Our booking form asks you to pick one: Standard or Deep. If you’ve never hired a cleaning service, that’s a strangely high-stakes choice to make about work you can’t see yet. Pick wrong and you either overpay or you’re disappointed. So here’s the honest difference, and a dead-simple way to know which one’s right for your home.
Standard Clean: keeping a clean home clean
A Standard Clean (starting at $164) is maintenance. It covers all the surfaces you see and use every day and keeps them consistently fresh:
- Kitchen: counters, sink, stovetop, appliance exteriors, floors
- Bathrooms: toilets, showers, sinks, mirrors, floors
- All living areas: dusting, vacuuming, mopping
- General tidying and trash
It’s designed to hold a home at a steady baseline. What it’s not designed to do is dig out months of built-up grime in a single visit.
Deep Clean: the reset
A Deep Clean (starting at $205) is everything in a Standard Clean plus all the spots that get skipped on a regular basis:
- Baseboards, door frames, and trim
- Detailed bathroom scrubbing, including grout and buildup
- Kitchen degreasing and detail work
- Blinds, vents, and light fixtures
- The reachable, easy-to-ignore corners that add up
This is the top-to-bottom reboot. If you want to get the most out of one, it’s worth knowing how to prep for a deep clean first.
The simple test: which do you need?
Ask yourself one question. When was this home last professionally, thoroughly cleaned?
- Within the last few weeks, and it’s been kept up: a Standard Clean is your move.
- A while ago, or never, or you can see buildup starting: you want a Deep Clean.
That’s really the whole decision. Not sure? When in doubt, deep. It’s far better to reset once and maintain than to book a Standard Clean and feel let down because it was never built to tackle a backlog.
Why first-timers almost always start with a Deep Clean
Here’s the pattern we see constantly. A new client books a Standard Clean, expecting it to erase a year of normal living. It doesn’t, because that’s not its job, and they walk away underwhelmed. The homes that are happiest do it in the right order: start with one Deep Clean to reset the baseline, then keep it there with recurring Standard Cleans. Cheaper over time, better result, no disappointment.
Trying to figure out how often to maintain after that reset? We laid that out in how often you should get your house cleaned.
A quick note on move-in and move-out
If your home is empty because you’re moving, neither of these is quite right. That’s its own category, priced and scoped differently, and you can read up on the move-in and move-out versions separately.
Ready to book the right one?
See exactly what each costs for your home on our pricing calculator, or browse the full list of services. We clean across the Triangle, and first-time clients get 10% off the clean.