Three ways a ballpark estimator goes wrong

I said this on YouTube before I ever compared us to anybody. A ballpark estimator can hurt you. If it is a bad experience for the homeowner, if it commoditizes your product, or if it does not talk to Facebook, it really cannot be used.

That is the whole test. Every tool in this category draws a fence on a satellite image and hands over a number. What separates them is what happens after the homeowner hits submit.

What mySalesman does

Where these numbers come from

Everything in this section is off mysalesman.com as of August 2026. If they change it, this page is wrong until I update it. mySalesman is a trademark of its respective owner. Next Estimate is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by mySalesman.

  1. $175 per month, no contracts, cancel any time. Paying for the full year up front saves you $175.
  2. A 30 day free trial, and unlimited users on the account.
  3. The homeowner types in an address, gets an aerial view of the property, draws the layout, and you both get the estimate.
  4. They see a budget range that you control, not your line items. Their pitch is that your real pricing stays hidden from competitors.
  5. They call it a lead-qualifying tool, not a lead generator. Their words, on their own FAQ.
  6. Integrations with JobNimbus, True, and ArcSite. Deck, roofing, turf, and exterior cleaning run $25 a month each on top.

That is a real product and the core workflow is the same as ours. If somebody tells you these tools are nothing alike, they are selling you something.

Where we are actually different

Most estimators stop at satellite. Satellite is fine until the yard is under tree cover, or it is a new build the aerial has not caught up to yet. Then the homeowner gets stuck on your form and you never hear about it.

  1. Satellite. Drop a pin on the address and trace the fence line.
  2. Property line view. County parcel data instead of aerial imagery, for lots where the trees hide the yard.
  3. Survey PDF upload. New construction with no house on the map yet. They drop in the surveyor PDF, set the scale, trace the fence.

Property line view and survey upload are not listed anywhere on mysalesman.com as of August 2026. That is the gap I would care about, because those are the jobs you are currently losing without ever knowing they came in.

The part most of these tools skip

The Meta pixel is a signal you send back to Facebook about what you qualify as a lead. Every time a good one comes in, you tell Facebook you just got a lead, and Facebook goes and finds more people like that.

What you reward it for is what you get more of:

  1. Reward the pixel for a form fill and you get more ghosts.
  2. Reward it for repair quotes and you get more hinge replacements. You told Facebook that was a win.
  3. Reward it for financially qualified homeowners in your service area who need a new fence in the next three months, and Facebook starts showing your ad to more of exactly those people.

An estimator that qualifies the lead and then never tells your ad account about it is doing half the job. You already paid for that traffic. The pixel is how it gets cheaper next month instead of costing the same forever.

You decide whether they see the price

You have two options with us. Show the ballpark on the spot, or hold it. When you hold it, the homeowner enters the measurement and the rep texts them the number after the call. Same tool, dial set differently.

That is the commoditizing problem from the top of this page. A naked number on a screen turns you into a price. The estimate page is branded to your company with your Google reviews on it, so they see the number in the context of how good you are as a business.

The $26 is not the reason to switch

$175 against $149 is $26 a month, $312 a year. On annual plans it is $1,925 against $1,490, so $435 a year.

That is not a reason to move anything. If your estimator is working, stay. The reason to move is if your leads come out of Facebook and nothing you own is teaching Facebook what a good one looks like.

When you should not switch

  1. You do not run paid traffic. Then the pixel argument does not apply to you and you should not pay extra for it.
  2. You need more than fence under one login. They productize deck, roofing, turf, and exterior cleaning at $25 a month each. We do fence.
  3. You want to try it before you pay. They have a 30 day free trial. We do not. We have a refund instead, which is in the FAQ below.

And if you are a small shop just getting going, do not pay either of us yet. I post free content with the lessons I learned selling five million dollars of fence. Use that until your volume justifies the tool.

How switching actually works

There is no migration and nothing to export. You set your material pricing, we send you a branded link, and you add it to your site. Ten minutes on a setup call, live within 48 hours.

If you are mid month on the other tool, run both for a couple weeks and cancel once you are comfortable. Nobody should be paying two of these forever, but two weeks of overlap is cheaper than guessing.