With appkeep, your house has a maintenance plan: what needs doing, what it costs over the years, and which decisions can wait.
It’s for the owner of the house they live in — in Finland, the Netherlands, or Sweden for now. The rest of the EU is next, and the rest of the world after that.
You don’t know if it’s a €200 fix or a €4 000 replacement. You’ve Googled symptoms, got three open tabs and no clearer answer.
You sort it. You check whether the boiler’s age makes this a repair year or a replacement year. You see what a fair contractor brief looks like. You forward the quotes that come back, check what was read, and confirm the figures beside the fair band.
The first question to ask the contractor. A note in the home’s record so next time something stops, you don’t start from zero.
Maintained, not abandoned. The methodology stays current as standards change. Your home’s record builds with every season you use it.
The method is public: the guides and the mandate calculator are free to anyone. The €37 a year is the system that runs it on your house: the multi-year plan, the record, and the decisions as they come.
pay → set up your house → build your plan
A mandate is the cap a property manager hands a contractor: hours, local trade rate, call-out, materials. They proceed within it. If the cost will exceed it, they stop and explain why in writing before continuing.
Holding a quote already? Enter it below to see whether it lands in the typical range for the job. Or set the ceiling first: the cap you hand the contractor before any work begins.
This is the tool for a repair you need now: something is broken, and sending a mandate commissions the work under your ceiling. Work that can wait puts you in a stronger position — you have time to make contractors compete on more than price. How to compare quotes for planned work
Select a trade and a scope to calculate your mandate.
I have a maintenance issue: [what you see — the symptom, not the solution].
Location: [room / floor / area].
You are authorised up to €0 including VAT to complete this repair. If you expect the cost to exceed that amount, stop and provide a written cost indication and a timeframe for completion before proceeding.
Please confirm availability and expected timeframe.
You're signed in · run this in your fix flow and it files against your house.
Jonas calls an installation company. Repairman arrives: €90.00 call-out. Thirty minutes assessing: €32.50. €122.50 on the meter before any repair begins.
| Call-out | €90.00 |
| Diagnostic · 30 min | €32.50 |
| Labour · 3 h × €65 | €195.00 |
| Parts trip · 1 h | €65.00 |
| Materials | €100.00 |
| The bill | €482.50 |
The price is capped before the visit, not discovered after it. Jonas runs the calculator for plumbing at half a day and hands over the ceiling it produces, in writing. The same repair, under a cap:
| Labour · 3 h × €70 | €210.00 |
| Materials · as billed | €105.00 |
| Call-out · agreed | €55.00 |
| The bill | €370.00 |
| ↓ €112.50 saved · 23% | |
The ceiling is the cap, not the price. Jonas's ceiling is €575; his bill is €370: you pay what the work took. The ceiling sits above the reactive bill on purpose: it is sized to cover the full half day, not to predict the price. Most of the saving is the meter-running the mandate removed: the diagnostic on the clock, the parts trip billed as labour, the call-out never agreed. If the job needs more than €575, the contractor stops and explains in writing before continuing.
Describe the problem, not the solution. You write "find and address the cause of the leak", not "stop the leak". The contractor's expertise is the diagnosis; your mandate is the budget.
Three numbers travel with a repair and they are not interchangeable. An estimate predicts what the work will cost. A quote is the contractor's offer, and accepting it forms the contract. A mandate is neither: it is yours, set before either one arrives, and it says how far the contractor may go before stopping to check with you. You can issue one without knowing the price, which is the point, because at that stage you usually do not know it and neither does anyone else.
Often no, and the arithmetic is worth running before you call. Subtract your deductible from the repair cost. That difference, not the repair bill, is what the insurer would send you. Then work out what claiming costs: your annual premium times a realistic increase (15 percent is a conservative middle), times the years it persists, which is three at minimum and commonly five. If the payout is smaller than that running total, paying it yourself is cheaper. Large payouts, liability claims, and damage the insurer will hear about anyway go the other way.
Across the EEA the working band is about 55 to 100 an hour including VAT, with roughly 70 typical, and individual countries sit off that band in both directions: the Netherlands runs nearer 50 to 90 once BTW is in, while around Helsinki it is 70 to 110. Add a call-out fee of around 55. Materials vary more than labour does, so when budgeting use a ceiling rather than an average: a plumbing mandate sizes materials at up to 80 percent of labour. Finland's kotitalousvähennys and Sweden's ROT-avdrag both reduce the labour cost only, never materials.
The 4P rule is the framework professional property managers use to decide whether a defect needs acting on now. It asks whether the defect puts People at risk (safety or health), Pets and environment (contamination or harm), Production (use of the space), or Possessions (damage to belongings or the building). If any one of the four is at risk, the defect is urgent and the cost of waiting is no longer just the repair. If none is, you usually have time to get a second quote and to pick a cheaper moment in the year.
Compare cost per year of service, not the two prices. Divide the repair by the years it buys you; divide replacement by the lifespan of the new unit. The lower annual figure usually wins. Two gates decide the awkward middle: if the repair costs more than half of replacement AND the boiler has under 30% of its expected life left, replacing is almost always cheaper over the years that follow. One gate alone decides nothing, since an expensive repair on a young boiler is still worth doing. And there are three options here, not two: deferring with a date attached is the one most people forget.