Charge for anything that requires diagnosis, design, or a site visit you can't scope from photos or a phone call — and credit the fee toward the job to keep serious customers. Keep free quotes for simple, high-close-rate work. A free estimate is unpaid sales labor: for a solo running a few site visits a week it quietly consumes weeks of billable capacity a year, and the cost doubles when the lead behind the estimate was itself paid for.
The free estimate is the most expensive free thing in the trade. It feels like marketing, it's booked like work, and it's paid like neither. Here's the honest cost of quoting for free, when it's still the right call, and how to charge for your expertise without watching jobs walk.
What "free" costs in a year — hypothetical, assumptions visible
Invented numbers, plausible on purpose — swap in yours. Say a solo electrician runs 3 site-visit estimates a week. Each one is honestly about 2 hours door to door: drive there, walk the job, talk the homeowner through it, drive back, write it up, send it, answer the follow-up text. Over 48 working weeks:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| 3 estimates/week × 2 hrs × 48 weeks | 288 hours |
| That's, in workweeks | ≈ 7 weeks per year |
| At $100/hr of foregone billable time | ≈ $28,800 of capacity |
| If 40% of estimates close | ≈ $500 of quoting cost baked into each won job |
Seven workweeks. A solo giving away estimates at that pace donates a quarter and a half of Fridays to people who, six times out of ten in this hypothetical, hire someone else or nobody. None of it appears in the books, because capacity you never billed doesn't leave a receipt — which is exactly why almost nobody prices it.
The double-pay trap
Now stack it on top of lead fees. Buy an $80 shared lead, drive the free estimate, lose the footrace — and you've paid twice for the same nothing: once in cash to the platform, once in hours to the homeowner. This combination is the default operating mode for a lead-buying solo, and it's the engine behind the ugly totals in the true-cost-of-leads math. The platforms sell the maybe; the free estimate is you subsidizing the maybe with labor. On shared leads it's worse still, since several of you are donating the same afternoon to the same kitchen.
The fix starts with measurement, and it's painless: for one month, log every estimate — source, hours door-to-door, and whether it booked. Most solos have never seen their own quote hours as a monthly total next to their close rate by lead source, and the two numbers side by side usually make the policy decision for you: which sources earn a free site visit, and which get photos-and-phone or a credited diagnostic fee.
When free quoting genuinely makes sense
Charging for every estimate is the wrong lesson. Free quoting is rational when:
- The close rate is high. A referral from a past customer closes at a completely different rate than a cold platform lead. When most quotes convert, quoting is cheap sales; when most don't, it's expensive charity.
- The ticket dwarfs the quote. Two hours against a heavy-up or a whole-house rewire is a rounding error. Two hours against a $250 outlet repair is the whole margin.
- You can scope it without rolling the truck. Photos of the panel, a video walkthrough, a five-minute call — many residential scopes price fine remotely. That estimate is "free" at nearly zero cost, which is the only kind of free that scales.
How to charge without losing jobs
- Sell a diagnostic, not an "estimate fee." Homeowners bristle at paying for a quote; they understand paying a licensed electrician to find out why the lights flicker. Troubleshooting, load calculations, panel evaluations — that's skilled work with a deliverable, and it's exactly the quoting that deserves a fee.
- Credit it toward the job. The serious customer pays nothing extra in the end; the tire-kicker filters out at the phone stage. Both outcomes make you money — one in work, the other in Fridays returned.
- Triage remotely, visit selectively. Photos and a phone call first; reserve site visits for jobs that survive triage and genuinely need eyes on. Your visit close rate rises because visits stop being step one of everyone's shopping.
- Say the quiet part to the customer. "The assessment is $X and comes off the job" reads as confidence, not nickel-and-diming. The response to that sentence is information: someone unwilling to commit coffee money was never hiring you at your real rate.
The version where quoting doesn't exist
Here's the structural punchline. Everything above is damage control for a model where the electrician does the selling. There's a model where the quoting simply isn't your job: on a job network, the work arrives already sold — scoped, priced, scheduled, homeowner committed — and you see a fixed payout before you accept. Zero estimates, free or otherwise. Not because of discipline or clever fee scripts, but because the sales labor sits on the network's side of the table, along with the acquisition cost. That's how Loadside is built, and it's why the 288 hypothetical hours up top are the first thing we'd hand back to you — the application takes less time than one free estimate.