We read every Adelaide commercial cleaning website we could find. All 106 of them.
In August 2026 we compiled every Adelaide commercial cleaning company website that directories and search could surface — 106 of them — and read each one asking a short, unreasonable set of questions: does it tell you a price? What the clean includes? What it excludes? Who insures the work? What the contract terms are? Nothing sneaky — public pages only, no fake quote requests, no phone calls. Just reading, the way any office manager with a browser could.
Twelve of the 106 websites did not load at all — expired security certificates, dead domains, server errors. Of the 94 that did, here is what the industry publishes.
What 94 working websites will tell you
0 of 94 publish a firm price for a defined commercial job. One site offers an indicative range calculator for post-construction cleans, labelled “indicative only”. Nobody publishes a price an office could actually book.
77 of 94 show no dollar figure of any kind. The 17 that show anything show “from $X per hour” or “as low as” figures — several of them for residential services, on pages selling commercial cleaning.
3 of 94 offer any kind of instant estimate. Ranges and “starting points” before a site visit — useful, and we count them honestly. Still not a price.
0 of 94 name their insurer. “Fully insured” appears everywhere. Two sites state a cover amount. Not one names the insurer or gives a policy detail you could verify.
8 of 94 publish a task-level scope of work. What the clean actually includes, task by task — the document every client signs up to sight-unseen at the other 86.
14 of 94 print a single exclusion. Every scope has exclusions. If they are not printed, you meet them one at a time, as disputes.
26 of 94 advertise “no lock-in contracts”. Our favourite number. A quarter of the market leads with what clients hate about the industry — while still not showing a price. The market knows. It just will not say.
13 of 94 promise a quote turnaround. From “within 30 minutes” to “within 8 business hours” — a promise about how fast you will be told a number that still is not written anywhere.
No company is named in this study, in either direction — the point is the market, not any operator in it. We would have to name almost everyone.
An industry priced on asymmetry
None of this is because cleaning companies are bad people. It is because the industry prices on information asymmetry: the provider knows what the job costs, the client cannot find out without entering a sales process, and every website is built to start that process rather than answer the question. The words that fill the space where a price should be — “tailored solutions”, “fully insured”, “attention to detail” — have their own translation guide.
The honest disclosure: Sarto sells commercial cleaning in Adelaide and publishes real prices, a full scope with its exclusions, and a calculator that shows a firm number before asking your name. This study is obviously in our interest — which is exactly why the methodology below is published in full, so you can run it yourself and check us. We counted generously against ourselves: indicative estimators, hourly “from” rates and residential prices were all counted as price indications.
And because someone will ask: we ran this website through the same eight questions. It passes seven. The eighth — the insurer question — we answer differently to how the question imagines, because cleaning here is delivered by independent contractors who carry their own $20 million policies, so there is no single insurer to print on a webpage. What you get instead is stricter: the attending contractor’s actual certificate of currency — insurer, policy number, expiry — sighted by us, re-verified every 13 weeks, and shown to you before they attend. A name on a website is a claim; a certificate is a fact. If we ever fail our own test, the method for catching us is published above.
How the study was run
Sample. 106 companies compiled in August 2026 from business directories, web search and suburb-level search across Adelaide. Marketplaces, lead-gen platforms and directories were excluded — companies only. One duplicate (two domains, one business) was merged and one company was removed after it proved to be Melbourne-based. Sarto and any business connected to it were excluded from the sample.
Method. Passive reading of public pages only — home, services, pricing, FAQ and terms pages. No quote requests, no forms, no calls: nobody’s time was wasted quoting a job that did not exist. Each site was assessed on eight yes/no questions (firm price, any dollar figure, instant estimator, task-level scope, printed exclusions, insurer named, contract terms disclosed, quote-turnaround promise), marked conservatively: when in doubt, the answer recorded was “no” for gaps and “yes” for anything approaching disclosure.
Verification. Every “yes” in the dataset was individually re-verified against the live page before publication, with the quote and page recorded. The aggregate dataset is available to journalists and researchers on request — hello@sarto.com.au. Company-identifying rows are not shared; the study is about the market.
Snapshot. All figures are as read in August 2026. Websites change — if this study ages into being wrong because the market started publishing prices, it will have been the best outcome available.
The five-minute version, for your own quotes
You do not need 106 websites to use this. Take the quote sitting in your inbox and ask it the same questions: the five things a real quote contains is the checklist, the office cleaning checklist is what a published scope looks like, and the Adelaide price guide is what a published price looks like. Or skip to the part the other 94 websites would not show you: price your own site in about 20 seconds.