Priced the way Sealcoating work is billed
A driveway sealcoat and a parking lot / lot striping don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Sealcoating the way the work is really billed: per square foot — about $0.20 a square foot. Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Sealcoating jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Sealcoating work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Parking lot / lot striping, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $975 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Sealcoating price
Two Sealcoating jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Cracks first — crack-fill and prep is its own line; sealer poured over open cracks just fails by spring.
- Coats — one coat and two coats are different prices, and two is what actually lasts.
- Lot size and traffic — a commercial lot you have to schedule around parked cars isn't an empty driveway.
What a Sealcoating job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Sealcoating is no exception. SideWRK captures the driveway size and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the driveway size
- the surface condition — cracks, needs patch
- the last-sealed date
- the cure/keep-off window plus a not-structural-repair note
Example note on a job: "Sealed over minor cracks per budget — advised heavy cracks may telegraph back; two-coat recommended next cycle."
How to price a Sealcoating job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Sealcoating job and tap a suggestion like "Driveway sealcoat" or "Crack fill & seal" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it per square foot
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, per square foot — about $0.20 a square foot. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Sealcoating ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Sealed over minor cracks per budget — advised heavy cracks may telegraph back; two-coat recommended next cycle." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Sealcoating-specific records: the driveway size, and the surface condition — cracks, needs patch.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Sealcoating estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Sealcoating work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: a business license in some places — sealer and rinse water are regulated (keep them out of storm drains), and sealcoating doesn't fix structural asphalt failure. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Sealcoating pricing — common questions
How do I price a Sealcoating job in SideWRK?
You bill per square foot — about $0.20 a square foot. Add the work — Driveway sealcoat, Crack fill & seal, Two-coat premium seal — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Sealcoating job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like parking lot / lot striping runs about $1,500 in the app — roughly $975 of that is your labor and about $525 is parts at your cost. Common Sealcoating work ranges from about $180 to $1,500. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Sealcoating job?
The records Sealcoating work actually needs: the driveway size; the surface condition — cracks, needs patch; the last-sealed date. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Sealcoating work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: a business license in some places — sealer and rinse water are regulated (keep them out of storm drains), and sealcoating doesn't fix structural asphalt failure. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you. It flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Sealcoating?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Everything above is the price. Getting somebody to say yes to it is a separate trade all its own, and the two guides at the end of this list are where that work is done. This part is narrower: what the app is doing from the minute you step onto a driveway that is not yours yet.
- The number leaves with them, not with you. Pace the drive, key the footage in, and hand over a branded estimate they approve on their own phone while you are loading the cones. Their typed name is the signature, and it prints on the paperwork afterward with the date beside it. A deposit comes due at yes if you asked for one — waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent, set per job or left at your shop default. Any line you marked optional is theirs to keep or drop, and the total re-adds itself as they toggle.
- The app tells you when they read it. An opened estimate sets off one alert — a push where notifications are switched on, an email where they are not, one or the other and never the pair, capped at once per job every six hours. Somebody rereading your quote is somebody comparing it to a flyer. That is the moment worth a phone call, and now you know when it happens.
- The quote has a shelf life. Fourteen days after it was written, an estimate stops taking an approval and says so on the page, with the valid-through date printed right under the total. Sealer prices move, and so does your August calendar. A number you gave in June should not still be binding in September.
- Then read these two, in this order. What to Charge for Driveway Sealcoating in 2026 is this trade's pricing deep-dive — the true cost of a driveway built line by line, the floor worth holding, the coats worth recommending, and the pavement worth turning down. Book a Full Sealcoating Season, Not One Driveway takes the other side of it entirely: how a month of single stops quietly eats itself in windshield time, and how a truck parked on one street turns into four tickets before it moves. One of them decides your number. The other decides your week.
Repeat business
Sealed asphalt comes due again in a year or three, so this trade's second act is whatever list you kept. When to ask and how to word it is the season guide's job. Here is the half the app carries:
- "Do this again" is one button. Pull up the job from last cycle and press it: a new estimate opens against that same customer and that same driveway, carrying the work at the prices you charged for it, editable before anything goes out. Fee credits do not follow. Neither do the payments or the photos. Two cycles in, re-quoting pavement you have already sealed once is a tap plus a look at the rate.
- Save the lines you quote every week. Anything you add to a job can be dropped into your price book, and it comes back as a one-tap chip the next time you add work: the name, the price, and your own private cost — the number that makes the ticket read as profit instead of revenue. Save the same name again and the price updates rather than doubling up.
- The review ask, handled without you. Wrap a job and the request can go out on its own: first an email, then a lone follow-up about seventy-two hours later, and after that the app stops talking to them. Two messages is a ceiling on purpose. Ask once and it reads as a favor; keep going and it reads as a mailing list, from a business this customer is supposed to phone again in a year or three. Kill the whole thing in Shop if you would sooner ask them face to face over the tailgate.
