Summer Pricing Is Now Live
Warning: summer is the busiest season. If you want a better deal, wait until fall/spring.
LC gang, great to see you here. Spring installations are in full swing, and we’re nearly booked out to mid-June!
Usually, this is when we hit pause for the summer. But this year, we’re doing something different.
We’re going to offer summer installations at a 10 to 15% discount to market.
The Prices
So here’s the thing. Even at a 15% discount to market, the prices are still higher than what we had in the spring, because average market price goes up in the summer.
Summer is the busiest season. If you want a better deal, wait until fall/spring.
Case in point: the average price for a 4-zone Mitsubishi ductless mini-split installation in a Wakefield single family home in the middle of summer, based on a sample of 15 quotes from summer 2024, is $28,969.10. This is the data behind it.
This summer, we are offering a Daikin 4-zone ductless installation for $23,000, which is ~20% below that average. For Mitsubishi, we charge 15% extra1; that brings us to $25,300, which is a little less than 10% below.
Please note the summer new attic ductwork adder, of ~$5,0002. This reflects how tough it is to be in an attic installing ductwork in peak summer, particularly in tighter attics. Not a hard and fast number, but I think you should also tip the crew generously if you had to swap the attic air handler.
The Brand
We’re going to stick with Daikin this summer as our default option. We’re impressed by the performance & manufacturing consistency, and we’ve secured bulk pricing that allows us to hit these price levels.
Where to Sign Up?
If you’re reading this in June & thinking
I get it, but these prices are still way below our other quotes. Where do I sign up?
You can do so here:
It’s on our in-house platform, Manatee, named as such since cofounder Hannan is from Florida1. Fill it out; you’ll get an approximate first pass, around the pricing menu price. If you like what you see, continue with the down payment, & upload all your documentation before scheduling a walkthrough with us on Calendly.
Why the Price Hike vs. Spring?
Because summer is the busiest season, and I can’t control demand.
I have, as best as I could, tried to tame price increases for the past two years. And we’ve largely succeeded, if you compare our Fall 2024 campaign price menu vs. Spring 2026:
I take pride in not raising prices. So much that in past summers, we just didn’t end up doing any installations3. I thought that, if we tried hard enough, we could shift enough demand to the shoulder seasons, and avoid having to raise prices during the summer entirely.
Dear reader, I have failed. I simply can’t control how people behave on a market level.
Trying to convince everyone to do installations during late winter is sort of like holiday travel. You KNOW it’s less expensive to fly 2 weeks before Christmas, or on Christmas day. But due to structural reasons (work schedules, school, etc.) you can’t do that, even though the lower price is a market signal to try to nudge you to do so.
In the same way, while I can shout from the rooftops that you can save money by installing in the off season, there are structural reasons why that doesn’t work:
For example:
In winter, it is fundamentally harder to do installations. Think of this winter. There was a ton of snow on the ground from late January through March. People in Cambridge & Boston be fighting over parking spaces with their neighbors; where does the crew park 2 large vans? And of course, you can’t do installations in a blizzard when the city is telling you to stay off the roads; and even if you can, ladder work when it’s 15°F outside is just rough. Plus you’re limited by the amount of daylight you have.
In summer, it is also hard to do installations. Attics get up to 120°F in the summer. That’s crazy! We did a couple of ducted installations last summer; to be honest with you, I felt bad afterward putting the crew in that situation. We got them cold water in coolers, but even if they weren’t in attics, doing exterior work in hot & humid conditions means more breaks, and slightly slower installs. And for those who sign up for us after they realize their AC broke/they want AC, I have no way of telling them “hey, you should’ve signed up 3 months ago” because 3 months go, they weren’t looking for AC.
So, reader, this is a long way to say: I can’t control the seasons. Therefore, we do have to face the reality that June through the end of the year is busier, and raise prices to account for that & shore up reserves before the slow season.
Expanding the Team
Let’s talk about reserves.
These days, we have 100+ units deployed out in the field. And I recognize that I have a responsibility to ensure that we have a team that is able to look after these units in the years to come. It’s the least I can do for the LC members who were willing to take a chance on us, for the benefit of the research community.
Here’s the reality: while I, a hungry startup founder, am willing to do all of this for the love of the game, my current & future full-time teammates will have different incentives. I will need to pay them good wages. We will need to make several key hires; and in doing so, I will need more in reserves, to ensure we don’t lay them off if demand is low during slow season.
