The whole pile, from a step back
With a person or a doorway in the frame for scale. A close-up makes every pile look smaller than it is, and volume is the thing you are selling.
Trades / Junk removal
Quoting and job management software for junk removal businesses
You quote by volume and you pay by weight. Mason collects what decides both — how much there is, how far it has to be carried, and what is actually in it — then prices it from your bands, your item fees and your minimum.
Join the waitlistIntake
What junk removal customers get asked.
Every one is answerable by looking, counting stairs, or pacing the walk to the truck. Nobody is asked to estimate cubic yards or guess a weight.
- 01
Would it fill a pickup bed, half a truck, or a whole truck? Pick the picture that looks closest to your pile.
Volume bands are the unit. Nobody can guess cubic yards, but almost anybody can point at the photo that looks like what is in their garage.
- 02
Where is it — curb, garage, back yard, basement, second floor, attic?
The same pile at the curb and in a basement are two different jobs with two different hour counts and sometimes two different crews.
- 03
How many stairs, and is there an elevator?
Stairs add more time than anything else in this trade, and they never show up in a photo of the pile.
- 04
How many steps is it from where the truck can park to where the stuff is?
The carry is the job. Twenty feet and two hundred feet are the same pile at a different price.
- 05
Is any single item too heavy for two people — a safe, a piano, a treadmill, a hot tub, a riding mower?
Heavy items get their own line and sometimes their own crew. Finding out on site means the truck leaves without it.
- 06
Is anything in there you do not take — paint, chemicals, tires, propane, mattresses, televisions, anything with refrigerant?
Your list is your list. Some of those are a surcharge and some are a no, and both belong in the quote instead of in the driveway.
- 07
Is it loose and ready to load, or does something have to come apart first — a shed, a deck, a hot tub, a swing set?
Taking something apart is labor by the hour. Hauling it away is priced by the load. Selling both as one number is how a day disappears.
- 08
Is any of it heavy material — concrete, dirt, roofing, tile, plaster?
Volume fills the truck, weight fills the scale ticket. Heavy material almost never belongs inside a volume band.
- 09
Will somebody be there, and does the crew need a code, a key, or a dock time?
A gate code nobody has, a storage place that locks at six, or a dock window that closed at noon turns a booked job into a wasted run.
Photo tasks
The photos that matter for junk removal.
Customers photograph the thing they want gone. The price is set by everything around it — the depth of the pile, the walk, and the stairs between the two.
A second angle
Piles hide depth. The shot from the other side is where the second layer, the pallet underneath and the third bag of tile show up.
Every heavy item on its own
One frame each for the safe, the treadmill, the hot tub. Those are separate lines, and the crew needs to know what is waiting before the truck is loaded around it.
The carry, walked end to end
Start where the truck parks and photograph the walk to the item — every stair, every turn, every narrow door. The carry is where the hours live.
The doorway the biggest thing has to clear
With a tape across it. A sectional that came in before the door was hung is a disassembly job, and that is a different line on the ticket.
Appliance and electronics labels
Refrigerant, e-waste, anything with a plate on it. Those are disposal fees somebody is paying, and it should be the person who knew about them.
Where the truck can actually park
Street width, a low garage clearance, a gate the box truck will not fit under. Better to learn that from a photo than from a driver calling in from the curb.
Rate sheet
How junk removal quotes get priced.
Your bands, your item fees, your minimum. How quoting works.
The units you actually sell
Volume first: an eighth of the truck, a quarter, a half, three quarters, full. That is the real unit even though customers think in items. On top of it sit per-item prices for the known things — mattress, refrigerator, tire, television — labor hours for teardown or a long carry, disposal charged at the scale, and surcharges for refrigerant, electronics and tires. Under all of it sits your minimum, because one item across town is still a truck, two people and a dump run.
The tension nobody says out loud
You quote by volume and you pay by weight. A full truck of cushions and a full truck of tile fill the same box and hand you two very different scale tickets. That is why heavy material — concrete, dirt, roofing, plaster — usually prices by the ton or on its own rate instead of inside a volume band.
