Plumbing, HVAC and other skilled trades operate almost entirely B2B, not B2C. The very premise of this article is why that is the case...people who don't understand what is required, what is good, and how construction operates shopping solely on price with unreasonable expectations.
That $22k quote? That's how a company can pay for capacity during peak demand...i.e. paying skilled workers enough to make extra long hours with no expectation of repeat business worth the effort, paying suppliers enough to get priority access to inventory, and of course making it worth dealing with customer-is-always-right amateurs.
Uber operates by letting customers not give a shit about their drivers (and not giving a shit about them itself). In the world where people have reasonable options, relationships matter and relationships are non-fungible.
Well said, and I suspect that the author's harrowing experience (in the first paragraph) was a preview of what surge pricing would look like in this market, post-Uberization.
So then where are the premium HVAC companies for the residential market charging a higher price but offering credible guarantees?
If you want to understand the state of these industries I highly recommend reading "How contracting because a race to the bottom"[0]. The crux of the problem is that unlicensed/uninsured firms will always undercut "quality" firms for small jobs. If you are getting a quote from a firm that actually pays workers compensation insurance it's going to be at a substantially higher price.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/magazine/contractors-cons...
You can hire from a sole proprietor working on his own behalf. Since he's working for himself he doesn't need workers comp but yet can still be licensed and legally operating.
My wife and I bought a house in 2022. It's an old home (built in the late 1800s) that underwent a gut rehab by a real estate firm in 2018-19, and which they subsequently ran as an Airbnb for several years owing to the pandemic and its effects on the housing market.
By 2024, it became apparent that while the rehab squad had done a really amazing job on most of the house, they also cut corners here and there and made some costly mistakes... well, costly to us.
We needed two major jobs done on the house, both for the exterior. I got several quotes from respected contracting firms in the St. Louis area, and the best price for Job A was around USD $40k while the best price for Job B was around $20k. Those were all multi-employee firms and promised to get the jobs done in just a few days once they could get started (booked solid for 5+ months).
Long story short, we ended up hiring a local solo contractor (never has helpers) with 40+ years experience who only takes cash and is something of a perfectionist (and dare devil!). Watching him work and talking to him about his work, it's clear he considers his efforts to be labors of love and a kind of art to which he is deeply devoted. He got the work done in a timely manner and was careful to abide by all the rules of the neighborhood association related to exteriors of historic homes. He charged USD $8k and $5 for the jobs, a massive savings for us! I'm not sure what we'll do in 20 years when we'll likely need another round of work and this guy is in his late 80s.
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Those companies are doing premium work for good customers...or at least charging enough to make dealing with poor customers less an issue.
In the case of the author, the $22k quote is a good way of segmenting the market. Remember the author was just a prospect, not a client since the author choked on the price.
How does a prospective customer tell if a high price is just a confidence trick, or if it’s genuinely indicative of a high credibility company?
A busy residential HVAC company does many many jobs a year. A highly reputable tradesperson will happily give you a long list of references…I once had a conversation with a roofer who metaphorically pointed his finger and said “I did that roof and that roof and that roof over there and three on the next block…please ask those customers.”
A grifter will not give you that kind of answer…unless they are admirably good.
You have to find someone who is local and stands by their work (this can be tough but talk to neighbors/friends/etc). Then treat them well by always paying a tip over the quoted price. Honest businesspeople exist, they will remember your generosity, stand by their work, and go the extra mile to make it right if they make a mistake.
It's relationships, not legal guarantees. There's not enough paper in the world to protect you from a dishonest contractor or tradesman. Finding someone honest and then overpaying is the premium option.
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Best I can do is $1000 to change a capacitor that any tom dick or harry could do, and $10,000 to install a mini split that I literally did myself for $1000 in tools and watching 8 hours of youtube.
The industry is largely a scam. There is no reason why you need a brick and mortar fixed business for many HVAC tasks. On one occasion, I knew exactly what was wrong but as a tenant so I could not perform the work myself. I had to deduct $1000 rent from my landlord becaues I had to pay an HVAC guy so I would not break the law literally replacing a plug-and-play blower motor myself. The guy didn't diagnose anything, or need any skill, I just told him exactly what to do and he was in and out in like 5 minutes.
Calling the industry largely a scam is pretty strong. Of course for the small minority of technically competent people with interest and time it will always be cheaper to do something yourself rather than pay a business to accomplish the same thing. But most people cannot/do not want to do it themselves, and regulations are there at least partially to help protect them against the house-fire-waiting-to-happen untrained handyman.
Sure a bunch of businesses opportunistically up-charge, some I'm sure are predatory, and there are obviously efficiencies to improve, but overall scam it is not.
