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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

If you're paying cash/under the table, then maybe. But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative. If you're not under the table, you're paying payroll taxes, probably paying for a payroll service, etc. so you're talking $2000+. At best you can maybe stay under $20k a year.

When you really look at the economics of it, a robot that never gets sick/doesn't require payroll/etc. makes a lot more sense.

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This comment seems insane to me. Like at $50 an hour thats 30 hours a month, or 8 hoursish a week. How dirty or huge is the house? And $50 an hour is way over what most hourly degree edgucated workers earn so definitely not exploitation.

I pay $40/h for 4 hours once a month. If the wife had her way, it would be weekly.

But presumably would not be for four hours a week, since they would do more maintenance-like cleaning. Once a month, yeah, it’s going to take that long.

Why wouldn’t it take that long? When you hire people to do housekeeping they don’t just come for the exact amount of time you need them on an infrequent, case by case basis. You generally have to agree to a standard number of hours and days or a flat rate per day. They’re trying to make a living. If you can’t give them consistency and a meaningful amount of hours, they won’t work for you (or only will temporarily). They will find someone else who can provide more stability.

All that being said, what do you think this will cost? Several of you are scoffing at my numbers but I am very curious what you think they will leave their house for on a daily basis and how many days a month they would be coming by. Plus all the taxes and such that come with doing it legally.

If we’re trying to compare this to some sort of robot that does all your chores, then we have to at least start at 3 days a week. I’d compromise at 2 I guess but 8 days a month doesn’t seem like a fair comparison to a full-time robot chore handler.

If you clean a house once a month, it will take longer than doing the same thing once a week. You will end up spending more hours total, but it won't be four hours per visit, more like one or two. You spread the tasks out. Clean kitchen and den one visit. Clean bedrooms one visit. Clean bathrooms one visit. Or whatever.

The total cleaning time (and thus price) goes up, but it's not 4x what you're getting now, which a whole-house cleaning once a month would be.

Once a month and it’s a different task each time for an hour or two? No one does that - a monthly or bi-monthly cleaning service is $200-$400 and they generally do the whole place in one fell swoop and they’re definitely not going to agree to cutting their pay since you don’t want your full house serviced after taking the time to prep, come out, and maybe say no to another job. I don’t know if you have freelanced before, but this is how you think when you engage in contract work. “Time is money” applies 10x compared to a salaried job. All of this is to say 3-4hrs is very typical. You seem to be coming up with the single thinnest definition of what constitutes hiring for housework and it just doesn’t reflect 99% of how these hires go.

Also, we are comparing to a robot that does all your chores any day. Once a month is not a fair comparison to begin with. This is carrots to oranges.

Let’s be super generous here. $100/day twice a week for a basic pass at your house. Dishes, laundry, some wipe downs, put things way, standard chores. $800/mo, $9600/yr. Plus payroll service/taxes/etc. Hell do $100 once a week, which you’d be lucky to get. This is a $5-6k a year investment for the bare minimum and you’re still doing 80% of the chores annually. If you’ve got kids this person is barely making a dent.

Hiring people is expensive. If it isn’t, you’re not treating them with basic dignity.

Somehow wires got crossed here. I'm saying that once-a-week cleaning won't be 4 hours each time.

It is expensive, just not four times as expensive as a once-a-month job.

What sort of expenditure are you envisioning on a monthly basis?

> But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative.

Sorry, what? Unless you're doing a deep clean of your house twice a week or you live in a particularly HCOL area, those numbers don't add up. You shouldn't be spending more than $1k/month on household chores, and even that seems high.

Source: A client of ours runs a "personal help" service (mostly focused on household tasks like laundry, tidying, organizing, etc as opposed to deep cleaning) so I have a lot of data on this. And they're a relatively premium service compared to some of the cheap labor you can actually buy. But they also don't operate in SF or NYC, so maybe prices are drastically different there.

Even in high cost of living coastal Southern California these numbers are insane unless you have a $10mil house with 10,000sqft

Not really? I pay $40/h, it takes them 4 hours to clean a 4 bed/2 bath. I do it once a month, but they’re talking twice a week.

Then tell me what you think it would cost. Hourly pay, how many hours they’d work in a day, and how many days a month you would expect them. What would be the monthly cost for the kind of help you are envisioning?

$1k/month in an HCOL like here in Seattle doesn't give you much:

> In Seattle, hiring a house cleaner typically costs $150 to $500+ per visit, with most recurring standard cleanings for an average-sized home landing between $180 and $300. If you pay by the hour, rates generally range from $45 to $65 per hour for self-employed independent cleaners and $75 to $125 per hour for professional cleaning companies.

Yeah I only see robomaids as an affordable option for someone that needs help with absolutely everything. These things are built out of commodity parts. Maybe you can make a robomaid a little cheaper if you build a lot of them to offset the upfront costs but not by much. Anytime the robomaid isn't working, it's just decreases the value of having one versus how much you paid for it. So the point would be to put it to work as much as possible such as for an elderly person that's unable to do anything for themselves.

Who spends new-car money to clean their homes? Maybe ultra high net worth individuals? I know people with 8 figures net worth who spend a fraction of that money for cleaning their homes.

None...

Given the current context the presumption would be you have somebody coming 2 to 3 days a week. Are you telling me somebody’s going to come work for you for less than $100 a day 2-3 days a week? Why would they even take the gig?

My point is even 8 figures net worth individuals do not pay for someone to clean their house 2-3 times a week.

We set a bar for income brackets here as well as decided this is just for individuals?

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