Spatchr for Window Cleaning
The only trade here where you count instead of measure
Windows do not have an area worth pricing — they have a number. Count the panes, decide whether you are doing both sides, and let height do the rest of the work.
Unit economics
How a window cleaning job gets priced
Every other service on this site starts by drawing a shape. Window cleaning does not, and pretending otherwise produces worse quotes rather than better ones. What drives the cost of glass is the number of separate pieces, not their combined surface. Ten small colonial panes take considerably longer than one large picture window covering twice the area, because the time goes into edges, frames, sills and the transitions between them. So the shipped Window Clean service bills per unit at eight dollars fifty for the first twenty, then seven dollars beyond — the step reflecting that once you are set up and moving, each additional pane costs a little less than the one before. Two-sided is a toggle rather than a multiplier, because interior work is a different job attached to the same visit. It means an appointment somebody has to be home for, shoes off, furniture moved, blinds handled. Plenty of customers buy exterior only, and the quote should be able to say so without arithmetic. Height applies as a percentage on top — thirty percent for a second storey, sixty for a third — covering ladders, poles and the slower, more careful movement that working above ground demands.
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Pane count
$8.50 each, $7.00 past 20
The count is the quantity, and counting it accurately at the quote stage is the single thing that determines whether the job pays. Grids and divided lights multiply the number fast, and undercounting is the classic way to lose a day.
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Two-sided
Interior and exterior together
Interior turns a job you can do whenever into an appointment with a person present. It carries scheduling cost as well as labour cost, and it should be a deliberate line on the quote rather than an assumption.
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Stories
+30% / +60%
Above the ground floor you are on a ladder or a pole, working slower and setting up between elevations. The pane count does not change but the hours do.
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Frame and sill condition
Condition adjustment
Painted-shut frames, rotten sills, construction residue and hard-water staining turn a wipe into restoration. Worth identifying at the quote, because it is the difference between four minutes a pane and twenty.
Minimum charge
Window Clean carries a $125 minimum in the shipped catalog, roughly fifteen panes. Small window jobs are almost entirely travel and setup, and without a floor they quietly subsidise themselves out of a day that could have held a full house.
Cadence and routing
Getting back there at the right time
Window cleaning is the steadiest recurring work in this group and the least weather-bound. Glass gets dirty on a predictable schedule regardless of season, so a domestic round tends to settle into quarterly, and commercial storefronts run monthly or fortnightly. That regularity is the asset. A customer on a quarterly plan is worth four times a customer who calls once, and the work of keeping them is almost entirely administrative — being there when you said you would, at a price that has not moved. Spatchr holds those as recurring service plans that generate their own visits, so the round exists whether or not anybody remembered to build it. Because the stops are short, density matters as much as it does in gutter work but for a different reason: a domestic window job might be ninety minutes, so an extra twenty minutes of driving between each one is a third of the day gone. Commercial storefront work is the exception worth handling separately. It is short, frequent, and on a strip where you can do six in a morning — and it fills the gaps around domestic bookings rather than competing with them.
Schematic — Tuesday, 10 stops
Your service catalog
What you start with
Spatchr ships a starter catalog that already contains window 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.
- Window Cleaneach · $125 minimum
Per-pane cleaning at $8.50 stepping to $7.00 past twenty units, with a two-sided toggle for interior work and a storey modifier reaching +60%.
Proof and paperwork
Showing the customer what they paid for
Clean glass photographs badly. It is transparent, it reflects whatever is behind you, and a picture of a spotless window mostly looks like a picture of a room. So the proof in this trade is less about images and more about the record — which panes, which sides, on what date, at what price, visit after visit. A customer three years into a quarterly plan is not asking whether you did it. They are asking why the price changed, or whether the conservatory was included last time. The visit history answers both. Where photographs earn their place is exceptions. A cracked pane you found, a seal that has blown, a frame too rotten to work on safely — photograph those, attach them to the visit, and mention them on the invoice. Finding a problem and documenting it before the customer notices is the behaviour that keeps quarterly customers for a decade.
