Spatchr for Lawn Care
Measure the lawn once. Bill it forty times.
The polygon you walk in March is the same polygon that prices every cut until November — and the same one that tells you how much fertiliser the round needs.
Unit economics
How a lawn care job gets priced
Mowing is priced per visit, but the per-visit number has to come from somewhere, and "it looks like a forty-dollar lawn" stops working the moment somebody else is driving the mower. So you measure the turf — not the parcel. The lot is a quarter acre; the grass you actually cut might be six thousand square feet of it once the house, the drive, the beds and the patio are taken out. Trace the mowable area, exclude what you do not cut, and that figure becomes the basis for the recurring price. From there most operators build a rate that steps down with size, because a large open lawn cuts faster per square foot than a small awkward one — the mower spends more time cutting and less time turning. A minimum per visit then protects the small lots, where the drive and the unload dominate whatever the turf figure says. The measurement pays for itself in a second way. Square footage is what determines how much fertiliser, seed or treatment a property consumes, so the same number that sets the price also tells you what to load on the truck for a round of twenty.
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Mowable area
Turf square feet, not lot size
The parcel includes the house, the driveway and the beds. Pricing off lot size overcharges open properties and undercharges dense ones, and both errors are visible to customers who talk to each other.
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Obstacle density
Complexity adjustment
Trees, beds, play equipment, a trampoline and a dog run turn open mowing into trimming. Two lawns of identical area can differ by fifteen minutes, and the difference is entirely how many times you stop.
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Gates and access
Access adjustment
A back garden reachable only through a narrow side gate means the ride-on stays on the trailer and the whole rear is done with a push mower. It is the single most under-priced condition in residential mowing.
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Slope
Terrain adjustment
Anything steep enough to need a walk-behind, or to be cut across rather than up and down, is slower and harder on both the operator and the machine.
Minimum charge
You set a per-visit floor when you build the catalog. On a dense weekly route the minimum matters less than in one-off trades — the stops are close together — but it still stops a tiny courtyard from being priced at eleven dollars because that is what the square footage said.
Schematic — Measured surface
Cadence and routing
Getting back there at the right time
This is the trade recurring service plans were built for. A mowing customer is not a job, they are a standing arrangement — every seven days from April to October, roughly thirty visits, at the same price each time. A service plan in Spatchr carries the cadence and generates the visits, so Tuesday's round exists without anybody assembling it. That sounds small until you are running sixty properties on a four-day rotation and somebody asks whether the Hendersons were done last week. Territories then group the round geographically, which in mowing is nearly the entire economics of the business. Stops are twenty to forty minutes; drives between them should be three, not fifteen. A round that grew by accepting customers in call order rather than in map order will quietly cost an hour a day forever, and the fix is a planning problem rather than a driving one. Growth changes the cadence rather than the plan. In peak growth you are on a seven-day cycle; by September many lawns stretch to ten or fourteen days. Shifting a plan's cadence moves the whole set of upcoming visits rather than requiring thirty individual reschedules.
Schematic — Tuesday, 10 stops
Your service catalog
What you start with
Spatchr does not ship a starter catalog for lawn care — the one bundled template covers exterior cleaning. You build yours, which takes about ten minutes and is worth doing properly once. Here is the shape most operators land on.
- Mowing — weeklysq ft
The core recurring service, priced from measured turf area with a per-visit minimum. Most operators set a rate band by property size rather than a strict per-foot figure.
- Trimming and edgingsq ft
Usually bundled into the mow price rather than sold separately, but worth existing as a line so a property with unusual edging can be priced up without a special case.
- Fertilisationsq ft
Priced straight off the measured area, and the clearest example of the measurement doing double duty — the same number tells you what to charge and how much product to load.
- Aerationsq ft
A seasonal add-on, once or twice a year, sold to the existing round rather than to new customers. Square footage drives both the price and the machine time.
- Leaf removalhour
The one lawn service that resists area pricing. Volume depends on the trees, not the turf, so most operators bill it hourly or as a seasonal flat rate.
- Spring and autumn cleanuphour
Bookend jobs that top and tail the season. Hourly, because what needs doing varies more than any measurement predicts.