We either do this, or we’ll be capped at 35 installations per season, perpetually.
Better Installations
It doesn’t cost a lot to install a heat pump that mostly works. It does cost a lot to install a heat pump that almost always works, in every possible condition you can throw at it in New England, and to respond to every permitting request even if they are a bit confusing4.
We’ve come to realize that it’s worth it to include electrical surge protectors to minimize issues in extreme conditions.
I recognize that some people are okay with a heat pump that works flawlessly in 8/10 winters, and has a 97% chance of working on an extreme year (e.g. this winter, 2026). But there are also some other people who are not, and want 99%.
At the end of the day, we can’t endlessly customize our product offering if we want to keep operations tight (& our overhead reasonable). So we will, by default, attempt to offer drain pan heaters & surge protectors whenever we can. Even if Daikin units seem fine without one, because they have a specialized pan to help drain better in cold climates.
Better Service
We’ve always tried to be the affordable option in the market, and in some ways, that requires for LC members to be okay with non-mission critical things, such as responding to low-level service calls in a few days instead of immediately. But during busy seasons, items on the punch out list can stack up quickly.
Having a service tech helps immensely in this department. We have one on staff who joined in May, and we ended up knocking out half of the items on the list in two weeks. And this is a coop engineering student who’s here for only half a year.
We’d like to hire one5 full-time. It would be a game-changer.
Inflation
This one is straightforward - consumables costs have been rising. Even as we secure better pricing on bulk equipment, it’s only enough to offset some of the COGS increase on the consumables side.
Want to see for yourself? Here’s a 3-zone Mitsubishi ceiling cassette install list, minus the 1801 stand (which costs $300, by the way) and the pad since this particular supply house didn’t have the pad + stand in stock:
And here’s another, for a similar situation for a 4-zone install involving ceiling cassettes:
We’re talking thousands in consumables cost alone (e.g. insulated line set, line hide, stand, pads) and these lists are probably only 90% complete. So yeah, it’s a lot. We need to account for that.
More Capacity
I’ve always admired street food vendors in Asia who sell meals for ridiculously low prices, and don’t really try to charge more (so they can profit & open as many restaurants as they possibly can, etc).
Or, in other words, chefs who care more about being actual chefs, rather than business people whose life goal is to take over the restaurant world with your 172378426 franchise stores worldwide (looking you, Philz) and make ludicrous amounts of money.
But when I’m forced to turn away new LC signups for 3+ months because we’re out of capacity, and their alternative may be a contractor that doesn’t bat an eyelash about charging them $35k for a 4-head mini-split just because they can, I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing.
I think there is a world in which local small businesses staffed by artisans who care about their craft, like that chef up there, are plentiful & consumers aren't stuck with consolidated PE-backed rollups. But that’s not the world we live in right now6, and definitely not in Massachusetts7.
So this summer, I’m going to strike a good balance. Prices will be higher to help us scale. But you’ll still be getting a reasonable deal. I hope you understand.
Sincerely,
Kit
Mitsubishi equipment costs roughly 50% more than the bulk negotiated Daikin prices we have right now, and this reflects that. Ultimately, our mission is to make solid installations affordable, which is why we’re using our bulk rates on Daikin and not Mitsubishi.
Why? Because it’s like ~120°F up there during a heat wave. You want to work in a hot attic for 8 hours doing ductwork in those conditions? Yeah, me neither.
And we just spent that time on research, and design instead. Granted, design was helpful in preparing for fall installations, but ultimately, we booked out all our capacity by the end of August and had to turn people away for 3 months.
Looking at you, Somerville - how are you about to tell me that a sheet metal permit isn’t the right one for ducted systems?
But even if we can’t hire one, we need more capacity to respond to inevitable issues, or even to replace systems if we have to. You’d think that warranties will cover systems; it really depends! Manufacturers & supply houses will make you try to debug a system multiple times before they’re willing to replace it for free, and if you can’t definitively figure out why it’s wrong, they won’t replace it.
Sometimes, it’s just easier to charge more & swap out units if you need to.
Because we have a labor shortage in the trades particularly on the senior level. Again, it’s impossible to hire a service tech… I have heard this from multiple people running crews, and at supply houses.
Probably more common in lower cost-of-living areas like Texas, Sacramento.
You have reach in all of Massachusetts?