Locksmithing is one of the few trades where the price you are quoted and the price you pay routinely differ by a factor of ten. Not because the work is unpredictable — because the quote is given at the worst possible moment, when you are standing outside your own door.
The pattern is well documented across North America. A national call centre advertises a $29 service call, takes your address, and dispatches a subcontractor. The subcontractor arrives, declares your lock “high security”, drills it, and invoices $300 or more. The company name on the invoice does not match the one you called. There is nobody to complain to.
Meanwhile the actual locksmith three blocks away — registered since 2004, does the job for $110 without drilling — is on page two of the search results because he does not buy ads.
Two things, and only two.
We make the price visible before the call. Every business here can state a call-out range and a price list. We publish it with the date it was set. If a business will not state one, the listing says so and shows no phone number. That is not a punishment — it is the information you needed.
We check the business is real. We look up each company in its provincial corporate registry and record whether it is registered and active. In Quebec and Alberta, where locksmiths need a licence, we check that too. It is a low bar, deliberately — but the operations described above rarely clear it.
We do not take a commission on jobs. We do not sell leads to the highest bidder. We do not re-publish reviews from other platforms. We do not rank businesses by what they pay — paid listings sit in a marked block and everything below is ordered identically for everyone.
And we do not verify prices. A business tells us its range; we publish it with a date and say plainly that we have not checked it. Pretending otherwise would make us the thing we are trying to fix.
Locksmiths list free, permanently. Some pay $19 a month to appear at the top of their city with their phone number and request form switched on. A small number pay $99 for the only paid slot in a city. That is the whole business model — no commission, no lead fees, no data sold.
A small independent team. We are not a locksmith, not owned by one, and not funded by anyone in the trade. If a listing is wrong, tell us and we will fix it — usually the same day. If you are a business owner and want your listing gone, say so and it is gone, no argument.