Spatchr for Roof Cleaning
The quote has to carry the risk, not just the area
Roof work is the highest-consequence job on the truck. Price it with pitch, material and height as explicit multipliers, and photograph what was already broken before you touch it.
Unit economics
How a roof cleaning job gets priced
A roof is measured as plan area from above, which the satellite view gives you directly, and the shipped Roof Wash service steps from fifty-five cents a square foot down through forty to thirty as the roof gets bigger. But plan area is only the starting quantity, because two roofs of identical footprint can be entirely different jobs. Material is the first multiplier. Asphalt shingle is baseline. Metal adds fifteen percent because runoff and fastener corrosion demand more care with chemistry. Tile adds forty, because tile is walkable only in specific places and breaks when it is not. Pitch is the second. A low, walkable roof is baseline; anything steep adds thirty-five percent, and that is not a padding number — it is the difference between walking a surface and working it on rope or from a lift. Height compounds it: two storeys adds twenty-five percent, three adds sixty, four or more doubles the price outright. Stack those and a steep four-storey tile roof prices at more than three times a single-storey shingle roof of the same footprint. That ratio looks aggressive written down and is roughly correct in practice.
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Roof type
Asphalt 0%, metal +15%, tile +40%
Tile cannot be walked freely and replacing a cracked one is a roofing call-out, not a touch-up. Metal needs chemistry that will not attack the coating or the fasteners.
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Pitch
Walkable 0%, steep +35%
Past a certain angle you stop walking the roof and start working from rope, a lift or the edge. Everything after that takes longer and needs a second person.
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Stories
+25% / +60% / +100%
Height changes the equipment, the setup time and the consequences of a mistake. A fourth-storey roof is a different trade from a bungalow, and pricing them alike loses money on one and the bid on the other.
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Overhang and landscaping
Complexity adjustment
Runoff has to go somewhere. Beds, ornamental planting and a neighbour's driveway under the drip line all mean pre-wetting, tarps and rinse-down time that the roof area never shows.
Minimum charge
Roof Wash carries a $350 minimum in the shipped catalog — by a distance the highest of any service in it. That is not opportunism. It is the number below which the setup, the safety equipment and the exposure are not worth taking on, and having it in the catalog stops you from talking yourself into a small roof on a slow week.
Schematic — Measured surface
Cadence and routing
Getting back there at the right time
Roof cleaning does not route. A residential roof wash is most of a day once you count setup, protection of everything underneath, the wash itself and the rinse-down, and stacking two of them is how people end up finishing the second one in the dark on a wet surface. So the scheduling surface is one job, one day, booked deliberately. Spatchr holds it as a job with its own visit rather than as a recurring plan, because the customer who has their roof cleaned this year is genuinely unlikely to need it again for four or five. Weather governs the calendar harder here than anywhere else on the truck. Wind is the constraint people underestimate — it carries chemical onto plants, cars and neighbours, and it makes a pitched surface dangerous. When a job moves, it moves with everything attached to it: the measurements, the quoted modifiers, the photographs and the notes about which side of the house the beds are on. The follow-up worth tracking is not the next clean. It is the estimate you gave someone who decided to wait a season, which is a task with a date on it rather than a job.
Your service catalog
What you start with
Spatchr ships a starter catalog that already contains roof 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.
- Roof Washsq ft · $350 minimum
Soft washing at $0.55 per square foot stepping down to $0.30, with independent modifiers for roof type, pitch and storey count that compound rather than replace each other.
Proof and paperwork
Showing the customer what they paid for
On a roof, the photographs that matter most are the ones taken before you start. Cracked tiles, lifted shingles, a rusted flashing, a sagging gutter line, a satellite dish mounted through the deck — all of it exists before you arrive, and some proportion of customers will sincerely believe you caused it. A dated set of arrival photos on the job record ends that conversation in thirty seconds and without acrimony, which is worth more than the argument you would otherwise win slowly. So the media on a roof job is a condition record first and a marketing asset second. Photograph each elevation on arrival, note anything already damaged, and let the customer see it in the estimate rather than discovering it afterwards. Then take the after shots for the same reason everyone else does. Damage found mid-job goes on the record as a note against the visit, so the invoice can carry an explanation rather than a surprise.
