Pricing Add-On Services: Ovens, Fridges, Windows, and Laundry

The tasks customers most often request beyond a standard visit — oven interiors, refrigerator interiors, interior windows, laundry — share two traits: they take real time, and the time varies enormously with condition. Folding them silently into your base price means every quote carries padding for work most customers do not want, which makes you look expensive. Pricing them as named add-ons keeps your base rate competitive and lets the customers who want extras pay for exactly what they get.

An add-on needs a boundary a customer can understand and you can defend. "Oven cleaning" should say whether it covers the interior, racks, door glass, and stovetop — and whether heavy, baked-on buildup moves it to an hourly rate. "Refrigerator interior" should state that shelves and drawers are included but that the customer empties expired food first, or that you will bag items only with permission. "Interior windows" should name what counts: glass and sills within reach, tracks as a separate line, exterior glass only where safely accessible from the ground. "Laundry" should cap the number of loads and clarify whether it means wash-dry-fold or simply moving loads along while you clean.

• Oven: interior, racks, and door glass — heavy buildup quoted separately after a look.
• Fridge: interior shelves and drawers, customer pre-clears food, exterior included in standard visits.
• Interior windows: glass, sills, and reachable panes — tracks and screens as their own line.
• Laundry: a stated number of loads, with fold-and-put-away named explicitly if offered.

Whatever pricing model you use, an add-on price is really a time estimate wearing a label. Time yourself doing each add-on across several real homes — a lightly used oven and a neglected one, a tidy fridge and a packed one — and price from your slower honest runs, not your best case. Then multiply that time by the hourly figure your business needs to earn, the same target rate you use for base pricing. If an add-on routinely blows past its time box, the price is wrong or the scope is leaking; fix one of them rather than absorbing the overrun. Ranges vary widely by region and provider — the only reliable number is your own timed data at your own target rate.

Take the oven as the worked example, using your own numbers. Time yourself on several real ovens and take the honest slower average, not the best case — call it your standard oven time. Add the minutes of setup and cleanup the task adds to a visit, because dwell time for oven products and an extra round of rinsing are part of the job even when your hands are elsewhere. Multiply that total time by your target hourly rate — the rate your whole business needs to earn, the same one behind your base pricing — then add the product cost the task actually consumes. That sum is your floor; price at or above it, round to a number that reads cleanly on a menu, and you are done. The discipline is refusing to skip a step: most underpriced add-ons come from pricing the scrubbing minutes and forgetting the setup, the dwell time, and the product.

Repeat the same arithmetic for each menu line, and re-run it whenever your target rate changes — an add-on menu priced against last year's rate is a quiet leak that grows with every visit.

Present add-ons as a short, plainly worded menu on every quote: the name, the boundary in one line, the price. A clear menu does three jobs at once — it upsells without pressure, it turns mid-job requests into easy yeses with a known price, and it protects you from scope creep because "that's on the add-on menu" is a friendlier sentence than "that costs extra." List the same services on your HouseGlow profile so customers comparing businesses in their ZIP see exactly what you offer before they ever message you.

Some add-ons belong in bundles: move-out cleans should typically include the oven and fridge by default, because landlords check both — price the package accordingly instead of surprising the customer with add-on math at the worst moment. Other requests deserve a polite no: exterior second-story windows without proper equipment, biohazard messes, or repairs are not add-ons, they are different businesses with different risks. A confident referral protects your schedule and your insurance. If you are still deciding which extras your market wants, browse the jobs board — customer postings in your ZIPs spell out the tasks people are actually asking for.

Watch for the two failure modes that erode add-on profit. The first is the silent yes: a client asks mid-visit, you agree without naming the price, and by the third occurrence the extra is an unwritten entitlement you can never charge for without a confrontation. The script that prevents it is one friendly sentence — "Happy to — that one's [price] from the add-on menu; want me to include it today?" The second is scope drift inside an add-on: "interior windows" quietly growing to include tracks, screens, and a ladder. When a task keeps outgrowing its boundary, either split it into two menu lines or re-time and re-price the whole line; absorbing the growth teaches every client that your menu is a suggestion.