That is the whole design. Pourhouse is not an operator with a website — it is the place the job gets priced in the open and then offered to every operator covering your postcode at the same minute. Nobody gets the work because of who they know.
Ring around for a pump on a Tuesday afternoon and you get three different answers: one operator who is booked, one who will call you back, and one who quotes an hourly rate but not the setup fee, the per-metre charge or the minimum. You find out what it actually cost when the invoice lands, usually after the slab has gone hard and the argument is pointless.
None of that is dishonesty. It is a trade of one and two-machine businesses where the person who answers the phone is often the person on the outriggers. Nobody has time to build a price page. So the price lives in their head, and you have to ring to get at it.
We built the page instead. The rates are the ones operators publish; the arithmetic is on screen; and the job goes to all of them at once rather than to whoever picked up first.
Operators do not bid against each other on your job. The price you were shown is the price, and the operator who takes it is paid the same as any other would have been. We would rather compete on being easy to hire than on driving down the rate of the person doing the work.
Setup, per-metre, minimum job, extra hose, weekend, early start — all of it on the page as you tick it, GST included in every figure. If a charge can reach your invoice, it appeared on the screen first.
Operators are asked with the machine, the date, the hours and the postcode. Your name, address and number reach exactly one of them: the one you pick.
What it costs us. Showing the whole price up front removes any room to recover margin quietly later, and asking everyone at once means we cannot promise a favoured operator the work. We think both are the point rather than the price of it.
Pourhouse comes out of Concrete Online, an independent ready-mix service that is not owned by a batching plant. Same idea, different machine: you build the job, every fee lands on the page as you add it, and the total is the total.
People ordering concrete often need a pump. People hiring a pump usually already have their concrete sorted, so Pourhouse stands on its own and does not try to sell you a load on the way past.
We are in Auckland and staying there until we are good at it. Local is checkable, and an operator who has to face you again behaves differently from one who never will.
Judge it by the price page. That is where the argument is either true or it is not.
Price a pump →