliable upsell in this trade, because the result is visible from the street and the customer is usually looking at the streaked section while you explain it. Priced per foot at $1.75, it often adds forty percent to a job that was already a short one, on the same ladder set-up you have already paid for.
- How do I stop autumn from becoming chaos?
- Put the recurring customers on a service plan so the round regenerates itself, and group the plan by territory so the day is geographic rather than chronological. The failure mode in this trade is not forgetting a customer, it is doing them in an order that adds two hours of driving to every day for six weeks.
- The customer is never home. How do they know it was done?
- Send flow at the downspout rather than a clean trough, plus the bagged debris. Both attach to the visit, so they go out with the invoice automatically. It takes about a minute on site and it is the difference between an invoice that gets paid and one that gets a phone call.
Neighbouring trades
Curated by real overlap — shared routes, shared ladders, shared customers — not by an alphabetical list of everything else.
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Put your gutter 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 |