What the site moves
Stairs, elevators, the length of the carry, whether the crew can back in, and whether the pile is loose or has to come apart first. A curbside pile and the same pile in a basement are not the same booking, the same crew, or the same price.
How the customer gets an answer
A pile fully visible in two frames, at the curb or in an open garage, with the heavy items called out: an exact quote from your bands. A packed garage, a storage unit, or a load nobody can see the back of comes back as a price range or a note that your team is reviewing it. A whole-house cleanout or an estate job gets an on-site look, because those are walked, not photographed.
Honest limits
What a photo of a pile cannot price.
Every hauler has been burned by at least three of these. Mason sends them to you as a range or a review instead of a number.
What is behind the front row
A photo of an open garage door covers the first four feet. The back of a full garage or a storage unit is the classic reason a quote and an invoice do not match.
Weight under a tarp
Volume you can see. Weight you cannot. A compacted pile, a covered trailer, or bags somebody already filled hide the number the scale is going to charge you for.
Whether it is still attached
A shed on a slab, a hot tub still wired in, a deck bolted to a house. Anything that has to be disconnected or unbolted is a different job riding on the same ticket.
Whether the pile is finished growing
Plenty of jobs go sideways because the customer kept adding to the pile after the photos. The quote is written against what was shown, with those photos attached to it.
Illustrative example
A two-car garage cleanout: a treadmill, an old refrigerator, and roughly half a truck of boxes and yard tools. The photos show a flat carry to the driveway and a refrigerant label on the appliance. Mason prices the half-truck band, that company's appliance fee and their heavy-item line from their own sheet, then puts a range on the back corner of the garage — because the second photo stops right where the stack starts.
The calendar
Coming soonWhat junk removal jobs need on the calendar.
Hauling is scheduled against a truck that fills up and a scale that closes. Scheduling is on the way. Quoting and follow-up are what ship today.
01
The scale closes before you do
Every full truck needs somewhere to go, and the transfer station keeps its own hours. The last load of a Saturday is a decision that gets made on Thursday.
02
Truck capacity is the schedule
You can only book what fits. A job that fills the box at ten in the morning means a dump run before the next stop, and that is most of an hour nobody put on the calendar.
03
Crew size follows the stairs
Two people move a standard load. Stairs, a heavy item, or a long walk from the back of the property want a third, and that body has to come off another job.
04
Buildings have their own rules
Apartments and commercial buildings run loading dock windows, elevator reservations and insurance paperwork. Those come up more often than most shops plan for.
05
Weather can change the hours or the day
Your company’s safety policy and the site conditions decide whether work continues or moves. Heat, rain, lightning, ice, and unsafe access can stretch a job or stop it.
06
The season is a calendar, not a guess
End of the month for moving, spring for cleanouts, the week after the holidays, and estate work steady all year.
07
The second truck
A second truck is not more capacity until there is a second crew and a second dump run inside the same day. That is a scheduling problem before it is a truck problem.
A good share of these loads start as somebody else's job — the debris pile from a landscaping cleanup, the broken slab from a concrete tear-out. If you run both sides of that, both intakes ask their own questions.
01Can it price a full-truck job from photos?
When the pile is fully visible in two frames and the heavy items are called out, it prices straight from your volume bands and item fees. A packed garage or a storage unit comes back as a range or a note that your team is reviewing it.
02What about heavy debris like concrete and roofing?
It prices from your heavy-material rate, not from a volume band, because that is how the scale ticket works. If you have not set a rate for it, the job comes to you instead of getting a guess.
03What if the pile grows before we get there?Coming soon
The quote is written against what the customer showed, with those photos attached, so the conversation on site is about the change rather than about who said what. Re-pricing added work from the truck is not built yet.
04Do we have to load our whole do-not-take list?
You tell it what you will not haul and what carries a surcharge. Mason asks the customer about those at intake and does not quote what you said you do not take.