Why we publish our prices when nobody else does

Ring around for a concreting quote in Perth and you will notice something. Nobody publishes a rate. Not one of them. You get a form, a phone number, and a promise to come out and have a look.

There is a reason for that, and it is not a conspiracy. Concrete pricing genuinely does move with the job. Access, levels, what is already there, how much steel goes in, whether a truck can reach it. Publishing a number invites an argument you cannot win, so the whole trade decided long ago that it is safer to say nothing until you are standing in the driveway.

We think that trade-off is the wrong way round.

What it costs you to not know

If you are planning a driveway, you have a budget in your head. Maybe it is right. Probably it is out by a factor of two, in one direction or the other, because you have nothing to anchor it to.

So you ring three concreters. Each one comes out, spends forty minutes measuring, and sends a number a week later. Now you know. But you have spent a fortnight and three site visits to learn something that could have taken thirty seconds.

And if the number was never going to work, everyone just wasted their time. Yours and theirs.

What we do instead

The rates are on the estimator. Pick a finish, set the area, and you get a range immediately. No email, no phone number, no form standing between you and the answer.

It is a range rather than a single figure on purpose. A single figure would be a lie, because the honest answer genuinely does depend on the job. The range is the band that most jobs land inside, and the cost guides explain what pushes a job to the top or the bottom of it.

What that costs us

Two things, and they are worth naming.

The first is that some people look at the number and go away. That is fine. Those were never our jobs, and finding out in thirty seconds is better for everyone than finding out after two site visits.

The second is harder. Publishing a rate means we have to hold to it. When a supplier moves a price, or a mix changes, we have to update the website rather than quietly adjusting what we tell people on the phone. That is a genuine constraint and we accepted it deliberately.

What it does not mean

An estimate is not a quote, and the site says so in about six places.

What you get from the estimator is a band based on published rates and the size of your job. What you get after a site visit is a written fixed number, with an inclusions list, that does not move unless you change the scope. The first one exists so you can plan. The second one is what you actually buy.

If the two are far apart, we will tell you why at the site visit rather than in the invoice. Usually it is drainage, levels, or what turns up when the old slab comes out.

The short version

We would rather lose a job in thirty seconds on the website than in week three of a quoting process. And we would rather you walked into the site visit already knowing roughly what you are looking at.

Put your own numbers in and see: the instant estimator.