Spatchr for Pressure Washing
Square-foot pricing that survives the walk-around
Measure the driveway and the siding where you're standing, let your tiered rates and surface modifiers do the arithmetic, and hand over a number you can defend line by line.
Unit economics
How a pressure washing job gets priced
Almost every washing job is a surface with an area and a condition. Spatchr treats those as two separate inputs, because they move a price in different directions. You draw the driveway, the walkway or the elevation on the map and get square feet. Then the service you picked applies its tiered rate — House Wash steps down from twenty cents a foot through sixteen to twelve as the surface gets bigger, because a larger wall does not cost proportionally more to reach and set up for. Surface Clean runs its own ladder from thirty cents down to sixteen. On top of that sits the condition of what you are looking at, expressed as percentage modifiers rather than a gut feeling you have to justify later. A concrete driveway is the baseline. Pavers add thirty percent because of the joints. Natural stone adds forty. Severe organic buildup adds another forty on top of that. The result is a number with an audit trail: the customer asking why their driveway costs more than their neighbour's gets a real answer, and so do you when you look at the job again in eighteen months.
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Stories
+25% / +50% / +80%
Height is the single biggest driver of setup time and risk on a wash. Reaching 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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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
House Wash carries a $150 minimum, Surface Clean $120 and Pressure Wash $100 in the shipped catalog. Below those thresholds the drive, the setup and the teardown cost more than the surface is worth, and the minimum is what stops a small job from quietly losing money.
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. Spatchr keeps the property record with its measured surfaces attached, so when the same customer calls back two seasons later the shapes are already there and requoting takes a minute. The seasonal shape matters too. Washing 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 in Spatchr keeps the estimate, the measurements and the photos attached to it rather than orphaning them.
Schematic — Tuesday, 5 stops
Your service catalog
What you start with
Spatchr ships a starter catalog that already contains pressure washing. 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.
- 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 photos you take attach to the job itself, not to a camera roll you will scroll through in November trying to remember 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 with the measured area and the line items beside them. 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. The estimate becomes the invoice without re-entry, and the customer gets a link to a rendered document rather than a photo of a handwritten pad.
Why square feet stopped being enough
Every pressure 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.
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.
The measurement is the boring part, and that is the point
Drawing the shape takes about thirty seconds. Walk the boundary or trace it on the satellite view, close the polygon, done. The square footage lands on the job and stays with the property, so the next time that address comes up the shape is already there.
That matters more than it sounds. Most washing work is annual or biennial, which means the majority of your quoting in year three is requoting places you have already been. If the measurement is stored, the requote is a two-minute job: pull up the property, check whether anything has changed, adjust the buildup modifier upward because it has been two years, send it.
If it is not stored, you are out there with a wheel again, doing work you already did.
Where this fits with the rest of the exterior trades
Pressure washing rarely travels alone. The customer who wants the house done frequently wants the gutters cleaned, and the one who calls about a black-streaked roof needs a soft wash rather than pressure. Those are different services with genuinely different economics — gutters bill by the linear foot off the same polygon’s perimeter, roofs carry a much higher minimum and a pitch modifier that flatwork never needs — and each has its own page here for that reason.
What they share is the property record. Measure once, and the shapes, the photographs and the history serve every service you sell at that address.
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 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 number, 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.
Roof Cleaning
Roof work is the highest-consequence job on the truck. Price it with pitch, material and height as explicit mu…
Gutter Cleaning
Draw the roofline once and Spatchr keeps the perimeter as well as the area. Gutter work bills off that outside…
Window Cleaning
Windows do not have an area worth pricing — they have a number. Count the panes, decide whether you are doing …
Put your pressure washing 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 |