How it works — TreePro

She finds you

Usually on a phone, usually in a hurry, usually off the map pack. If it's storm season she's standing in the driveway looking at the damage while she types. Your site loads fast, the phone number is a link she can tap, and the emergency path is separate from everything else so she isn't reading about stump grinding while a limb is on her roof.

The phone number is in the HTML the server sends, not drawn in by a script. Cell service during a storm is bad and a page that needs JavaScript to show a phone number is a page that fails exactly when it matters.

She sends a picture instead of writing an essay

The camera opens first. One instruction: stand back far enough that the whole tree and the nearest building are both in the shot. That single framing rule is the difference between a photo you can price from and a close-up of bark.

Then an optional second shot of the base, which is where the interesting problems usually are.

Three questions, because three is what people will answer

Roughly how tall, using the house as the ruler. How close to a building, a fence, or a line. Can a truck get into the yard. A six-question form gets abandoned; these three get answered, and between them they move the price more than anything else on the job.

TreePro writes down what it sees

Species when the photo supports it, size class, visible defects, what's underneath. It builds a record of that tree at that address, which matters later when she calls back about the other one in the side yard.

Then it sorts the job into one of three piles: priceable from here, needs a look, or stop.

Stop means a line in the frame, a trunk that reads hollow, a lean over an occupied structure, or anything it can't see well enough to judge. Those go straight to you flagged, with no number attached.

You get a range with its reasoning showing

A band, not a number, and underneath it every assumption in plain words: assumes a crane pick over the garage, assumes full haul, assumes the stump comes out, assumes no decay below grade. If one of those is wrong you change it and the band moves.

The band tightens as the software learns what you actually charge. Early on it's wide and you'll correct it a lot. That's expected and it's how it gets useful.

The proposal goes out, and you can watch it land

Delivered. Opened, and when. Bounced, and here's the address that's wrong. Five days of silence and it comes back to the top of your list with a follow-up already drafted.

This sounds like a small thing. It isn't. Operators have lost five figures to proposals that were never received and never chased.

What moves the number

The seven things that decide what a removal costs.

None of this is a secret. It's what you already do in your head standing in someone's yard. Writing it down is what lets software help instead of guess.

Two identical trees. On the left the swing of the height lands on a house, so the job needs rigging or a crane. On the right it lands on open ground, so it is a notch and a back cut. — Swing the height down to the ground and look at what it lands on. Same tree, same size, two completely different jobs, and it is the one fact homeowners never think to mention.

Height and proximity do most of the work. Everything else adjusts around them. A tree inside one tree-length of the house is a different job from the same tree in an open field, and that single fact is the one homeowners never think to mention.

Variable	Why it moves the price
Height	More rope, more sections, more time in the air, and a bigger drop zone you probably don't have.
DBH at 4.5 feet	Thicker trunk means heavier pieces and slower chipping. Measured at breast height, not at the flare, because the flare lies.
Proximity	Inside one tree-length of a structure or a line and you're rigging or setting a crane. This is the single biggest jump on most residential jobs.
Access	A narrow gate can turn a two-hour chip into a day of dragging brush around a house.
Haul-away	Where the wood ends up. Some customers want the rounds left, most don't, and it's worth asking before you quote.
Stump	Usually priced per inch of diameter. Often forgotten in the quote and then argued about afterward.
Species and condition	A brittle silver maple with included bark is not an oak. Decay changes the plan and sometimes changes whether you climb it at all.

The limit

What a photograph genuinely cannot tell you.

There are products selling instant firm prices off a picture. We think that's how you lose this trade's trust, and once it's gone you don't get it back.

A photo doesn't show internal decay. It doesn't show what the ground will do under an outrigger after three days of rain. It doesn't show that the only drop zone is a septic field, or that the neighbor's fence is six inches inside the property line.

So TreePro gives a range and says what it assumed. When the assumptions are shaky it says so and tells you to go look. The final number is yours, with your name on it, the way it already is.

Photo in. Priced job out.