Guide
Five steps, in order: find the cost of one visit, build the tune-up price, total the annual cost of what you're promising, add margin, then decide how to present the payment. Monthly billing is a marketing choice, not a pricing method.
Most maintenance plans are priced by copying a competitor's number or picking something that sounds cheap enough to sell. That's how you end up with 400 members and no idea if the plan makes money. Do it the other way: build the price from your cost, then check the margin.
A visit has four cost components. Miss one and your price is wrong before you've started.
Worked example, one HVAC tune-up visit:
Total per visit: $118.75 + $22 + $15 = $155.75, call it $156.
If you sell this as a standalone visit (not part of the plan), you'd mark it up the same way you mark up any job — using a target margin, not a flat multiplier. Run the numbers through the markup and margin calculator to see what a 50% margin does to that $156 cost. At 50% gross margin, price = cost ÷ (1 − 0.5) = $156 ÷ 0.5 = $312 for one visit sold alone. Nobody pays $312 for a filter change, which is exactly why the plan bundles multiple visits and sells the bundle, not the individual call.
This is where most plans go wrong — the promise creeps (more visits, "unlimited" something) but the price doesn't move. Total the visits you're actually committing to for the year.
Continuing the example: two visits a year (spring and autumn), each costing $156.
2 × $156 = $312 annual cost per member, before you add anything else the plan promises — priority scheduling, discounts on repairs, filter delivery, whatever's in the brochure. Those cost real money too and need adding to this base before you set price.
Plans should carry a healthier margin than one-off jobs because you're taking on scheduling risk, no-show risk, and a fixed commitment at a locked-in price for 12 months while your costs (fuel, parts, wages) can move. Aim for 45-55% gross margin on the visit cost, not the retail equivalent.
Price = cost ÷ (1 − margin):
| Target margin | Calculation | Annual price |
|---|---|---|
| 45% | $312 ÷ 0.55 | $567 |
| 50% | $312 ÷ 0.50 | $624 |
| 55% | $312 ÷ 0.45 | $693 |
Real plans round and discount for competitiveness, so a workable range from this base cost is $520-$620 a year. That's a genuine 40-50% margin band once you account for occasional visit overruns, and it's competitive without racing to the bottom. Check any final number against the job profitability calculator using your actual churn and no-show rates, not the textbook ones.
Once you have the annual price, you can offer it monthly — $520/yr becomes $43.33/month, or round to $45. But set the annual figure first. If you build the plan around "what sounds good per month" you'll back into a price that doesn't cover cost. Monthly billing is a sales tool for cash-flow-sensitive homeowners. It should never be the starting point of the calculation.
Plans aren't priced to break even on year one alone — they're priced against how long a member stays. At 15% annual churn, the average member sticks around for roughly 1 ÷ 0.15 = 6.7 years. That changes the maths. A plan priced close to raw cost can still be profitable overall if it drives repair work, because you get six-plus years of relationship, not one.
The break-even question becomes: what share of members need to convert a maintenance visit into paid repair work for the plan to pay for itself across its lifetime? Depending on your repair margins and plan discount, that threshold is often somewhere around a 40% attach rate — roughly 4 in 10 members generating a repair job at some point. Below that, a near-cost plan is a loss leader you're funding out of goodwill. Above it, the plan is genuinely profitable even before you count the retention value of a locked-in customer who isn't calling your competitor.
Both of these are unpriced promises. If they're in your plan's terms, cost them into Step 3 before you set the annual price, not after members start calling.
Cost the visit properly, total the year's commitment, price at 45-55% margin, then decide how you want to collect the money. Check the whole thing against your actual churn rate and repair attach rate once you've got a few months of member data — the theoretical price and the profitable price often aren't quite the same number.
The Small Business Operations Kit ($19) turns guides like this one into fill-in-once worksheets: rate card, quoting sheet, job costing, payment terms and follow-up templates. Built by the same people who write these guides.