Everytime, without ever questioning if it really is honest!
I spent the first couple of months of 2025 in India for some professional development and travel, and although it was truly incredible, some days it wore me down. Auto rickshaw (‘tuk tuk’) drivers are sharks. Everybody knows they are, and negotiating is part of the state of play. But sometimes, you know, I just wanted to be given a reasonable fare first time without having to do literal research and price comparisons before jumping in for a ride across town. Why do they not just use the installed meter?
It got me thinking about pricing in my own industry, and trades more generally. Customers just want to know the price and feel confident in the integrity of the person giving them a quote. In fact, I’d say trust is one of the most critical factors when hiring tradies…or auto drivers. There were times in India that I was so insulted by the outrageous, massively inflated first price that I walked away and flat out refused to negotiate, even if they dropped it to something fair. And that’s because they broke my trust from the outset. By treating me like a cash cow and an idiot, I felt this person lacked integrity, and some days, that meant I just walked instead!
Coincidental to these incidents, I listened to a Hidden Brain podcast with psychologist Sunita Sah, titled Marching to your Own Drummer during my trip. The episode discussed ‘insinuation anxiety’; the feeling when you go along with someone in the moment for fear of signalling to them that you don’t trust them. You know the situation – you’re talking to someone (like a tradie in your home to do works) and you feel something is off. You are sceptical about what you’re being told (like, you'll have to pay $X more for something you didn't want because of XYZ excuse), but your refusal would reveal that you don’t believe them. In the pressure and awkwardness of the situation, you agree to it, even though you really think it sounds like BS, because not complying makes you fret they’ll know you now don’t truth them. Insinuation anxiety. You may be unsurprised to learn that in the researcher’s experiment, women suffer insinuation anxiety more than men, which
increases our compliance with things we don’t want to do, and are against our best interests.
The solution? ‘Power of the pause’, according to Sah. Taking the opportunity to step out of the situation with this tradie (eg: the age old “I need to discuss it with my partner” or some such excuse) gives you the space to break the tension and that feeling of needing to comply. You can blame your refusal on something else so you don’t have to signal your distrust.
But how do we end up in these pressurised dynamics? Is it a deliberate tactic by tradies? And why do customers have the feeling that the tradespeople they hire are untrustworthy, incompetent, biased or unreliable sources of information? After all, they’re supposedly the experts, and we rely on experts to give it to us straight.
I can’t know for sure, but my sense is it’s got a lot to do with an industry that has historically had a lot of shady people – lots of one-man-bands working solo, often without business reputations to uphold or management to be accountable to. Suddenly MIA and not answering the phone when things go pear-shaped. Yeah, and sexism – assuming female customers are ignorant and gullible, or adding a P.I.A tax because previous women have dared to ask questions or called them back to fix substandard work, so they charge extra or come up with cock-and-bull stories to befuddle and redirect blame.
Conversely, women in trades have, fairly or otherwise, a reputation for being trustworthy from the outset. That’s probably true beyond the building industry. I say ‘unfairly’ because no stereotype - good or bad - can be uniformly applied to an entire gender. But certainly, anecdotally, tradeswomen hold values of integrity. Some of us deliberately do things differently – things that make women feel confident we’re not trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
What does this have to do with pricing?
Well, just with the auto rickshaws in India, it’s tiring to have to use all your faculties just to decide whether the price is fair and honest before you even begin. Customers just want to know,
- what it’s going to cost
- how that price was reached, and
- that it’s fair, reasonable and value for money.
This blog can’t tell you that. But I can tell you there are essentially three ways tradies quote for jobs.
1. Fixed price per job/project, upfront, all inclusive
2. Quoted price with a cost escalation clause
3. Per hour, possibly with material costs on top
They each have their pros and cons, like everything in this world. Do you have an instinct about which one is better? Let’s examine each.
Fixed Price
Tradies can lose out in this situation if their costs increase due to unforeseen issues, like material shortages causing price hikes, or a problem which requires them to bring in specialist labour. They don’t love these risks (but it is an extremely common type of quote), so often they add a fat, juicy margin as a ‘just-in-case’ buffer.
On the Pro side for clients is that you know what you’re going to pay to get a job done to completion. Simple.
On the Con side, your tradie may look for ways to cut corners to save money. Worst case scenario, they walk out on the job midway and you need to find someone else to finish it.
Something which breeds mistrust in fixed pricing is when someone – say a locksmith (who has pretty low, standardised material costs), gives you a quote (which you may be in no position to decline, such as when locked out of your house), comes to do the job, and it literally takes them10 minutes tops. Bish bosh bash. $150 thank you very much. Next job! Of course the counter-argument is they spent a lot of time learning how to do that job in 10 minutes, but that’s not always the case.
Secondly, clients often want a breakdown of a fixed price quote, which tradies rarely want to provide (sometimes because it’s totally plucked from the air, based only on some vague notion of experience). Whether they provide a detailed breakdown or not, you do need to understand what is included (and more importantly, excluded) in the quote. Ask questions!
