u/woodswastemn

I run a junk removal company in Minnesota with my brother. Got tired of guessing prices standing in peoples garages so I built an app that does cost based quotes, and eventually added AI photo quoting (you take a pic of the junk pile and it prices it off your own rates). Then a CRM, scheduling, card payments etc got bolted on because we needed those too.

Site: woodswastemn.com/pro

Pricing is $29/mo starter, $59/mo pro, $149/mo for teams. 14 day trial, no card. Also take 2% on card payments (1% on pro) when guys collect through the app.

Where I'm at: cold emailing haulers daily, got my first real interested lead this week. A handful of users total. So basically nowhere yet.

Things I already suspect are wrong so you don't have to find them:

- the site is one giant page and its A LOT

- "pays for itself past $6k/mo collected" math might be too in the weeds for a guy reading on his phone in a truck

- no demo video on the page yet, you just have to trust me the AI thing works

What I actually want roasted: would a junk removal owner making 8-15k a month look at this page and get it in 10 seconds? Is the pricing believable or does 3 tiers + a payment fee feel like too much? And is "built by an actual hauler" worth leading with or does nobody care?

Don't be gentle, I shovel hoarder basements for a living, I'll survive.

My brother and I run a junk removal company out of Farmington, MN. For the first stretch we priced every job the same way most guys do: stand in the customer's garage, look at the pile, sweat, and throw out a number.

Some weeks that worked. But when we started writing down what we actually charged vs. what the job actually took, the pattern was ugly:

- Two nearly identical half-load jobs, quoted $110 apart, because one customer sounded more price-sensitive on the phone

- Hot tub removals we did for basically free because we forgot to account for dump fees and 3 hours of sledgehammer work

- Jobs 25 minutes away priced the same as jobs 5 minutes away

The fix wasn't complicated, it was just discipline. We sat down and built actual cost-based pricing:

1. Load tiers with a real floor — min load, quarter, half, full truck, each with a low/high range based on our actual dump fees and time

2. Flat surcharges for the items that always burn you — mattresses, fridges, pianos, hot tubs, tires. The stuff that's a pain to dispose of gets its own line, every time, no mercy pricing

3. Drive time priced in — miles x 2 x a per-mile rate. Sounds obvious. We weren't doing it.

4. A markup % we picked once, on purpose — instead of re-negotiating with ourselves on every lawn

The part I didn't expect: quoting got faster, not slower. Customer calls, we ask three questions, number comes out consistent every time. Close rate went up too — turns out confident numbers close better than nervous ones.

Eventually I got sick of doing the math on my phone calculator standing on lawns, so I built it into an app for us (and got carried away — it does photo quotes with AI now, which honestly works better than my own eyeballs on garage jobs). A few other operators use it now. Not trying to pitch it here — happy to share how the pricing structure works either way, most of the value is in the discipline, not the software.

If you're running any service business off gut-feel pricing: track quoted vs. charged for two weeks. The gap will make you sick, and then it'll make you money.

Happy to answer anything about junk removal pricing, what we charge for specific items, or the dumb mistakes we made.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

My brother and I run a junk removal company out of Farmington, MN. For the first stretch we priced every job the same way most guys do: stand in the customer's garage, look at the pile, sweat, and throw out a number.

Some weeks that worked. But when we started writing down what we actually charged vs. what the job actually took, the pattern was ugly:

- Two nearly identical half-load jobs, quoted $110 apart, because one customer sounded more price-sensitive on the phone

- Hot tub removals we did for basically free because we forgot to account for dump fees and 3 hours of sledgehammer work

- Jobs 25 minutes away priced the same as jobs 5 minutes away

The fix wasn't complicated, it was just discipline. We sat down and built actual cost-based pricing:

1. Load tiers with a real floor — min load, quarter, half, full truck, each with a low/high range based on our actual dump fees and time

2. Flat surcharges for the items that always burn you — mattresses, fridges, pianos, hot tubs, tires. The stuff that's a pain to dispose of gets its own line, every time, no mercy pricing

3. Drive time priced in — miles x 2 x a per-mile rate. Sounds obvious. We weren't doing it.

4. A markup % we picked once, on purpose — instead of re-negotiating with ourselves on every lawn

The part I didn't expect: quoting got faster, not slower. Customer calls, we ask three questions, number comes out consistent every time. Close rate went up too — turns out confident numbers close better than nervous ones.

Eventually I got sick of doing the math on my phone calculator standing on lawns, so I built it into an app for us (and got carried away — it does photo quotes with AI now, which honestly works better than my own eyeballs on garage jobs). A few other operators use it now. Not trying to pitch it here — happy to share how the pricing structure works either way, most of the value is in the discipline, not the software.

If you're running any service business off gut-feel pricing: track quoted vs. charged for two weeks. The gap will make you sick, and then it'll make you money.

Happy to answer anything about junk removal pricing, what we charge for specific items, or the dumb mistakes we made.

My brother and I run a junk removal company out of Farmington, MN. For the first stretch we priced every job the same way most guys do: stand in the customer's garage, look at the pile, sweat, and throw out a number.

Some weeks that worked. But when we started writing down what we actually charged vs. what the job actually took, the pattern was ugly:

• Two nearly identical half-load jobs, quoted $110 apart, because one customer sounded more price-sensitive on the phone
• Hot tub removals we did for basically free because we forgot to account for dump fees and 3 hours of sledgehammer work
• Jobs 25 minutes away priced the same as jobs 5 minutes away

The fix wasn't complicated, it was just discipline. We sat down and built actual cost-based pricing:

1. Load tiers with a real floor — min load, quarter, half, full truck, each with a low/high range based on our actual dump fees and time
2. Flat surcharges for the items that always burn you — mattresses, fridges, pianos, hot tubs, tires. The stuff that's a pain to dispose of gets its own line, every time, no mercy pricing
3. Drive time priced in — miles × 2 × a per-mile rate. Sounds obvious. We weren't doing it.
4. A markup % we picked once, on purpose — instead of re-negotiating with ourselves on every lawn

The part I didn't expect: quoting got faster, not slower. Customer calls, we ask three questions, number comes out consistent every time. Close rate went up too — turns out confident numbers close better than nervous ones.

Eventually I got sick of doing the math on my phone calculator standing on lawns, so I built it into an app for us (and got carried away — it does photo quotes with AI now, which honestly works better than my own eyeballs on garage jobs). A few other operators use it now. Not trying to pitch it here — happy to share how the pricing structure works either way, most of the value is in the discipline, not the software.

If you're running any service business off gut-feel pricing: track quoted vs. charged for two weeks. The gap will make you sick, and then it'll make you money.

Happy to answer anything about junk removal pricing, what we charge for specific items, or the dumb mistakes we made.