Far less often than price monitoring tools assume, and far more often than most service firms manage.
Retailers reprice within the day because their competitors do. A cleaning firm updates its published price list once or twice a year, usually when wages force it. Checking hourly would cost real money to learn nothing.
That slowness is also why the task never gets done: anything needed twice a year has no natural trigger, so it waits for a crisis.
Before your busy season, when a wrong price costs the most. After it, when you can see what winning and losing actually looked like. And whenever a competitor visibly changes something — a new site, a new service, an advert with a number in it.
Two scheduled checks a year plus opportunistic ones catches nearly everything that matters in this trade.
Not the prices themselves — the drift. Watching weekly tells you which direction the market is moving and who moved first, and that is a different, more useful fact than any single snapshot.
It is also the only way to catch a competitor beginning to undercut before it shows up in your calendar as a bad month.
Each check is twenty minutes of reading, multiplied by every service you sell and every competitor worth watching, with the unit conversion redone each time because nobody kept the last one.
The task is not hard. It is unrewarding enough, often enough, that it loses to everything else in the week — which is exactly the kind of work worth handing to something that does not get bored.
Everything above is a job you can do by hand. It is also the job that quietly never happens twice. Competitor price monitoring for service businesses explains how the same reading works when something else keeps doing it.
Where service firms actually publish their prices, how to read a price list that hides behind a quote form, and what to record so the comparison is still useful next season.
A quiet phone has several possible causes and price is only one. How to rule it in or out before you cut anything.