What the law says, and what it does not
Nothing in French law requires a tradesperson to draw up quotes free of charge. A quote is a piece of assessment work like any other: you are entitled to charge for it. The only real constraint is a duty to inform. The customer must know that you charge, and how much, before you start working. A charge announced after the fact is indefensible, and almost always turns into a dispute.
Conversely, the law does require a written quote in certain cases: call-out, repair and maintenance work in the home above a certain amount, and several regulated activities such as removals, home-help services or optics. Do not confuse the two questions: compulsory does not mean free. A quote can be required by regulation and charged for by you, as long as the customer was told first.
The case for the free quote
The reasoning is simple: a quote is a sales tool, not a service. It gets you through the customer's door, it puts you in competition on ground you know well, and charging for it adds one more obstacle before signature. For a private customer who is already hesitating, a quote they have to pay for is enough to send the call to the competitor down the road.
This school works well when the pricing is quick, when the average job is modest and when local competition is fierce. It carries a real cost, and that cost is always underestimated: the travel, the evening spent writing it up, then the follow-ups. That cost exists whether you invoice it or not; it ends up either in your prices or in your evenings. Its main flaw has a name: the alibi quote. The customer who needs three quotes for their insurer, or who is looking for a figure to wave at the firm they have already chosen, costs you nothing but time.
The case for the paid quote
Here you are not charging for the piece of paper, you are charging for the study. A site survey, measurements, a drawing, sizing work, a technical visit to an old building: these are identifiable hours of work, and giving them away is far from obvious when they run to half a day. Charging also sorts the enquiries: a customer who agrees to pay for a study is almost always a customer who will go ahead with the job.
The version that lands best is the deductible one. You quote a clear price for the study, and you make clear that it comes off the final invoice in full if the job goes to you. The customer loses nothing by signing, you do not work for free if they do not. The real risk with this school is a teaching one: you have to be able to explain it in one sentence, on the phone, without sounding like you are guarding against a bad payer.
The middle road, which plenty of people take without saying so
Between the two sits a comfortable position: the quote stays free, but the diagnostic visit is charged. For a plumber called out to a leak, the diagnosis is a technical act, not a sales visit. The pricing that follows from it costs the customer nothing extra.
The variants are easy to hold: free within a set radius of the workshop, charged beyond it; free for routine jobs, charged for complex studies. What matters is not which rule you pick, it is having written it down somewhere and announcing it the same way every time, from the first phone call.
The factor that weighs heavier than being free
A customer who contacts three firms very often signs with the first one that gets back to them, not with the cheapest. While the problem is still fresh, they are comparing firms. A week later they are comparing prices, and price is the only thing left to defend yourself with.
A fast quote is therefore a weapon, and the only one you control entirely: it depends neither on the market, nor on your competitors, nor on your size. A decent price sent the same evening beats a perfect one sent ten days later, and it often beats a discount too.
How to hold that deadline without spending your evenings on it
Speed does not come from willpower, it comes from preparation. A library of standard lines for the jobs that keep coming back, a template already on your letterhead, an enquiry form that collects from the start the information you are always missing: with that, a routine quote takes a few minutes to write instead of an hour.
The rest runs on autopilot. That is what we set up around quotes: the enquiry arrives complete, the document goes out with electronic signature, and the follow-ups run on their own until the customer replies. The circuit is the same for a plumber and heating engineer as for a joiner or an electrician; only the content of the lines changes.
What to settle this week
Three questions are enough. How much time does a quote actually cost you, travel included? What share of your enquiries look like alibi quotes? And how many days pass on average between the call and the moment you send? If the answer to the last question is more than forty-eight hours, that is where your room for improvement sits, well before the question of charging.