Illustrative example
Cedar privacy fence · sloped lots · 80-120 ft
Your price book says 6 hours. Your last 14 jobs averaged 7.4.
Updating this would have added about $210 to each of those quotes.
Update priceNot now
Price learning
Coming soonYour prices should learn from your jobs.
Every tool you have tried takes your prices and leaves them alone. Meanwhile the work changed, the crew changed, and the book did not. This part is not built yet. It is the part we care most about getting right.
Join the waitlistWhere drift comes from
Nobody sets a bad price on purpose.
A price book goes stale in small pieces, and always in the same few ways. None of them show up on a profit and loss statement until the end of the year, by which point you cannot tell which service did it.
- 01
Material moved and the book did not
You repriced when lumber jumped. You did not reprice when it came back down, or when your supplier changed the bundle. The number in the book is a snapshot of the week somebody typed it.
- 02
The crew got better
The second year of doing a service is faster than the first. Nobody goes back into the price book to take the hours out, so you keep charging for a learning curve you already climbed.
- 03
One neighborhood is not like the others
The hillside subdivision is hand-dug post holes and a wheelbarrow run from the truck. The flat new-build across town is not. Same service, same price in the book, two completely different days.
- 04
You win every single one
A service you never lose is usually a service you are giving away. That is not proof, it is a question worth asking, and it is one your finished jobs can answer.
- 05
The add-on that is never in the price
The dump run. The gate hardware upgrade nobody charges for. The extra half hour moving patio furniture before the crew can start. Small, every time, never on the line.
What you would see
One card. One decision.
Not a dashboard. Not a report you have to go looking for. One line of your book, what your own finished jobs say about it, and two buttons.
The card below is a drawing of that idea. The numbers on it are invented to show the shape of the thing — there is no real company and no real job behind them.
Illustrative example — invented numbers, not a statistic, not a result, and not a promise about your business.
Three rules
The promises this has to keep.
Software that quietly moves your prices is not a feature, it is a liability. If we cannot ship it under these three rules, we will not ship it.
- 01
Built from your jobs, not someone else’s averages
An industry benchmark is another company’s crew, another company’s trucks, another company’s standards, in another company’s market. It cannot tell you what a day costs you. Only your finished work can.
- 02
Never changes a price on its own
A suggestion sits there until you press the button. Nothing shifts while you are on a roof, nothing shifts overnight, and nothing shifts because a number crossed a threshold. You are the only one who edits your book.
- 03
Never applies to a quote you already sent
A price a customer is holding does not move. Ever. If you update a rate, it takes effect on the next quote — the one in their inbox stays exactly what you told them it was.
Show your working
A suggestion you cannot check is a guess.
You should be able to pull the thread on any number Mason puts in front of you, all the way back to the jobs it came from.
Which jobsThe finished ones behind the number, listed, so you can open any of them
How manyIf it is four jobs, it says four jobs, and you are free to ignore it
What was loggedHours on site, materials used, and the notes the crew left
What it would changeThe one line in your book it is talking about, and nothing else
Staying in its lane
It reports. It does not advise.
There is one thing this can honestly tell you: here is what this work has actually taken you. What you charge for it is a business decision, and it stays yours.
- 01Will not tell you what to charge to beat somebody else’s bid
- 02Will not price a service you have never sold
- 03Will not tell you what your margin should be
- 04Will not send a suggestion to anyone but you
What it depends on
This needs finished jobs to learn from.
A suggestion is only as good as what came off the truck. That means hours, materials and photos captured at the end of the job, in under a minute, with gloves on — which is the crew app, and the crew app is on the bench with this one.
So this is the last piece to arrive, not the first. Quoting from your book works today, and that book is what price learning would eventually sharpen.