9 September 2026 · 6 min read
We opened 40 home-service websites. One gave us a price.
Thirty-six of them had a quote form. One of them answered.
In August 2026 we opened the website of every home-service business on a list of forty — movers, junk removal, roofing and exterior cleaning, split between the Phoenix and Charlotte metros. Not a scrape. Somebody loaded each site, went looking for a price the way a homeowner would, and wrote down what happened.
Two numbers came out of it, and the second one is the interesting one.
- 36 of 40 had a quote form on the site.
- 1 of 40 would tell you a number without a human being involved.
Almost every business in this survey has already decided that people want to ask about price on the website. They have built the form. What almost none of them have done is answer.
Who publishes anything at all
Counting generously — a rate card, a "from" price, a per-square-foot figure, anything a visitor could do arithmetic with — 11 of the 40 publish a real number. It is not spread evenly:
| Trade | Publishes a price |
|---|---|
| Pressure washing and exterior cleaning | 4 of 8 |
| Movers and junk removal | 6 of 20 |
| Roofing | 1 of 12 |
If publishing prices were mainly a proxy for having a good website, you would expect it spread fairly evenly — careful operators exist in every trade. It is not. It is half in one trade and one in twelve in another.
What tracks is not website quality. It is whether the job can be computed from things the customer already knows. Pressure washing is square footage and one storey or two. A roof needs somebody on it.
The trades that publish, and what they actually show
The four exterior-cleaning companies doing this are the most confident. AZ Power Wash Pros publishes a per-square-foot rate — $0.20 single storey, $0.25 for two — and puts it behind an add-to-cart flow, which is the closest thing to e-commerce anyone in this survey has built. APS Charlotte lists windows, gutters and soft wash as a straight price list.
Among movers, A to B Movers in Phoenix publishes a full rate card: $120 an hour for two movers, $180 for three, $240 for four, plus a stated trip charge. Nothing about that is a quote — it is a rate card, and the customer still does the arithmetic — but a homeowner comparing three movers at 9pm can work out roughly where they stand, which is more than the other nineteen offered.
The one that answered
Exactly one business in forty had a working calculator that returns a figure without asking for your phone number first: Junk Raider, a junk removal company in Mooresville, North Carolina. Pick what you are throwing out, get a number.
One in forty. That is the whole competitive landscape for answering the price question in these trades, in two large metros, in 2026.
Roofing deserves its own paragraph
One roofer in twelve publishes anything, and the objection behind that is real. You cannot price a roof you have not stood on. Pitch, layers, decking, access — none of it is visible from a form, and a confident wrong number on a roof costs somebody thousands.
The interesting part is that the one roofer who does publish did not solve that problem. They sidestepped it: they publish a range for a typical job, by material and area, and say plainly that it is an estimate. That is not a quote and it is not pretending to be. It is a filter — enough for a homeowner to know whether they are in the right conversation, and no more.
What we think this means
The form is not the problem. Thirty-six businesses have one. The problem is that a form which ends in "we will get back to you" asks the customer to spend something — their number, their name, their evening — before it gives them anything.
Anyone comparing three companies on a Saturday night is not doing that three times. They are doing it once, for whoever tells them something useful first.
Publishing a price does not mean publishing a promise. Every operator in this survey who does it well shows a range, a rate, or a "from" figure, and keeps the jobs that genuinely need eyes on them for a phone call. The ones who lose are not the ones who quoted carefully. They are the ones who said nothing at all and hoped the customer would wait.
How the survey was done
Forty businesses, chosen for being independent operators rather than national franchises, across Phoenix/Mesa/Scottsdale and Charlotte/Mooresville. Each site was opened by hand between 30 and 31 August 2026 and checked for a published price, a quote form, and whether any calculator present returned a figure. Businesses that hide their prices are counted but not named — every one of them is somebody's competitor, and this is a survey, not a pillory.