Homejoy brings its cleaning service to London, priced at £13 per hour

Homejoy, the service for booking a domestic cleaner in a click of a button, has launched in London today.

First available in the US and Canada and fresh off the back of a $38 million round of funding back in December, Homejoy’s platform is now allowing Londoners to book a cleaner for £13 per hour.

Rather than employ cleaners itself (which would put it more in the realm of a cleaning company than a tech startup) Homejoy uses a network of contractors.

“They’re typically individual businesses that are starting out, or [existing ones where] we help supplement their book of business,” Adora Cheung, co-founder of Homejoy told TNW.

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But with no shortage of traditional cleaning services in the city, Homejoy is banking on the simplicity of the service driving uptake. There are also other cleaning startups like Mopp and Hassle — both of which charge £10 per hour — already operational  in the capital too, so it will need to find a way to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

Despite the lower prices of its rivals, Cheung says that Homejoy is aiming to build a sustainable network of reliable cleaners, as well as customers.

“Our pricing structure has been designed to give our customers the best quality service at an affordable rate. At the same time, this price enables us to ensure that every cleaning professional we work with receives fair and competitive payment for their work – up to £9.50 an hour.”

Competition clearly doesn’t concern Cheung though; she views London as another potential New York City success story for Homejoy:

New York City, within a year, became our biggest market. The people are tech-savvy, there are many young professionals — there are lots of comparables to it. In New York City, we’ve grown pretty rapidly, we continue to do double digit growth, we have hundreds of cleaners of the platform.

With the focus on London for now, Homejoy says the question isn’t necessarily where next in the UK it could launch, but where across Europe.

The biggest thing is to figure out where people really, really want us and so we rely a lot on people telling us “you should come here!”… We get a lot of requests on the website saying “why aren’t you here yet!?”

Coverage in London at launch includes all of Zones 1 – 4, part of Zone 5 and part of Zone 6, but by the end of the year, Homejoy hopes that it will cover the whole of the Greater London region.

Beyond cleaning

The obvious other question is whether Homejoy will be branching out into other domestic chores. While this remains a possibility for the future, it doesn’t sound like one that’s on the near-horizon, according to Cheung.

Our long-term vision is to be the ‘get help button’ for your home, so it’s not just if you’re house is dirty, it’s any issue in the home, but that’s the long term. Right now, we’re very focused on cleaning itself because we want to get it right and deliver the best service we can possibly deliver.

We don’t want to be the jack of all trades and the master of nothing, we want to be master of one thing first, and then go on to the next.

There are however, native mobile apps still due to arrive this year. Until then, the mobile-optimized website is still the quickest way to book a Homejoy cleaner, should you so wish.

➤ Homejoy

Featured Image Credit – Shutterstock