LawnStarter Reviews

I never do reviews, but LawnStarter/scam has a major lawsuit in the works and a F rating on BBB for a reason. Usually bad reviews aren’t justified, but the ones for this definitely are. It’s a ripoff for both customers and providers with unrealistic expectations and penalties for not meeting them regardless of the situation.

Customer set the wrong day and needs to reschedule? Incomplete job. Thunderstorms that day and need to reschedule? Incomplete job. Now your account is paused from receiving jobs for 3 days for incomplete jobs cause “sorry, that’s the way it works.. is there anything else?” - Customer Support.

Trust me just build your business and customer base on your own. The whole point of being a business owner is being your own boss and not having the entire destiny and success of your business, and quality of customer service in someone else’s hands esp when that someone is a low IQ pimp/slave owner, w/ a rudimentary algorithm designed to keep you low tier so they don’t have to honor and uphold their end, H1B-visa “customer support” on the other side of the planet, and AI chat bots (see the response to this and everything else). Plus they take a huge chunk of profits, so it’s impossible to properly quote other jobs & services without either being super underpaid, or significantly overcharging the customer who obviously isn’t going to agree to overpay. Stay away, thank me later.

I became a service provider with LawnStarter , first week went kinda smoothly. But then LawnStarter began to fail left and right. You need to upload before and after pictures for everything. Not an issue to do, but and issue to actually upload them. LawnStarter won’t accept uploading pictures, LawnStarter won’t let you submit bids for jobs. While that is all going on they penalize you for being late on your submissions. Went from a tier 1 provider with an excellent rating, to a week later take 2 ans my rating plummeted. None of which was in my control. If LawnStarter worked like they keep saying it’s going to then I wouldn’t have a problem. But the fact that they are penalizing you for issues that land and fall on their end is absurd. Can’t even begin to explain how much of my free ans unpaid time I spent emailing back and forth with the service representatives. Bottom line is they kept telling me after talking to them that LawnStarter would be fixed, when I would just encounter the same issues as before, with nothing being fixed. All LawnStarter did was penalize me for their issues ans sully my businesses name locally in the process. I might be willing to change this review if they ever get their ducks in a row, but I’m not holding my breathe on that one. Good luck to anyone that wants to work using this platform, expect to waste your time and not being paid to help develop their broke AF app.

Wasted about $60 in gas going to jobs that could be done for one reason or another. One was an abandoned house with nothing but brush and trees growing around it about waste high. Next I drove what was supposed to only be 16 miles which added up to 80 round trip somehow. I get there and the address isn’t marked or doesn’t exist, can’t get ahold of customer or support (closed on weekends) LawnStarter is exactly the same as lawn love which I don’t even understand how they got through the review process. LawnStarter itself in my opinion is poorly designed and lacking in functionality. Even when I could contact support you can’t cancel the job without them singing your score. Oh and my first yard was supposed to be .14 acres and it was about an acre for $50. Do yourself a favor and stay away!

On multiple jobs, I was notified to go to the property for a set amount which I accepted, But when I got there the grass was A LOT higher than what explained and there was debris everywhere from a storms (assuming). I called back and said the property isn’t what they explained and that there was falling trees and limbs everywhere, they asked me to give a quote to haul off and I told them we don’t haul because we have our mowers on the trailer. They said they’ll have to give the jobs to someone else….. I said cool, but I’ll need my travel fee. They said NO because I wasn’t on a certain “TIER” yet to receive travel fees. Again, this was the 2nd time that day this happened and 3rd time in general. Horrible experience, horrible policies, terrible customer service, horrible business. DO NOT USE THEM!!!!!!

LawnStarter is so clunky. You would think in the year 2024 a company would be able to figure out how to make their app work correctly. You can’t look at your completed jobs or the pay for each job easily.

In addition to that, I get about 55 notifications a day from LawnStarter. The notifications are completely useless though and tell me to do tasks that I’ve already done. One of the notifications that keeps popping up is review your performance. I’ve reviewed it 600 times, but the notification still stays there. I’ve turned off notifications for LawnStarter . Now it gives me a notification when I open LawnStarter saying that I have notifications off.