Proof and paperwork
Showing the customer what they paid for
Weekly work generates almost no disputes about whether it happened and a steady trickle of questions about billing — which weeks were skipped for rain, whether the September gap was two visits or three, what the total was for the season. The visit record answers those without argument, because every generated visit is either completed, skipped or rescheduled, with a date attached. A month's invoice built from four completed visits is checkable rather than assertible. Photographs matter less here than in the exterior trades, with one exception worth building into the routine: damage. A sprinkler head you clipped, a section scalped on a hump, a bed edge that was already ragged when you arrived. Photograph it at the visit, note it, and mention it before the customer finds it. Weekly customers forgive mistakes they are told about and remember the ones they discover.
The measurement that keeps paying
Most trades on this site measure a property once and bill it once, maybe again in two years. Mowing measures once and bills thirty times a season, for as long as the customer stays.
That changes what the measurement is worth. Thirty seconds spent tracing the mowable turf accurately in April is amortised across the entire season and every season after it. Getting it wrong is amortised the same way — a lawn priced ten dollars light is three hundred dollars a year, quietly, until somebody notices.
It is also the reason to exclude what you do not cut. The parcel boundary is easy to trace and tempting to use, but a quarter-acre lot on a suburban street might be six thousand square feet of grass and five thousand of house, driveway, patio and planting. Two customers with identical lot sizes can have genuinely different lawns, and pricing them the same is how you end up with one customer feeling cheated and another you are subsidising.
Plans, not appointments
The mental shift that makes this trade manageable is treating a customer as a standing arrangement rather than a series of bookings.
A service plan holds the cadence — every seven days, April to October — and produces the visits. Tuesday’s round is generated, not assembled. Nobody has to remember that the Hendersons are fortnightly and the Patels moved to Thursdays.
At ten properties you could hold that in your head. At sixty you cannot, and the failure mode is not dramatic: it is one missed property a month, each of which is an apologetic phone call and occasionally a lost customer. A generated round removes the category of error entirely.
Route density is the margin
Here is the arithmetic that decides whether a mowing business works.
A residential cut is twenty to forty minutes. If your stops are three minutes apart, a day holds twelve properties. If they are fifteen minutes apart, the same day holds eight. Same work, same equipment, same fuel bill, two-thirds of the revenue.
Rounds rarely get spread out deliberately. They get spread out by saying yes — to the customer eight miles away who called in June, and the one across town who was a referral. Each individual yes is obviously worth it. The cumulative effect is a route that costs an hour a day.
Territories exist to make that visible while it is happening rather than at the end of a season. When a new enquiry lands, the question is not just whether the price is right; it is whether the property sits inside a day you already drive to.
Where lawn care meets the other work
The customers overlap heavily with the trades around it. A weekly mowing round is the best distribution channel a landscaping business can have, because you are on the property thirty times a year and you notice things — a bed that needs rebuilding, a fence panel gone, a tree that should come out. Those are one-off jobs at a different scale, priced differently, but sold with no marketing cost at all.
Autumn cleanups likewise turn into haul-away work, which has its own economics again — no measurement, no recurrence, and a unit the app does not ship. That one has its own page.
Questions people actually ask
- Should I price from lot size or the part I actually cut?
- The part you cut, always. Lot size includes the house, the driveway and the beds, which can be half the parcel on a suburban property. Measuring the mowable turf takes an extra thirty seconds and produces a number you can defend to a customer who compares notes with a neighbour whose lot is the same size but whose garden is mostly patio.
- How do weekly visits get created?
- A service plan carries the cadence and generates them, so the round exists without being rebuilt. You are managing an arrangement rather than a calendar, which is what makes sixty weekly properties administratively possible for one person.
- What happens when growth slows in autumn?
- Change the plan's cadence rather than editing individual visits. Moving a property from seven days to fourteen adjusts everything upcoming at once, which is the difference between a two-minute seasonal adjustment and an afternoon of rescheduling across the whole round.
- Does the app help with fertiliser quantities?
- Indirectly, and usefully. Because every property carries a measured turf area, a round's total square footage is a number you already have — and that is what determines how much product to mix and load. Most operators discover they were over-ordering once they can see the real total.
- Why does Spatchr not ship a lawn care catalog?
- The one bundled starter catalog covers exterior cleaning, so lawn services are something you build. It takes about ten minutes, and it is genuinely better done yourself here than in the washing trades, because mowing rates are set far more by local market than by any national logic.
Neighbouring trades
Curated by real overlap — shared routes, shared ladders, shared customers — not by an alphabetical list of everything else.
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Junk Removal
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Put your lawn care 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 |