A building is where a business stores tools and inventory, provides desks with computers and phones, and parks the trucks at night.
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Go with a good vendor and you won't have a problem.
The problem is, of course, that both good and bad vendors will charge similar amounts.
>In the world where people have reasonable options, relationships matter and relationships are non-fungible.
What type of homeowner hires their plumber/HVAC guy based on "relationships"? They might only need a visit only once in a few years, so the idea of "relationships" is laughable.
I think this is how most homeowners hire this type of people, they either "have a guy" or they ask their friends/neighbors if they "have a guy". I have an HVAC guy who is miles better than the HVAC company with ~50 techs that I had come out before I found him. But if I needed some plumbing work done, I'd ask my neighbors, since I've never gotten plumbing done before.
If neither of these they fall back to advertising, door-to-door sales, classifieds, google reviews.
The kind of homeowner who pays a reasonable rate to get their AC repaired during a Houston heatwave.
The first AC guy at my last house and us had kids in the same third grade classroom. Later when his business changed to commercial work, Charlie put us on to a semi-retired AC guy who kept us running for several years until we moved.
By the way, Charlie was recommended by our neighbor two doors down when we moved in.
I mean, I do? As do most of my friends who are homeowners. We are constantly asking each other for recommendations for people who can do X.
Hire a couple of disasters, and you will appreciate that a good relationship with a good contractor/tradesperson is worth an incredible amount of money (and time).
> An Uber-like, magical experience that you can trust to show up on time, do the right thing on your behalf, and fractionalize prices in an antiquated industry.
I can summon an Uber and, by magic, I have a rather high chance of getting a distracted driver in a run-down car with a bunch of nasty air fresheners
If Uber does this to me, I will still probably be unharmed at the end of the ride and I’m done which it. If an HVAC contractor does that, I have years of suckage ahead of me.
Ya, this is my thought as well, although I don't take Uber as much because the quality of the drivers is so iffy now. Maybe we should be asking why is there no Waymo for plumbing/HVAC instead?
IF your Uber driver crashes in a bad way you'll be dead.
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About 10 years ago my AC failed. Decided it was time to replace both my units including the air handler. Bought the equipment online from Alpine Air and it arrived in a few days. Then I put an ad on Craigslist for a AC installation. Paid $1000 for each unit to be installed. Watched a bunch of YouTube videos to learn what “good” looked like, and just watched over the guys shoulder the whole time, asking him questions about how he was measuring the vacuum etc. Saved around $10k compared to the quotes I’d received from Home Depot and Lowe’s. Would do it again.
Yes, it would be nice if everything was easy, fair, and equitable. But:
Almost anyone can become an Uber driver without much effort. Not true for plumbers and HVAC people.
There are so many drivers available they're waiting for your call. Any decent plumbing/HVAC company has a backlog.
All Uber drivers are centralized under one pricing system. Plumbers/HVACs control their own pricing logic. I've never gotten contractor estimates that weren't across a huge range from low to high.
You can never trust a referral unless it's from someone you know that received the service themselves.
Uber vs. plumbing/HVAC is apples and oranges.
I agree. The comments in this thread don't seem to understand how skill trade work operates at all.
One truism is that any halfway decent tradesman always has about 10x the amount of work waiting for them as they can accomplish. People who can do the job well are always in demand.
Uber for plumbers would be a disaster because the only plumbers who have the free time for waiting around for on-call work are the ones who are terrible at their job.
Just like you have many taco places on UberEATS/doordash, you could have many plumbing/HVAC companies to chose from along with common tasks, etc.
Uber Eats does not have to deal with past taco installations.
HVAC repair does.
It's probably the plumbers that have to deal with past taco installations if we're being honest.
Honestly if you use greer or some budget-tier mini splits it's easier just to install a new one every time than to fix them. It would work for 99% of residential cases and be cheaper.
A lot of the 'real' HVAC companies will basically push you to buy new shit if anything is broken anyways, so may as well use that model in a way that's actually economically efficient and just have teams of essentially unskilled unlicensed "Uber" goons that only know how to install a brand new X brand mini split and that's the way they fix literally everything.
If you already have a mini-split, that has some truth. Most AC's in Houston are not mini-splits.
And the segment of the homeowner market that takes pride in doing the cheapest possible improvement is limited and not one that makes a lot of business sense to cater to as an HVAC company. Because not only does that segment not open its wallets wide (if at all) but also because cheap HVAC systems are cheap in part because of the places that costs are cut such as noise and manufacturer support.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that people don't get joy from the noisy installation they installed themselves and maybe even joy from dealing with the lack of manufacturer support for that unit.