The most dangerous job you sell should not be the vaguest
Ask a washing operator what they charge for a roof and you will often get a range rather than a number, followed by “depends on the roof”. That is an honest answer and a bad quoting system. The things it depends on are knowable — material, pitch, height, what is underneath — and each one moves the price in a direction you could write down if anyone made you.
Spatchr makes you. Roof Wash ships with three independent multipliers, and the reason they are independent is that they genuinely are. A steep bungalow and a shallow four-storey are both harder than a shallow bungalow, but they are harder in different ways and by different amounts. Folding them into one “difficulty” slider throws away the distinction and produces a number nobody can defend.
Why the minimum is the most important number on the page
Three hundred and fifty dollars is the floor in the shipped catalog, and it is there to protect you from yourself.
Roof work has a setup cost that barely moves with the size of the roof. You still protect the plantings. You still run the lines. You still put a person somewhere they can fall from. On a big roof that overhead is a small fraction of a large invoice. On a small roof it is most of the job, and the temptation on a quiet week is to take it anyway at a number that feels reasonable in isolation.
A minimum charge in the catalog turns that decision from a judgement made while a customer is on the phone into a policy you set once, calmly, with a spreadsheet open. You can still override it. You will just have to do it on purpose.
Plan area and the pitch correction
The measurement is taken from above — the footprint of the roof as it appears on the map — because that is the only surface you can reliably trace without walking it.
A steep roof has meaningfully more surface than its footprint suggests. A 6:12 pitch adds about twelve percent of actual material area; a 12:12 adds over forty. The pitch modifier is doing two jobs at once: correcting for that hidden area, and pricing the labour and equipment that steepness demands. Those could be split into two fields, and on a large commercial job you might want to. For residential work one multiplier at thirty-five percent covers both closely enough that arguing about it costs more than it saves.
What matters is that it is explicit. When a customer asks why the quote is higher than the flat roof next door, “yours is steeper and there is more of it than it looks” is a sentence backed by a number on the estimate.
Photograph first, wash second
The habit worth building on roof work has nothing to do with cleaning.
Walk the perimeter on arrival and photograph every elevation, including the things that are already wrong. Lifted shingles. The cracked tile above the garage. The flashing that was rusted before you got there. Put them on the job record with the date attached.
This costs four minutes and occasionally saves a claim. More often it does something quieter and more valuable: it lets you tell the customer about a problem they did not know they had, before you start, without it sounding like an excuse. That conversation is how roof cleaners get recommended.
What this shares with the rest of the exterior work
The property record. A house that needs its roof soft-washed usually needs the gutters cleared while you are up there, and often the siding done in the same season. Those are separate services with their own units — gutters bill by the foot around the edge rather than the area inside it — but they sit on the same address, with the same measured shapes and the same photo history behind them.
Questions people actually ask
- Why is this priced so differently from a house wash?
- Because the risk profile is different and the price has to say so. A house wash is done from the ground or a short ladder; a roof wash puts a person on a pitched surface with chemistry, above landscaping, often two or three storeys up. The $350 minimum and the compounding height modifiers exist to make sure a roof job is never accidentally quoted like siding.
- Does the app know the difference between soft washing and pressure?
- The catalog does, because they are separate services with separate rates. Roof Wash is set up as a soft-wash service — high pressure strips granules off asphalt shingles and voids most manufacturer warranties, so quoting a roof at pressure-washing rates is quoting a job you should not do. Keeping them distinct in the catalog keeps them distinct on the estimate.
- How do I measure a roof I cannot safely get onto?
- You measure the plan area from the satellite view, which is what the pricing expects. Plan area understates the true surface of a steep roof, and the pitch modifier is what corrects for it — that is precisely why pitch is a separate multiplier rather than something folded into the rate.
- What if I find damage halfway through the job?
- Add a note to the visit and photograph it there and then. It attaches to the job rather than living in your phone, so the invoice can reference it and you have a dated record if the conversation turns awkward later. The same applies to anything you decide not to clean because it is not safe.
- Can I quote a roof without visiting first?
- You can measure and quote from imagery, and many operators do for a first number. Leave pitch and roof type at their most likely values, mark the estimate as provisional, and confirm on arrival. Because the modifiers are separate dropdowns, correcting the quote on site takes seconds rather than a rebuild.
Neighbouring trades
Curated by real overlap — shared routes, shared ladders, shared customers — not by an alphabetical list of everything else.
Put your roof 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 |