Most people do not think about a service plan until the week after they wish they had one.
The gate fails on a Friday. Somebody comes out, and between the dispatch charge, the hourly rate and the part, the number is larger than expected. Standing in the driveway afterward, the sentence that gets said is some version of: is there a way to just have somebody keep an eye on this thing.
There is, and we run four of them. This is a plain explanation of the difference, including the part where the bigger plan is not worth it for your property.
The three things that change between plans
Every plan gets you access to our 24-hour emergency dispatch. After that, the plans differ on exactly three things.
Whether we come out on a schedule. Silver, Gold and Platinum all include preventive maintenance visits: annual, which is one visit a year, or semiannual, which is two. The visit is the real product. It is the full system check, lubrication, limit switch adjustment, hardware tightening, motor and gearbox inspection, battery backup testing, sensor cleaning and recalibration, alignment, and control board inspection. We covered what that actually involves in our post on gate tune-ups. Bronze does not include visits. More on that below.
What a trip costs you. Every time we come out there is a dispatch charge. Bronze and Silver take 10 percent off it, Gold takes half off, and on Platinum there is no dispatch charge at all.
What the work costs you. Repairs, labor and parts are discounted on every plan: 10 percent on Bronze and Silver, 15 percent on Gold, 20 percent on Platinum.
Silver, Gold and Platinum also put you ahead of unscheduled work when you call. Bronze does not.
| Bronze | Silver | Gold | Platinum | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scheduled maintenance visits | None | 1 or 2 a year | 1 or 2 a year | 1 or 2 a year |
| Priority scheduling | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Dispatch charge | 10% off | 10% off | 50% off | None |
| Repairs, labor and parts | 10% off | 10% off | 15% off | 20% off |
| 24-hour emergency dispatch | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
That is genuinely the whole difference. On the three plans with visits, it is the same visit, the same checklist and the same technicians. Moving up a plan lowers what each trip and each repair costs you.
How the pricing works
Silver, Gold and Platinum are priced per operator, with a rate for the first operator and a lower rate for each additional one. Bronze is a flat membership.
The per-operator part is worth a sentence, because it is the part people find surprising. An operator is the motor and control unit that drives a gate. A single swing or slide gate at a house has one. A bi-parting gate, the kind where two leaves meet in the middle, usually has two, and so does a property with a separate entrance and exit. Those are separate machines that each wear, each need adjusting, and each fail on their own schedule. The plan is priced against how much equipment is actually being maintained, not how many gates you see from the street.
You can pay monthly or pay for the year up front. Current rates for every plan, annual and semiannual, first operator and additional, are published on our preventive maintenance page. We are deliberately not restating them here, because a blog post is exactly the place a stale number goes to live forever. The page is the number.
HOAs, commercial properties and sites with several gates fall outside the standard plans. Those get custom pricing, because the equipment, the traffic and the cost of downtime vary too much for a table to be honest about. Call us and we will put one together.
An honest read on which one
We would rather you were on the right plan than the expensive one, so here is how we actually think about it.
Bronze makes sense when:
- You want a discount and a number to call, but you are not ready for scheduled visits.
- The gate is newer and you do not expect to see us often.
- Be clear-eyed about what it leaves out. Bronze discounts the repair. It does not include the visit that finds the problem before it becomes a repair, and that visit is most of what a maintenance plan is for.
Silver tends to be the right answer when:
- You have one gate, at a house, cycling a handful of times a day.
- The gate is relatively young, or has been maintained.
- A gate being down for a day is inconvenient rather than expensive.
- What you mainly want is for somebody to look at it on a schedule so it does not quietly decay. That is the majority of residential gates and Silver covers it properly.
Gold is the middle step when:
- The gate gets more use than a typical driveway, or it is old enough that you expect to see us between visits.
- You have two operators, a bi-parting gate for example, and you want trips and repairs to cost less without going all the way to Platinum.
Platinum starts paying for itself when:
- The gate is older or has a service history. If we are likely to be back, no dispatch charge and 20 percent off are landing on real work.
- Downtime is a real problem. A long private drive, a property that depends on the gate for deliveries or care visits, anywhere a stuck gate is more than an annoyance.
- You would rather never think about whether a trip is worth the dispatch charge. On Platinum, it never costs you a dispatch charge to have us look.
The semiannual question is separate and simpler. Two visits a year make sense for gates that take a beating: high cycle counts, exposed sites, heavy weather, or anything where the first visit historically finds something. One visit a year is enough for a well-behaved residential gate. If you are not sure, start annual. It is easy to move up and there is no sense paying for a second visit that finds nothing.
What a plan does not do
It is a maintenance plan, not a warranty. Parts and labor are discounted, not free, and no plan makes a gate immortal.
What it does is change when you find out. Most of what takes a gate out of service starts as something small and visible: a belt losing its grip, a sensor drifting, a hinge developing play, a battery quietly dying. Those are cheap on a Tuesday in April with somebody looking for them, and they are expensive on a Friday in January when the gate has already stopped.
You are not buying repairs. You are buying the difference between those two days.
Getting set up
Call us at (425) 881-3554 and tell us what you have: how many gates, what kind of property, and roughly how much traffic they see. That is enough for us to tell you which plan makes sense and what it costs, usually on the phone.
We maintain automated gates and access control across the Puget Sound region, including Redmond and Issaquah and the rest of our service area, and we have been doing it since 1979.
If you would rather just have somebody look at the gate once before committing to anything, that is a fine place to start. Ask for a tune-up and we will tell you honestly what shape it is in.