Only that people don't find delight in the crappy unit they paid to have installed once they realize it;s crappy. And as an HVAC business, that's your problem and not one worth having.
If It weren't for the HVAC licensing gangster system where armed police would show up and stop me, I would absolutely start a company ripping out whatever broken system you have and with the business model is I would replace it with a small menu of mini split systems I have goons trained to install for cheap.
There is massive pent-up demand for this. Even poor people fix their HVAC system if they have a spare buck. I recently met an elderly lady (yard sale to pay her HVAC bill) who paid $15k, her hearing was shit and she seemed about dead, she wouldn't have given a single shit if it was a little louder. But in any case, I've installed many Daikins (for myself) and for not much more money they are as quiet as the sound of the moving air.
Oddly, the article does not talk about "why"!
So - let me shoot my guess. Uber didn't invent a new category. There were already taxi dispatchers, and there were already "radio-taxi" and "mini-cab" dispatchers - private driver fleets, who weren't licensed to be flagged down curbside, but otherwise operated as Uber. You placed a call, the operator gave you a quote and wait estimate, and told you the license plate of the car to expect.
Uber just put a fancy app on this.
Arguably this isn't a new category either then.
India has this thing called as urban company
Does HVAC, Plumbing and much more https://www.urbancompany.com
Disintermediation. The degree which marketplace platforms can exert pressure against disintermediation determines their right to exist.
Certain markets, it's absolutely trivial for marketplace participants to agree to an off-market transaction, cutting the marketplace out of any transaction fees. That's what killed all the Uber for Maids businesses of the early 10s.
Uber for Uber, on the other hand, is an absolutely amazing platform for preventing disintermediation. Occasionally, you'll get a driver handing you their personal business card and saying call me directly if you want a ride to the airport but overwhelmingly, people are unable to get around the platform, regardless of how high the middleman cut is.
People on a forum run by VC types or wannabes complaining about the capitalistic system. They have the money, get to it. Figure out how to make plumbing robots or ai systems that turn software geeks into wrench jockeys.
Why does $Company charge so much? Cuz they can.
I'm reasonably convinced we'll have advanced AGI or fusion power or something before the day comes that a robot can autonomously swap out a home water heater.
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A lot of these "Uber for X" conversations miss a deeper point. The software only works as a force multiplier when the underlying labor is modular and fungible. Ridesharing works because every trip is basically the same API call i.e. person A to location B.
Plumbing or HVAC isn’t like that. Every house is a legacy system with zero documentation and different failure modes. Half the job is reverse engineering decades of homeowner hacks, and mystery piping. The other half is risk management.
If Uber had to deal with "each car is different, some are from 1978, half the wiring was DIY, and if you route one trip wrong the customer’s house floods," it would look very different.
The heterogeneity of the physical world is the limiting factor. Basically, devops for building (instrumentation, diagnostics and standardization).
I can't comment on this idea but I will say that I would have expected press fittings to have brought down the cost of plumbing because they don't require soldering up to certain diameter. But they don't seem to have had any impact on the cost of plumbing despite not requiring as much skill.
https://www.ferguson.com/content/ideas-and-learning-center/t...
The skill of a plumber isn't in knowing how to solder. I've run copper pipe and soldered fittings on my own plenty of times, it's not hard. The skill is in either knowing the building codes inside and out when dealing with new work, or for remodel work it's knowing all the tricks of how to alter existing plumbing quickly, cleanly and efficiently. Both those skills are only developed with experience.
Press fittings have a well earned reputation of leaking after a few years (they mostly rely on rubber o-rings that will dry out over a decade). They are rarely used by anyone who knows what they are doing.
Note that crimp fitters (which your link discourages!) do not have the same problem and are what most are moving too. Soldering still has a place, but is rarely used because modern PEX is so much cheaper and easier to work with.
My experience with push fit and press fit is that if they aren't perfectly done (or have a manufacturing defect) they can appear to be secure, only to fail catastrophically at some random point hours/years in the future...
With a solder joint or a traditional compression fitting (the ones with olives) it's obvious if the connection is no good.
Perhaps because you do not do plumbing yourself, you do not realize that making the pipe connections is a trivial part of the job. I learned how to sweat a copper pipe in about 15 minutes of training. You can learn it off YouTube. It is not a high-skilled operation.
I don't think DIYer even bother learning how to sweat copper pipe anymore. I plumbed an entire house myself using pex for the supply. All I had to know was how to press the trigger to expand the pipe.
The only copper I had was a copper stub for the toilet supply, but I used pex expansion to terminate there too because they make copper-pex stubs.
