A price on the screen
Every competitor in this city makes you fill in a form and wait for a call. We decided the price was not a negotiation, so there is nothing to negotiate about.
A cleaning company that shows its arithmetic
Started in East Austin in 2016 with two cleaners, eight houses and a strong opinion about estimate visits.
The bit that annoyed us into starting
In 2016 you could not find out what a house clean cost in Austin without giving somebody your phone number and then sitting through a sales call. Every company did it, and every company knew roughly what they were going to charge before they picked up the phone.
So Freshline published the formula. A flat call-out, a rate a bedroom, a rate a bathroom, a multiplier for how thorough the visit is. That is the whole thing, and it has not changed shape in nine years.
Everything else about the business follows from that one decision. If the price is fixed and public, you cannot make the margin back by rushing, which means you have to pay people properly and keep them.
Freshline today
2016
Started, in East Austin
2,100
Homes cleaned since then
4.1
Average time a cleaner stays
4.9
Across 418 reviews
Four things we will not trade
Every one of these costs us money. They are also the entire reason people stay for years.
Employees, paid hourly
Per-job pay makes a cleaner rush your kitchen to reach the next house. Hourly pay costs us more and is the single biggest reason our reviews look the way they do.
A written checklist
The same list runs in every home, so a substitute cleaner leaves your kitchen the way your usual one does. It is published, not hidden in a terms page.
Come back and fix it
One visit in ninety goes wrong. Arguing about those is worse business than driving back, so we drive back.
How it went
2016
Two cleaners and a Corolla
Rae Aldridge and Camila Fontenot-Reyes started with eight houses in East Austin, a spreadsheet and a shared phone number. The phone is the same number today.
2018
The pricing decision
We stopped doing estimate visits. It cost us about a fifth of our enquiries in the first month and roughly doubled the number who actually booked.
2020
North crew
Enough Round Rock and Cedar Park customers to stage a second crew up there rather than drive people north through Austin traffic every morning.
2023
Everybody on payroll
The last contractors moved onto payroll with holiday pay and workers compensation. Prices went up about seven percent and we said so in an email rather than hiding it.
Today
34 cleaners, 2100+ homes
Still two crews, still one phone number, still the same checklist. We turn down commercial work over 6,000 square feet because we would be bad at it.
What is in the caddy
The standard kit is fragrance free and plant based: a pH-neutral all-purpose, a wood-safe floor solution, an acid descaler for the hard water, and microfibre rather than paper. All of it is safe around pets and children once dry, which is most of why we chose it.
Bathrooms on move-out cleans get a stronger disinfectant because a landlord expects it. You can opt out of that in the booking notes and we will use the standard kit instead.
- Fragrance free, plant based, safe once dry
- Microfibre washed and reused, not paper
- Pet safe as standard, no request needed
That is us. Your turn.
Get a price without giving anybody your phone number, and book only if you like the number.
Or call (512) 704-3188, weekdays 7:30 to 6.