At times customers may tell us our service call or maintnenace fee is more than the coupon rate they received in the mail from another HVAC service provider. In mailers its common to see $69, $49, or even a $29 special. When considering whether to use these options it's important to consider how much it actually costs to send a technician to your home. The industry average pay is about $30/hr for a technician with 5-10 years experiance (We're assuming that a customer wants a well trained and experienced tech here). In addition to hourly wages a company is expected to pay for and contribute to payroll taxes, medical insurance, dental and vision, paid time off and other benifits. In reality that technician will cost closer to $40-50/hr. In addition to wages there is fuel, liabilty insurance, commercial auto insurance, supplies, licensing fees, office staff, utilities, rent as well as other expenses. Depending on the outfit and overhead of the company it will cost the company on average $60-100/hr. or more to send this technician to your home. Consider that the average service call with travel time will take about 2 hours. This equates to a company cost of $120-200 to do that $29-69 service. "How does a company make money from those calls" you may ask? The most common way: High pressure sales tactics. The company considers this low service fee a "loss leader", this means they know that some of these new customers will turn down extra services which will incur the company a loss. However a certain percentage of customers will accept high dollar and high pressure job proposals. The money they make from this will easily pay for losses incurred from other customers less inclined to spend. Aditionally, since companies know that many customers will not accept a proposal for work that would make the service call or maintenance profitable, they may instruct a technician to quickly graze over your AC system and not really spend adequate time to discover true potential problems or do maintenace in a proper and effective way. Companies will pressure technicians to do this service very quickly so as to minimize losses on "loss leader" calls. Sometimes a company will even send a very inexpreienced tech who has no formal training or at times send a sales person instead of a tech. This means occasionally a customer will have paid $29-69 to invite a sales person in to their home who tries to sell them new AC equipment or some other unnecessary service. Often times companies will actually do new equipment estimates for free if requested, so the customer in this case has paid for a service that is normally free. At Instant A/C we price service calls and maintenace calls so that a technician can spend adequte time to actually find problems and offer solutions that aren't always big ticket repairs or new equipment estimates. In reality, even though our initial service may cost more, we often find cost effective solutions that save the customer a lot more than had they called the company with the low teaser fee that comes with high dollar unnecessary propsals. Therefore when deciding to agree to a service call or a maintenance call, go with a price that makes sense. Better yet, go with Instant A/C!