How sealcoating bills
One meter, two boxes. A sealcoating job's work form asks for Square feet and Rate ($/sq ft) — the rate box already carrying the researched $0.20 default, 600 greyed into the footage box as the hint because that is about a standard double-car drive — with a "This work =" figure under them that redoes itself on every keystroke. Patching and crack work are their own lines. They are not a coat of sealer quietly rounded up. What the meter makes of the driveways this trade actually pulls into:
Same arithmetic every row, at the default rate. Which is exactly why that top row should not leave the yard on its own — and the app will hold the line for you rather than trusting you to. Set a minimum charge for Sealcoating in Shop and the job itself raises a hand whenever a ticket lands beneath it, offering a single tap that writes a Shop minimum line for whatever is missing — that $90 apron, held against a $150 floor, takes on $60 and settles at $150. Run three trades and each carries a separate floor. Whether a floor belongs at $150 or higher, and what a small drive really costs you door to door, is argued out in the pricing guide.
The seal gets measured; the patch gets priced. That $70 is not a number somebody felt out — it is the gap between the app's own starting prices for a plain driveway sealcoat ($250) and a patch-and-seal ($320), which is what the app puts on the patching over and above the coat. At this trade's 35 percent materials share, roughly $98 of the $280 is sealer, filler and sand, and $182 is yours. No idea of the footage? The takeoff button on the job opens the sealcoating calculator with the satellite trace built into it, and Add to this estimate drops what it built onto the job — the labor line, the materials line, and a pick sheet you can check off at the supply counter.
Multiplying jobs
Turning one finished driveway into the block is the season guide's whole argument, and it is worked out there street by street. What follows is what the app is doing around it:
- The buckets count themselves down. Truck stock opens with this trade's list already written — sealcoat in five-gallon buckets, crack filler, sand additive, striping paint, oil-spot primer, squeegee refills — each with a reorder point, each one tap to add. Pull one onto a job and the count drops. Take the last one and it tells you so on the spot. Nothing gets emailed about it, and nothing nags: the number is just correct the next time you look, which in August is what you need it to be.
- Grey to black, side by side. Two shots off the same job go up as a before-and-after on the work gallery your public page carries. Very few trades hand you proof this photogenic, and a homeowner choosing between two names tends to choose the driveway they can look at.
- The chasing runs itself. An estimate nobody answered gets nudged on day 3, then day 7, and that is the end of it. An invoice nobody paid gets three, on days 3, 7 and 14, each carrying a pay link. That link lands on the approval page, which settles by card or Apple Pay. Venmo, Cash App and Zelle live on the separate payment request you send by hand. All of it email, none of it text messages, every one of them a switch you control.
- The money does not have to wait on the bank. Card money that has already settled can go to your debit card in about 30 minutes, and Stripe takes 1 percent for the speed. On a Saturday where you sealed four drives and Monday's sealer costs about what Saturday earned, that half hour is the difference between buying product and waiting on it.
Truck stock, the gallery, and a whole seeded sealcoating business are running in the live sealcoating demo — free, nothing to sign up for.
Price it now
Put in a size, pick coats and crack condition, set your rate. This is the same free tool the sealcoating page carries, dropped in here so you do not have to go looking for it (the full-size version lives over here):
The paper worth keeping
You already read the list of what gets captured. This is where those answers land afterward, and why that lands harder in sealcoating than in most trades. The work is weather-bound, August is when the calendar is stacked, and a stacked month is precisely when nobody stops to type a disclosure from memory:
- The site, on the record. A sealcoating job site takes a label and a service address, then three dropdowns: driveway size — 1–2 car, 3–4 car, long or double-wide; surface condition — good with light weathering, minor cracks, heavy cracking, or needs patch first; and last sealed — never or new asphalt, within a year, one to three years, three-plus, or unknown. You answer them at the estimate while you are looking at the pavement. Next spring the record answers for you, which is the whole point of writing it down at the only moment you actually know.
- The trade's notices print themselves. Every sealcoating estimate and invoice carries this trade's standing notices under the totals without you typing a word: the cure-and-keep-off window that you set and disclose, the plain fact that a seal put down on damp or cold pavement or ahead of rain may not bond, that sealer and rinse water are regulated material whose disposal and wash-out follow local rules and never a storm drain, and that a seal maintains sound asphalt rather than repairing structural failure. They state the rule. They never state anything about you. What to say out loud on the driveway, and when the honest answer is no, is the pricing guide's territory.
- Your note goes where the work went. A disclosure you type on a piece of work rides that work's own lines onto the document, in italics under the group it belongs to, rather than floating loose at the bottom hoping to be read as related. The whole paper trail answers the March phone call before you do.
- A licence line, and a caution sized to the ticket. There is a business licence field in Settings, and a number you put there prints on the estimate and invoice head. When a job total reaches this trade's threshold and no number is on file, the job shows a caution: it names the point most states start requiring a contractor licence, adds that splitting one project across two estimates does not get you under it, and says outright that SideWRK does not determine or guarantee compliance. Worth knowing the threshold sits well below what the app starts a parking lot and striping job at — the commercial work is where it fires, and the driveways mostly never see it.
- April, already handled. Numbered invoices, the payments against them, your materials at cost, and the fuel-and-tools receipts you logged all roll into a year-end wrap-up — the rows, the category totals, an income CSV and a costs CSV (plus QuickBooks-shaped ones), and a printable summary a preparer can actually work from.
SideWRK is the notebook, not the licence. Its job is to write down what you did. It makes no ruling on whether you have met a licensing, environmental, or disposal requirement, and it never promises that you have. That part is yours and stays yours.