Image from The Reno e-Guide
Quoted Price plus cost escalation
This one reminds me of the rickshaw drivers in India (actually, the world over), who suddenly tell you there’s a parking fee on top, or it’s extra for luggage – after you’ve already negotiated or even after taking the ride!
Cost escalation clauses are great for contractors, and risky for clients. You get an upfront price, but basically if there are any extra costs, they’re yours to cough up. Is the quoted price going to be the actual total when it’s all said and done? No, no, it isn’t. And there’s the Con for clients. Invariably the tradie will hit you up for additional costs for some reason, which may or may not be valid – maybe they just forgot to add it in when they did the estimate/take off.
Or perhaps it’s you who you changes the game midway. Project costing is a finely tuned balance of time, scope, and quality. Changes to one area will lead to changes in another, which invariably results in more cost. It’s fair in this case that you pay more.
Client scope creep is a real thing tradies have to deal with; Image from The Reno e-Guide
In the Pro column, in general you have to agree to it. Informed consent. Sadly sometimes they have you over a barrel, but they do have to come to you cap in hand and give a explanation (sometimes even in writing, with evidence) of the reason for the additional expenditure, and some contracts may even stipulate they have to disclose the cost and any margin, so that’s a win for transparency. If your written contract outlines exact project specifications, you may have a case to refuse if you’re being asked to pay for something meant to be included, but with many slap-dash ‘quotes’ scrawled out at 10pm and emailed off, it lacks a level of detail that gives you a leg to stand on. This is where that ‘insinuation anxiety’ thing may put you in a weakened negotiating position. Yikes.
So that brings us to…
Per Hour
Full disclosure, She Bangs is a per hour service provider, so I may have some biases. Actually, many of my clients prefer it, but there are Cons, so I’ll try to be objective.
Review on She Bangs Facebook page
I chose this model as a brand spanking new handywoman business because a) I came from a wage/salary background where I exchanged time for labour, so I was used to that model, and b) because I was inexperienced I actually didn’t always know how long something would take me, and if I was to have a viable business, I had to cover the cost of my time. To counter this, I kept my rates low (women typically undercharge - the ‘depressed-entitlement effect’ is another one of those
gendered things researchers study). I was also excrutiatingly honest, and left the power and choice with my clients.
And there’s the Pro. You know how much you’re paying because it can be measured objectively, you can assess its worth, and you know what you’re getting for your money >>> Time.
That leaves the Cons. Almost no tradespeople, especially qualified and licenced ones, ever charge by the hour. Subcontractors often do (to the head builder, or PCUB), and certainly in-house employees in a building company get paid by the hour, for example. But it’s rare for a contractor to come to your house and get paid for the time spent doing your job. Maybe it’s because they see themselves as more than labour. You’re paying for an outcome, so a project-based model is more appropriate. Maybe it’s so the 5mins it takes the plumber to change your waste trap can be invoiced at eyewatering rates that more than compensates the drive over and material costs.
But for you, dear reader, in the Cons ledger of time-based rates, you don’t know this person’s experience, competence, pace of work etc, and therefore how long it may take and thus what it will cost is an unknown. If they’re unethical, maybe they’re on the go-slow so that a job that could take 2 hours is stretched to three. Are you paying for their tea break?
She Bangs tries to mitigate these downsides by estimating duration upfront, but honestly I do mis-judge sometimes, or sometimes things just take longer than they ought to because things go wrong onsite. This is where trust comes to the fore. Throughout my entire booking process (well, even before, even for women who aren’t my clients),
I strive to educate (“This is what’s involved in resealing your shower”).
I highlight risks (“I haven’t done this before”).
I disclose (“I’m not a qualified tiler”).
I explain (“When I removed the cabinet, I found extensive water damage to the floor caused by XYZ”).
And I always keep my clients informed (“I am about 30mins from being done here, is that OK?”).
It’s your home and your money; you have a right to know what’s going on, and exactly what work I’ve done.
Not everyone is like me.
So now that we’ve covered the three main types of pricing jobs, which one do you feel is the best? Are you more comfortable with the certainty of a fixed price, the transparency of cost escalation, or the familiar metric of time-based payments? Whichever you choose, just remember this:
You can get it done cheap and fast, but it won’t be good. Or you can get it done well and/orfast, but it will not be cheap.
Image from The Reno e-Guide
No matter how your tradie quotes your job, we can only hope they’re honest and show integrity. One thing is for sure, taxi and tuk tuk drivers around the world will take you for a ride, in more ways than one! Hone those negotiating skills on the airplane, or else download your preferred ride sharing app and circumvent them altogether!
As for tradies, get a referral from a trusted source.
If you’d like more guidance about successfully working with trades, try this blog. If you love that good sauce and you want more in-depth help through the entire renovation process, get the guide here.