Another thing that is really annoying and unnecessary about LawnStarter is that it needs my background location on all the time? No it should be when I’m completing jobs or using LawnStarter .

When uploading photos of a property, you can only select 5 photos at a time to upload. There will be incidents where you need to take a lot of angle photos to get paid (long grass and etc). Thus, when you have 30 or more, it's annoying. Also, during the upload, app ask if the select photo is ok to use on each and every one that is uploaded. That's annoying. After submitting long grass with what you just did before. you are then require to resubmit everything you just did to complete the job. Again, it's annoying and a waste of time sitting in the Vehicle to do the same task twice. After you have submit the long grass and complete the task, in a day or two, your long grass claim is decline because of insufficient photos (not enough before or after photos). Even though you have submit every photos you got (twice) before and now, you have to do it a third time from an email for decline long grass claim.

For example: I had only ever received 5 star reviews. I took a new property for Dec. 1st that hadn’t been mowed since the beginning of November. The customer said it was under 6 inches but it was closer to 10 inches. So the customer was going to be charged double ($80). I spent an hour and a half cutting, edging and trimming, cleaning up. Also it was raining. I finished and some time later get a notification that the customer said I didn’t complete the mow. I had about 15 photos of the mow and so I said that it had 100% been completed. Then I get a notification that there was a dispute that I had done an uneven mow. The uneven mow was accompanied by a photo of my tire tracks in the wet grass. So long story short I was told that I had to go back or they would reassign the customer, pull my fee, and I get a bad rating. LOL, I told them to go right ahead, and I swiftly deleted LawnStarter right after. I don’t need to work for free because some clown was upset he got charged more after lying about his grass length.

This company has some of the worst customer service. They outsource the reps who work from home. The fees are ridiculous and you would be better served finding customers via Facebook marketing boosts rather than spending money on their fees. We found it was more cost efficient to cut ties with them.

Stay clear... the straw that broke the camels back if you will, was the last mow for a customer where it had to be double cut. Everyone knows the northeast was inundated with rain in spring of 2020. Every customer we mowed for the past week was double and/or triple cut. We placed a double payout request (which you can do). It was denied because of “insufficient evidence to support the claim”. We submitted pictures and explained the claim. We told them we don’t work for free. We are sure you don’t work for free either. DON’T USE THESE PEOPLE. You won’t make money.

Let’s start. The idea of LawnStarter is to connect you with guests who need lawn care. And LawnStarter takes a percentage of every cut. It’s close to 20 percent. LawnStarter has the absolute worst customer service you have ever heard of. It’s a purposeful loop of mindlessness that never gets you to a solution, so you just give up. The quality of clients from LawnStarter is horrendous. I have had trap houses/drug dens/almost foreclosures that are derelict, yet somehow I’m supposed to do a $35 cut on grass over 3 feet tall. I have disconnected from LawnStarter and happily make better connections from handing out flyers with hand written messages. Save yourself the hassle and these guys trying to threaten $5000 fines for stealing customers. Also LawnStarter tracks you all day and night. It’s wildly invasive, and issues with LawnStarter itself? I could go on. The messages sent via text don’t link to LawnStarter so they are pointless. LawnStarter often has no work available because of how dissatisfied most clients are. Please. Stay off apps like this that think you are worth Pennies on the Dollar for your time.