Counting is not a lesser form of measuring
There is a reasonable assumption that a measurement-first app wants you to measure everything. For windows it does not, and the reason is worth stating plainly, because getting this wrong produces quotes that are confidently incorrect.
Glass area does not predict glass labour. A single large picture window might cover thirty square feet and take four minutes. A Georgian sash with twelve divided lights covers less and takes fifteen, because almost all of the time in window cleaning goes into edges — the perimeter of each pane, the frame, the sill, the transition to the next one. Surface area is the part that goes fastest.
So the unit is the pane, and the quantity comes from counting rather than from a map. That is why this page has no polygon on it. Every other exterior trade here starts by drawing a shape; this one starts by walking the outside of the house with a running total in your head.
Where the money is actually lost
Undercounting at the quote stage, almost every time.
A house is described over the phone as “about fifteen windows”. You quote fifteen units. You arrive to find eleven of them are six-over-six, which is sixty-six units of work, and you have committed to a number that is a third of what the job needs. There is no graceful recovery from that — you either eat it or you have an unpleasant conversation on the doorstep.
The fix is not software, it is policy: decide what a divided light counts as before you quote, apply it every time, and count on site rather than over the phone whenever the job is large enough to matter. What the software does is make the policy visible on the estimate, so the customer sees sixty-six units rather than a total that looks arbitrarily high.
Quarterly customers are the whole business
The economics of domestic window cleaning are unusually clear. A one-off job barely covers its own travel. The same customer on a quarterly plan, for five years, is twenty visits from one sale.
That means the operational priority is retention, and retention in this trade is almost entirely about reliability. Turning up when you said. Not raising the price without warning. Remembering that the conservatory is included and the garage windows are not.
None of that is glamorous and all of it is record-keeping. Recurring plans generate the visits so the round does not depend on anyone’s memory, and the visit history means a question about what was done last March has an answer rather than an apology.
Working with the other ladder trades
Window cleaning shares more with gutter cleaning than with any washing service — short stops, tight routes, a ladder, and a customer who is frequently not home. Operators who do both often run them together, and the seasonal shape is complementary: gutters compress into autumn and spring, windows run all year, so the quiet months for one are ordinary months for the other.
They bill on entirely different units, though, and that is the point of keeping them as separate services with separate profiles. One counts. The other measures the edge of a roof.
Questions people actually ask
- How do I count panes quickly during a walk-around?
- Count elevations rather than windows — front, back, each side — and record a running number as you walk. Divided lights are the trap — a sash with six over six is twelve units of work even though it reads as one window from the street, and deciding your policy on that before you quote is what keeps your pricing consistent between jobs.
- Can I charge differently for interior and exterior?
- The two-sided option exists exactly for that. Many operators quote exterior as the default because it needs no appointment, then offer interior as an addition the customer can take or leave. Because it is a toggle on the service, the estimate recalculates cleanly rather than needing a separate line built by hand.
- Why is there no measurement step for this trade?
- Because area does not predict the work. One large picture window can have twice the glass of ten colonial panes and take a quarter of the time, since the cost lives in edges, frames and transitions rather than surface. Counting units is not a simplification here — it is the more accurate model.
- How do I handle a storefront that wants weekly service?
- Set it up as a recurring plan at the cadence they want and let it generate its own visits. Short commercial stops are best treated as route filler around domestic bookings, and because the visits regenerate you are not rebuilding a weekly list by hand for a job that takes twenty minutes.
- What happens when I find a broken seal or cracked glass?
- Photograph it, attach it to the visit and note it on the invoice. Blown seals in particular look like poor cleaning to a customer — the haze is inside the unit and no amount of work will shift it — so documenting it on the day protects you from a complaint you cannot fix.
Neighbouring trades
Curated by real overlap — shared routes, shared ladders, shared customers — not by an alphabetical list of everything else.
Put your window 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 |