What a free consult usually is
When a painting company advertises a free color consultation, the visit is part of their sales process. Someone comes out, looks at your rooms, offers a few color ideas, and leaves you a quote. Some are genuinely helpful. But the color advice is a byproduct — the goal of the visit is the quote, and the person giving it is usually an estimator, not a designer.
The hidden cost shows up later. A color chosen in twenty minutes, from a two-inch chip, in one kind of light, is a gamble. If the "warm white" goes pink in your north-facing bedroom, fixing it means paying to paint the room twice. Free advice that leads to a $4,000 mistake isn't free.
What the Paint Plan is
The Paint Plan flips the order: design first, quote second, painting last. We spend an hour in your home, capture a Matterport 3D scan, and measure every wall. Back at the studio, a designer builds a room-by-room palette around your light, your floors, and the finishes you're keeping. You see the colors rendered onto photos of your own rooms and as large swatches on your walls before anything is decided. Then you get a fixed price calculated from measured surface area — not an estimate that grows mid-job.
It costs $499 because it's a real deliverable, not a sales call. And it's credited in full when you book the paint job — so if we paint, the plan effectively costs you nothing. If you don't book, you keep everything and can hand it to any painter you like.