They’ve made changes to the way their algorithm distributes jobs . They have multiple tiers that range from Platinum Pro to Bronze pro but the only “Pros” who actually get jobs are gold and platinum. No sense in trying to contact their help desk either it’s just a handful of people reading from a company manual while giving you excuses . Also all the customer has to do is call them and make up some kind of issue and they refund the money 50% of the payout (which is already woefully underpaid) . A $50 dollar yard will get you paid roughly $35 but they don’t tell you and the customer always lies about how high the grass is and once you claim it you gotta do it or it hurts your rating which drops your overall tier . Also they charge you $1.50 PER JOB that you complete and they call this their “damage fee” which includes a $5000 deductible which you are forced into with this new update . Run from LawnStarter , you might as well go work for someone because they try and tell you how you should run your business while cheating the pro at every turn

If you are trying to run a legitimate business stay away. Every single property I have received has been under quoted by a large margin with no account for obstacles in lawns and slopes or anything else that increases lawn time. Square footage is just the starting point to quoting.
I showed up to one house that that was $30. It had a steep slope I couldn’t mow and a ton of other string trimming. Easily a $70-80 house. Spoke to customer support and they had the audacity to ask me to do the house anyway and dispute the payment later. No professional business works without guarantee of payment. I spoke to a manager and she openly told me they try to be cheap then she walked back what she said to clarify that it’s because the mowing doesn’t include chemical work. No lawn guy charges that low for not including weed control.
They are taking advantage of new providers that don’t know their numbers yet and they know it. Don’t support this business do your own marketing and your profit margins will be much higher. this app is by far the most expensive way to acquire a client given how big a slice they take. Run.

It’s all a tier base program the algorithm they’ve created is meant to keep you on a lower tier. You also don’t jump tiers for three months at a time. Definitely do not accept any quotes. It’s next to impossible to communicate with the customer and if you cancel you lower your rating. You don’t get paid to go out and do a quote and they’ll schedule all your quotes on different days. If you try to reschedule them that will hurt your score. They will give you jobs to do on certain days if you reschedule those that’ll hurt your score. At first you will get jobs if they are available in your area $30-$40 lawn jobs not to mention you’re going to end up having to pay taxes on this. If you don’t accept these jobs, they will not offer you other jobs to do because your rating will be low. If a job does pop up in your area you have about two minutes before some other person will grab it so you don’t get to read any information about the place. I’m sure there’s a lot more negative things I could say about it but if you’re just starting out and you need some jobs, I guess it’s good. You have to work on their schedule that makes no sense.

If you’re starting a lawn care business then market and do it on your own. LawnStarter will penalize you for customers canceling on their end and no verification with their providers. Being penalized means you get no jobs. I started my own business to operate on my terms. I don’t need an app to tell me I can’t take anymore customers. They don’t care about providers as all of their customer service uses AI to respond. As a provider with a 4.8 rating being penalized for customers simply not wanting a service anymore due to budget doesn’t make sense. Get off LawnStarter and compete with their prices.

*edit*
After I posted this review my stats on LawnStarter completely dropped within 24 hours. I all of a sudden had 5 jobs added onto my stats that said “not complete” bringing my completion percentage down to 60% or otherwise ineligible to get new clients on LawnStarter (I didn’t have any appointments with LawnStarter this week so how did I not complete jobs I never assigned). They’re trying to kick off the providers that have complaints about LawnStarter by putting their status in red so no more jobs can be collected. If you respect your business name you won’t let a garbage app like this destroy what YOU are trying to create and build.

LawnStarter is definitely not worth it. You better off knocking door-to-door. LawnStarter lies and says you don’t even complete half of your jobs. I’ve completed every single one of my jobs and they said on LawnStarter . I’ve only completed 13. Out of 20. and I contacted support and they said sorry there’s nothing we can do. it’s automatic system when I’ve done everything in my possible way to complete the job as they wanted even knocked on the door and asked the customer. Is there anything else you would like done is everything how you want it but somehow I did not do my job. I strongly urge Apple to review these apps for compliance with App Store guidelines regarding fraud, scam activity, and misleading practices. They use a tier system for workers that is nearly impossible to reach, creating false expectations of unfair pay and advancement.
I have repeatedly been marked as “not completing jobs,” even when I completed them exactly as required. This unfairly penalizes honest workers and can impact earnings.
The apps create a cycle where workers are blamed and punished despite fulfilling their side of the agreement, making it extremely difficult to succeed. And move up in their tear system, This behavior not only hurts independent contractors but also misleads users of LawnStarter Store into downloading an app that does not operate transparently or fairly.

