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.
HVAC repair does.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why does $Company charge so much? Cuz they can.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is, of course, that both good and bad vendors will charge similar amounts.
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.
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.
A grifter will not give you that kind of answer…unless they are admirably good.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/magazine/contractors-cons...
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.
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.
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).
If neither of these they fall back to advertising, door-to-door sales, classifieds, google reviews.
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 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.
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.
https://www.ferguson.com/content/ideas-and-learning-center/t...
With a solder joint or a traditional compression fitting (the ones with olives) it's obvious if the connection is no good.
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.
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.
The last thing the trades need is the profiteering, abuse and unsustainable race-to-the-bottom that Uber brings with it.
Does HVAC, Plumbing and much more https://www.urbancompany.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
These systems were designed so that people with a basic education in third world countries can install them. It's not rocket science.
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.
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.
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).
This voids the "generic" fulfilment model.
https://prospect.org/2023/10/16/2023-10-16-private-equity-in...
For example, there’s a forecasted 550K plumber gap in the US— https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2024/03/15/plumber-short...
It’s “easy” (from a barriers to entry perspective) to become an uber driver. It’s also hard to advertise to one-off riders. Uber exists to match a super liquid pool of drivers with a large rider base.
There is no incentive for a plumber to sign up for a platform like this that (1) takes a cut and (2) will say if you are bad. You as a plumber have plenty of work.
Solving this is not a tech problem, it’s a labor supply problem.
(I run a company that at one point took a ton of tier 1 venture money to use tech/automation to solve a blue collar skilled talent problem. It was extremely unsuccessful.)
TacticalCoder•3mo ago
They've got local sites, per country:
https://yoojo.fr
https://yoojo.be
https://yoojo.lu
And there are electricians and plumbers who can fix (and install) HVAC.