Offering good, better, best

A homeowner walks you around a tired front yard and says, "I don't really know what it needs — what would you do?" That sentence is the whole case for tiered pricing. They have a budget they have not named and a picture they cannot describe, and one number on a page makes them say yes or no to a scope they never chose.

Three priced options change the question from "is this worth $5,800?" to "which of these do I want?" But tiers only help when the job genuinely has three versions. Manufacture them and you get a slower decision, not a bigger one.

Does the job actually have three versions?

Before you build options, find the fork: a decision the customer has not made and cannot make without seeing prices. Usually one of four.

• Material grade. Architectural shingle or three-tab. Poured concrete or pavers. Builder-grade fixtures or mid-line.
• Scope size. The failing section now, or the whole run while the crew is mobilized.
• Service level. One visit, or a maintenance schedule covering the same work for a year.
• Method. Patch and coat, or tear out and rebuild — different lifespans at different prices.

If none of those is open, there is no fork. A customer who has picked the tile, sent a spec sheet or asked you to match a competitor's bid has already decided. Three prices then read as a stall.

Three ways tiers cost you the job

There are more than three. Four options invite a spreadsheet. Five invite a call to the competitor who sent one page. Cap it at three; a good fourth idea belongs in the conversation after they pick.

The bottom tier is unprofitable. A stripped option built to look affordable sometimes wins, and then you are working at a margin you did not want, with the same drive time, insurance and callback risk. Never put a price on the page you would be unhappy to have accepted.

The bottom tier becomes the number you get compared on. A homeowner collecting bids lines up your lowest figure against everyone else's single price. Your $3,200 option against another contractor's $5,900 full-scope estimate makes you look cheap and them look expensive, and neither number describes the same job. State what each tier includes and excludes, so the comparison lands on scope.

Vary one thing between tiers, not everything

Change material, scope and service level at once and the customer is comparing three unrelated projects. If they cannot say in one sentence what the middle tier has that the bottom one does not, the tiers overlap, and the only thing left to compare is price.

Pick one axis and hold the rest steady: a shared base — the work you would do no matter what — plus one addition per step up. Same crew, same warranty, same schedule, same exclusions.

Name the tiers for what they cover, not for how good they are. "Lawn and beds" tells a customer what they get. "Bronze" tells them they are buying the cheap one.

Worked example: a front-yard landscaping estimate

A front yard of roughly 1,600 sq ft — about 900 of lawn, the rest beds and path: patchy turf, overgrown foundation shrubs, a cracked concrete path to the door. The base scope is identical in all three. The path and the irrigation are the fork.

Unit prices vary widely by region, soil, access and season. Use your own.

Because the first four rows repeat, the customer can see you are not thinning the base work to make the cheap option look cheap. The extra money buys a walkway, then water — nothing else moves.

One tax note: the material share differs between tiers, so the tax line can move more than the price gap suggests. There is no national rule. Some states tax landscaping labor itself. Some tax routine maintenance and capital improvements differently. In others the contractor pays tax on materials at the supplier and collects nothing from the customer. A walkway and an irrigation system may land on a different side of that line than sod and shrubs on the same estimate. Check with your state revenue department or your accountant before you put tax figures on the page.

Making the middle tier the obvious pick

There is no trustworthy industry figure for how often the middle option wins. What you control is how easy it is to choose.

Put your recommendation in the middle and say so. One word — "recommended" — next to one option. If you track it and the middle really is what most customers pick, "most chosen" is stronger. If you do not track it, do not claim it — that is an advertising claim.

Give it the most detail. Two or three sentences on the middle option, one on each of the others, describing what the customer ends up with, not what you will be doing — "a dry, level path from the driveway to the door that will not heave the way the concrete did."

Mind both gaps. In the example the middle sits 83% above the bottom and about 27% below the top. A top tier barely above the middle makes the middle look pointless; one at triple makes it look like a prop. There is no researched spacing that works everywhere — treat something in the range of a third to a half above the middle as a starting point, and adjust once you see what your own customers actually buy.

Give the whole set one expiration date, and say each price assumes that option is accepted as written. One line saves re-pricing three columns in six weeks.

Lay them out so they do not compete

Three columns on one page invite comparison, which is the point. Three separate estimates sent back to back risk the customer reading the first price and stopping.

There is one approval, not three. The accepted version becomes the scope you both work from; the other two drop out. Anything added later — the irrigation they skipped, an upgraded shrub — is a change order against the option they chose, priced and signed before it goes in. A customer who months later remembers "the estimate said irrigation" is remembering the column they did not buy.

Writing three versions by hand is where the discipline breaks: you fix the walkway wording in one and forget it in another. In DoneQuote you build the shared scope once and copy it into the other versions, so the base lines stay word for word identical and only the lines you meant to change differ.

When the cheap tier keeps winning

If the bottom option wins nearly every time, that is data. Usually it means one of three things: the bottom tier is too complete, so there is nothing meaningful left to buy; the gap to the middle costs more than the value it adds; or you are quoting customers who were always buying on price, and the top two tiers are unpaid writing time.

The fix is rarely to lower the middle tier. It is to move a line — take one item out of the bottom option and put it in the middle, where it does real work.