Two quotes for the same bathroom renovation land in a customer's inbox. One says: "Discount applied — save $250." The other says: "Included FREE — full electrical safety inspection (valued at $280)."

The first tradie is $250 poorer and looks like he was overcharging to begin with. The second gave away forty minutes of labour at trade cost, looks generous and thorough, and still charged full price for the job. Same gesture on paper. Completely different outcome — for margin and for trust.

This is the discount conversation nobody in the service industry is having, and it's why we built promotions into robot® Quote the way we did.

Money off shrinks. Value added grows.

A dollar discount does exactly one thing: it lowers the number at the bottom. It doesn't make your quote more impressive, doesn't differentiate you from the two other PDFs in the inbox, and quietly implies your first price was inflated.

A free inclusion does the opposite. It makes the quote bigger — one more line the customer is getting, one more thing the competitors didn't offer. And because you're giving it away at your cost, not retail, a "$280 value" inclusion might cost you $60 in real terms. You'd have to knock $280 off to create the same perceived generosity with a discount.

The crossed-out price is the whole trick.

Retail has known this forever — it's why every sale tag shows the old price struck through. The saving has to be visible to be felt. In robot® Quote, when a customer claims your promotion it lands on their quote as "Included — FREE" with the real value crossed out right beside it. They see what it's worth, and they see it costing nothing. That line gets talked about at the kitchen table when the household is comparing quotes.

robot® Plan and robot® Quote — the plan marks up, the quote (and its promotion) writes itself.

When money off is the right call.

Free extras aren't always the answer. Price-sensitive jobs, tight tenders, repeat commercial clients on a rate card — sometimes the honest move is genuinely a lower number. The rule isn't "never discount." The rule is never discount silently. If you're taking money off, frame it: give it a name, a reason and a deadline. "$150 off for bookings this month" with a live countdown converts. A bare negative line item just erodes your price integrity.

robot® Quote handles both: a framed discount that pops with your message and counts down, or a free inclusion with its value crossed out. You pick per job, per customer, in about ten seconds.

What this looked like on our own jobs.

We run a Sydney electrical and smart-home business, and every quote we send goes through this exact software. Two patterns emerged quickly. Free inclusions won on premium jobs — customers choosing between polished quotes respond to value, not haggling. Framed time-boxed discounts won on competitive jobs — where the customer was clearly collecting quotes, the deadline made ours the one that got answered first. Either way, the upsells came from a third mechanic entirely: optional extras the customer ticks on themselves, watching the total update live. Present the add-ons properly and customers sell themselves.

Stop treating discounts as damage control.

A discount handed over the phone after the customer hesitates is a retreat. The same dollars, framed as a promotion inside a quote that looks better than everything else in the inbox, is an advance. The tools to do this used to belong to companies with call centres. Now they cost less than a carton of consumables: robot® Quote is free for 30 days, then $29/month for your first three months.

Send your next quote with it and watch what the customer does differently — robotplan.com.au. Electricians: pair it with robot® Plan and the quote writes itself from the floor plan.

Made by robot® Smart Homes, Sydney. We quote every one of our own jobs with this software — the results in this post are ours.