They taught you the trade. Nobody ever taught you the number.

A tradesman standing alone in a half-finished room in the late afternoon, notepad in one hand and a pencil against his lip, staring at the wall working out a number.

You picked your rate years ago.

You've been charging it ever since.

Nobody's ever told you if it works.

You set the rate once. Nothing has checked it since.

  1. Year oneYou pick a number that sounds about right, and that becomes your rate.
  2. Year threeFuel's up, insurance is up, the van needs tyres. The rate doesn't move.
  3. Year fiveSome jobs pay well and some bleed, and you can't tell which is which.
  4. Year sevenYou put it up a bit. It's another guess, and you're still unsure.
  5. Year nineFlat out as ever, and nobody has ever handed you the right number.
“ServiceYak put my whole business on my phone. I quote on site, the invoice goes out the second the job's done, and the money lands without me chasing it. Game changer for a small team.”
@hakeaprojects
Alex Tasseron
Hakea Projects · Fairfield, VIC
Alex Tasseron

You're not bad at pricing. Nobody ever gave you the number.

Right now, before anything else

Get the number nobody ever gave you.

  • Free, no signup, no email — your figures never leave the page
  • Starts with what you charge now, which you already know off the top of your head
  • Counts your overheads, the weeks you don't work, and the hours nobody pays for
  • Then puts the rate you need right next to the one you're charging today
Open the calculator

Then stop re-deciding it every quote

The number you land on is the number that goes out.

  • Your price book and kits hold the rates, so nothing gets priced from memory
  • Cost, profit and margin on the screen before you knock anything off
  • The whole crew quoting off your numbers, not their own
How quoting works

And afterwards, whether it held

Every job tells you if the number was right.

  • Job Profitability puts what you quoted against what the job cost
  • Variance and margin on every job, not just the ones that hurt
  • So the next quote is priced on what happened, not on a feel
What the reports show
“I used to do quotes and invoices at the kitchen table well after I clocked off. Now it's knocked out from the ute before I've pulled out of the driveway, I've got my evenings back.”
Luc Dunbar
Luc Antony Garden Designs · Keilor East, VIC
Luc Dunbar
The same tradesman in the same half-finished room, notepad gone, phone in one hand, looking at it with his shoulders down and the number settled.

Same jobs. This time you knew the number.

  1. Ten minutesYou work out the rate you need. Nobody asks you for your email.
  2. Next quoteIt goes out at that rate, without you deciding it all over again.
  3. Job's doneAnd the job tells you whether it held, so the next one is easier.
Start your 30-day free trial
Questions, answered

What tradies ask about pricing.

Yes. No signup, no email, nothing to install — open it, put your figures in, get your rate. It's on this site because a tradie who knows his number stays in business, and we'd rather be the ones who showed you that than sell you something first.

Nothing you'd have to go and look up. What you charge an hour now, roughly what you want to earn in a year, and a rough idea of what running the business costs you. Guess that last one if you have to — you can go back and sharpen it once you've seen what it does to the rate.

It doesn't much care what you do. It works off what you want to earn, what the business costs to run, the weeks you actually work and the share of your time nobody pays for — the same arithmetic whether you're a sparky, a chippy or a landscaper. What changes between trades is the figures you put in, and those are yours.

That's your call, and the calculator doesn't make it for you. Plenty of tradies find their number and hold the old rate for their regulars while the new one goes on everything else. What changes either way is that you'll know which jobs are subsidising which — and turning down bad work stops feeling like turning down money.

Then you lost a job you'd have lost money on, which is a different result from the one it feels like on the day. The ones you quote and don't win cost you the same evenings either way. Knowing your number is how those evenings end up going on the work that pays.

Put it in your price book. That's the whole mechanism — a quote is built from saved rates rather than typed fresh each time, so the rate you decided on is the rate that goes out, on every quote, by everyone on the crew, without anybody having to remember it was ever decided. And the cost, profit and margin sit there while you build it, so a discount stops being a gesture and becomes a figure you're looking at.

The Job Profitability report puts what you estimated against what the job actually cost, with the variance and the margin on each one. Do that over a few months and a pattern turns up, and it's usually the same one: a kind of work you like doing is quietly carrying a kind of work you don't.

Not for the calculator — that's yours either way, and you can use it and never hear from us again. Everything after it lives in ServiceYak: the price book, the live margins, the job profitability. That's $37 a person a month with everything included, and 30 days free without a card.
30 days freeNo card needed

Know your number. Then never guess at it again.

Start your 30-day free trial today: no card, no lock-in, completely risk-free. So what are you waiting for?

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