What the $99 drain special really costs a plumbing company
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Run the numbers on the cheap drain offer: truck cost, upsell rates, the customers it brings and what to advertise instead in a slow month.
Someone in your market is running a $99 drain special right now. Probably $79. Every fall a few more shops copy it, and every winter a few of those shops quietly stop answering their own ads.
Here is the arithmetic, because the offer is usually adopted on feel rather than on a spreadsheet.
The cost of the truck roll
A tech at $28 an hour fully burdened costs about $42 an hour with taxes, insurance and workers comp. A drain call is 45 minutes of drive time and 60 minutes on site, so 1.75 hours, which is $74. Vehicle cost at the IRS business rate on a 22-mile round trip is about $15. Cable, blades, wear on the machine, bags and floor protection is $8 to $20 depending on the job.
Call it $100 to $110 in direct cost before a dollar of overhead, dispatch, or the cost of generating the call.
At $99 you are underwater on every one. At $79 you are paying $30 for the privilege of visiting a stranger.
The upsell assumption
The defense is always the same: the drain special is a foot in the door and the tech sells something else. Sometimes true. In practice, across shops that run it honestly and measure, 20% to 35% of $99 drain calls turn into additional work in the visit, usually a camera inspection or a second fixture.
Say 30% convert to an average additional $240. That is $72 of extra revenue per call, spread across all calls. Add the $99 and you are at $171 of revenue against $100 to $110 of direct cost. Roughly $65 of contribution per call, before overhead and before the ad cost that produced it.
Now subtract the ad cost. If those calls came from Google Ads at $60 to $150 per call, the offer is a loss on most of them. If they came from your Google profile at no marginal cost, it is a slim win.
That is the honest picture. The $99 special is not a foot in the door. It is a way to convert free organic calls into small jobs, and a way to convert paid calls into losses.
The customer it selects for
The bigger problem is not the margin on the call. It is who answers the ad.
A homeowner who chose you because you were $20 cheaper than the other guy will choose the next shop for the same reason. They do not become a repeat customer. They rarely leave a review. They almost never buy a $6,000 sewer replacement from you, because the relationship started as a price transaction.
Meanwhile you have trained your own techs to lead with the cheapest thing you sell.
What to run instead
Anchor upward and stay honest. "Drain clearing from an accessible cleanout, $185. If we cannot clear it, the camera inspection is free and the $185 credits toward the repair." You cover the roll, you keep the credibility, and the customer who calls is buying a fix rather than a discount.
Sell the camera as the front-end offer. "Sewer camera inspection, $149, credited toward any repair we find." It costs less to deliver than a drain clearing, it produces a recording you can show the homeowner, and it finds the $3,000 to $12,000 work. A shop that runs 40 in a month typically finds six to ten real jobs.
Advertise the jobs with room in them. Water heaters, repipes, softeners and tankless conversions carry the ticket that makes paid advertising work. A rough rule is that you can spend about 10% of gross ticket on acquiring the job. On a $290 drain job that is $29. On a $2,400 water heater it is $240. Every channel is open to you at $240 and almost none are at $29. The pricing guide works through the rest of that math.
Put ranges on the website. Publishing "drain clearing $185 to $325" screens the $99 hunters before they call and makes your tech's quote feel expected. The website guide covers where those go.
When a cheap offer does make sense
Two cases. First, if you have real capacity you cannot fill and the marginal call is genuinely free, a low-price drain offer beats an idle truck, as long as you cap it at a set number of calls per week.
Second, as a past-customer offer, not a cold one. A discount to somebody who already knows and trusts you buys goodwill and a review. A discount to a stranger buys a stranger.
Everything else is a subsidy paid to people who will not call you again.
The wider point
Plumbing companies rarely lose on marketing because the ads were bad. They lose because the thing being advertised cannot carry the cost of advertising it.
Look at your last 100 jobs, sort by ticket, and ask which of them you would happily pay $200 to acquire. Advertise those. Fix the phone so the free calls stop leaking, and let your review count do the rest. The median plumbing company on Google has 21 reviews and 78% sit at 4.5 stars or better, so the rating is not what separates you. The count and the ticket are.
If you want the ads pointed at the higher-ticket work for two weeks at no cost, that is the free 14-day trial. No card. Text or call (385) 832-6175.