This platform will send you on wild goose hunts to lawns that aren’t scoped or booked correctly and then if you get any bad review or can’t do the job because it’s not booked correctly they penalize your metrics and take your work. Companies like this are dangerous to the pro and the customer. I did 45 jobs, of those 2 were booked correctly. Most had grass waist high and were listed as last now within a week so you can’t report the long grass and you either get bad metrics for skipping the job or a bad review from the customer for not doing out of scope work. The better business bureau needs to look into this platform and get them on track or shut it down! And if you’re a customer, just know lawn starter is playing games with your lawn care provider and trying to take advantage of them. Do direct business with your provider and cut companies like this out of business until they can learn to be ethical!

I am a new business in the DFW area, and have done well so far, however, most clients through LawnStarter have cancelled service over a year and half ago, and this app still sends you to them. Costing far more money than what is necessary. Its hurting my business. Please be careful and make sure to ask clients before performing service. this app also isnt paying enough for large corner lots that take far more time. The rescheduling shouldn't hurt our ratings either. I went to a clients home and the back yard was over two feet tall, and i asked for a tall grass fee increase and they cancelled as a result. So holding the client to photos prior would be a great help. Im not real happy with the current status of this app. Most clients are more than happy to cancel with them and use you direct, its also more of a fair price that way.

The people who work behind provider support have no idea what they are doing. Maybe someone just created LawnStarter and realized it works (duh) but has no idea about anything to do with the professional lawn industry.

When a customer signs up they have an option of choosing weekly or bi-weekly services BUT these services only include “basic” Mowing which means no bush trimming or weed control which as WE ALL know is very highly needed especially to maintain a great looking lawn. I have had customers complain because I wasn’t spraying for weeds or trimming the bushes, well duh!!! You’re not paying for it! But people think that these additional services are included when you hire a company (as they should be) and they are not wrong but this app doesn’t include that option when quoting the customer sadly.

Hopefully this app will give customers the option of adding weed control and hedge trimming with their future recurring services.

I also had a this app team member once quote $30 to customer for a nearly $200 job.

Another time a this app provider help member didn’t know how weed killer works. After the customer called to complain, He asked me when it was going to take effect when the job was done months ago lol!

On top of a lot of other things.

Lol oh well, this platform really helps with the bills though, so no complaints there.

I’ve been working for lawn starter for about a month and a half and I think for a just starting out person trying to get known and branch out this is perfect but it does have some flaws because if it rains and you reschedule it says it don’t doc you for inclement weather and I don’t think that’s fair to the providers nor the customer because that would give a false overall rating

Started providing services w/ this app and LawnStarter constantly crashes when uploading before and after pics. Adds a lot of time to route and have had to call customer support a LOT to help with yards that are already done due to overbooking on the marketplace. Pretty long hold times when I call pro support BUT when I get online, they are very helpful.

Also, I had met 100% of my services scheduled and took a big hit when I had to reschedule due to lightning and rain (customers first service and they were completely fine rescheduling due to the weather). I think this is a fundamental flaw in the rating system as it encourages providers to complete jobs when yard conditions aren’t great AND in unsafe conditions. If they could work out the kinks, it could be a great app. Still pretty good tho

It’s a good way to fill in schedules but if you are an actual established business like we are, you have to account for doing things like employees do like checking in, sending pictures, waiting 3-5 days for your money, very inconvenient when you are trying to get more services or suggesting. Customers in LawnStarter don’t take you seriously but will pay you when you do a good job… sometimes. Sometimes you can give them more than they asked to help them and you get crapped on or cancelled for no reason. Speaking of that, if you cancel a schedule or reschedule, you get points knocked off.. that’s not business class to me but oh well, business is business. Prices are lower than usual and as a business it can hurt rather than help so be careful. I don’t know if LawnStarter hijacks money off the top but take it as you see it. Be ready to start asking for more money because customers leave sour elements like major overgrowth.