Skill isn't the issue though time is and soldering itself is pretty fast.
Surprised no one has mentioned that Private Equity has rolled-up most HVAC operations. Not sure about Dallas, but what he describes certainly suggests that the Dallas market is controlled by PE. E.g.
https://prospect.org/2023/10/16/2023-10-16-private-equity-in...
We called this a "handyman" back in the day. They're still around.
(Decent) Plumbing requires significantly more skill than driving a car or bike. As a result, the variance in service quality will be far wider.
This voids the "generic" fulfilment model.
the real issue is that since you don't need the contractor immediately you can cut the middle man! then consider the median price the gigs and it makes sense.
Learn how to fix your own stuff. Problem solved.
"All you need to remember for plumbing is that s*t runs downhill" - Tony Soprano
That's just rule #1. Rule #2 is "Don't bite your fingernails."
Thumbtack has access to all sorts of handy people. Hired multiple people from the app for all sorts of needed home projects
task rabbit is sort of uber for a lot of non driving things, many house repair/handyman people available. not sure if they go all the way to major things like hvac
It's typical for those trades to have extensive licensing requirements. In my state (OR) plumber and HVAC licenses require four years of apprenticeship. Additionally the HVAC trade has gatekeeping around the EPA refrigerant licensing and supply distributors/manufacturers who will only sell to contractors.
I got my EPA 608 license from like two days of cramming and an online proctored test. Skillcat, was like $0 or $50 if you want the card. Can order unlimited refrigerants straight to my doorstep.
No place around me to install mini-splits for cheap so I just got the EPA 'licensing' and did it myself. As long as you don't offer the service commercially, in most states, I think that's all they need.
I also got my 608 cert online for $25. I found no real need to study or cram, most of the answers were common-sense or easily googleable real-time. I got a $40,000 quote to install a 4 zone heat pump system. It was roughly $6500 worth of equipment, $500 worth of tools, a $25 EPA cert, and 2 weekends of my time. Basic carpentry and electrical tasks, some minor special skill development to get the copper flares just right, a nitrogen pressure test, vacuum evacuate and chill.
These systems were designed so that people with a basic education in third world countries can install them. It's not rocket science.
Yeah if you just do part 1 you could probably google real-time.
The universal is proctored, so you have to have the *FCs and limits somewhat memorized, it's definitely just rote memorization and if you have exceptional memory you might just remember it all the first time without any 'study'. A person like me with relatively average intelligence would probably take a couple days, but it's definitely a lot better than needing 4 years of HVAC apprenticeship or something.
Technically you need part 2 or universal to do most home HVAC systems, but part 1 (or even an EPA 609 probably) would get you the refrigerants, so it's largely a moot point.
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It’s called home warranty companies.
Which are 100% scam
That depends. We got one paid for by the seller of our house and in the first year it paid for an HVAC repair and plumber. I renewed it once for $600/year and wound up getting our refrigerator replaced in-kind, probably a $1500-2000 machine.
I decided my luck had run out and so I _did not_ renew it again, and we haven't had any other issues that _would have been covered_ since then, so I think I played my cards right.
I don't think they are a scam, but they are an insurance product, and insurance products have a lot of detail that need to be understood before you can decide whether it meets your needs or not. It's not a panacea to home-ownership woes.
Problem is most of them are paid for by the seller who doesn't care about customer service. If your HVAC really was bad they will replace it when they must, but their incentive is to do the cheap repairs as long as possible, instead of the expensive do it right: hoping that eventually you give up and replace it yourself.
If people regularly paid for the yearly subscription they would have incentive to service the customer, but this would increase their costs and most people are not willing to pay the true yearly costs.
Uber and Lyft basically destroyed the taxi industry by subsidizing incredibly cheap rides until they had wiped out independent drivers, then gradually raised their prices much higher than taxis ever were.
If there was an Uber for plumbing/HVAC, you would get ONE quote, and it would be higher than any of the ones you got.
So I'm not sure that's the future we should be racing toward.
There are lots of HVAC companies trying the above in every city. Finding the good (often independent) tech is hard because they don't have the big ads.
In some countries there is.
Exploitation already runs rampant in the trades, so does incompetence (see CyFy Home Inspections on Youtube).
The last thing the trades need is the profiteering, abuse and unsustainable race-to-the-bottom that Uber brings with it.
You mean Jackie's List? A thing that already existed? Or this thing called The Phone Book?
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There definitely is something like that in several EU countries: it's called Yoojo and there are people using it.
They've got local sites, per country:
And there are electricians and plumbers who can fix (and install) HVAC.