Cost Per Qualified Estimate: What a Floor Coating Appointment Really Costs

A qualified floor coating estimate costs $125 to $199 when you buy it as a booked appointment from a pay per appointment provider. If you generate the lead yourself and do all the calling, qualifying, and scheduling in house, the media cost works out to roughly $25 to $75 per booked estimate, before you pay anyone to make the calls. Both numbers are real. The gap between them is labor, systems, and who carries the risk on every lead that never books.

What makes an estimate qualified?

Most disagreements about cost come from people pricing four different things as if they were one. Sort them before you compare a single dollar figure.

A qualified estimate clears four bars at once: the person owns the property, wants floor coating work, sits inside your service area, and has agreed to a specific time that fits your route. Miss any one of those and you are driving to a conversation that was never going to become a job.

What does it cost to produce a qualified estimate yourself?

Start with media. Coating contractors running their own Meta ads with decent creative see $15 to $45 per lead, which lines up with the ranges in our garage floor coating lead cost breakdown. Our published benchmarks show that when the lead is called within one minute, about 90% answer and 60 to 70% become booked estimates.

Run that math. At $30 a lead and a 65% booking rate, the media cost per booked estimate is about $46. At $45 a lead and a 60% rate, it is $75. At $15 and 70%, it is $21. So $25 to $75 per booked estimate, in media alone.

Then add everything the media does not buy:

• The caller. Speed to lead is the whole game. A dedicated setter who answers inside a minute from 8am to 8pm, plus Saturdays, is a real wage, not a rounding error. Our in-house setter breakdown walks through what that actually costs once you count the hours nobody covers.
• The follow-up. Most leads that book do not book on the first call. That is five touches across three days, per our follow-up scripts.
• Campaign management. Creative testing, audience work, and cutting losers every two to three days. Left alone, a coating campaign decays, which is the pattern in why floor coating ads stop working.
• The leads that never book. You paid for all of them. Thirty to forty percent of them will never turn into an estimate no matter how fast you call.

That last line is the one contractors leave out of the spreadsheet, and it is the one that moves the number most.

What does Appointly charge per qualified estimate?

$125 to $199 per booked estimate, depending on your market and the work you install. You are billed when a qualified homeowner is confirmed on your calendar and at no other time. No retainer, no monthly fee, no charge for a lead that never books.

Three things are worth being specific about, because they are what the number buys:

Every appointment is vetted before it reaches you. Our team confirms property ownership, real interest in coating work, service area fit, and a time that works with your route. We specialize in floor coating, so the qualifying questions are built for garage floors, epoxy, polyaspartic, and concrete coatings rather than adapted from a generic home services script.

Appointments are exclusive. One coating contractor per market. The estimate is yours and is never sold, resold, or split with the company down the road. That is the difference explained in full in exclusive vs shared floor coating leads.

The credit policy is generous on purpose. If a confirmed homeowner no-shows, or an appointment turns out not to meet the criteria we agreed on, it gets credited. You should not be paying for an estimate you could not run. The model only works when the incentive on our side is to book estimates that actually happen.

Is $125 to $199 a good price?

That depends entirely on your job value and close rate, and not at all on what a lead costs somewhere else.

Take a $4,000 average epoxy garage floor. Contractors who show up on time and present well close 30 to 40% of exclusive booked estimates. At 35%, every booked estimate carries about $1,400 in expected revenue. At $175 per estimate, your acquisition cost is roughly 12% of the job, or about $500 per closed floor.

Now run it at a $6,500 average job with a 40% close rate. Expected revenue per estimate is $2,600 and the same $175 is under 7%. The higher your average ticket, the less the per-appointment number matters and the more the volume and the show rate matter.

Run it the other way to find your ceiling. Decide what percentage of a job you are willing to spend to acquire it, multiply your average job by your close rate, and you have the most you can pay per booked estimate. Our guide on what a booked estimate is worth works through that calculation in detail.

Which route should you choose?

Run it yourself if you already employ someone whose actual job is answering inside a minute every day including Saturday, you have the appetite to manage creative, and you would rather carry the risk on leads that never book in exchange for a lower media number.

Buy booked estimates if your crew is in the field all day, you want a predictable number of estimates rather than a pile of phone numbers, and you would rather pay more per appointment and nothing per dud. Most single-crew and two-crew coating companies land here, because the cheaper route quietly requires an employee they do not have.

There is no clever answer. There is just whether the calls get made inside a minute, because every number on this page falls apart if they do not.

Frequently asked questions

Ready to see the number for your market?

Book a strategy call and we will walk through your average job value, your close rate, and how many booked estimates your crew can actually run in a month. If the math does not work for your market, we will tell you on the call.