Review management for a tradie comes down to three jobs: ask every customer, know when a review arrives, and reply to it. If a tool does those well, it's enough. Everything else on an enterprise feature list is built for franchises with 40 locations, not a sparky with two vans.
Search for "google review management" and the first results are mostly big platforms like Birdeye. They're good products for the businesses they're built for. A one-person plumbing business doesn't have those problems.
The four things a tradie needs
1. A way to ask every customer
This is where most of the value is. The reviews you don't get are the ones nobody asked for. A good setup asks every customer, a day or three after the job, with a direct link to your Google review form.
The ask has to follow the rules. Google bans offering discounts or gifts for reviews and bans asking only the happy customers. In Australia, the Spam Act requires consent, a clear sender and an unsubscribe option for commercial messages. The ACMA's guidance doesn't settle whether a review request is commercial, so get consent anyway. This is general information, not legal advice.
You can do this by hand with the free review link generator and a saved text. See how to ask for a Google review.
2. One place to see new reviews
You need to know when one lands. Check your Google Business Profile settings for what review alerts are available. If you also use Facebook and a lead platform like hipages, add a weekly check. See how to see all your Google reviews in one place.
3. Help replying
Replies are public, and Google has a help page with tips on writing them. The hard part is time. A draft you can edit beats a blank box on a Sunday night. Examples are in positive review responses and how to respond to a bad review.
4. A clean way to handle the bad ones
You can't delete a real customer's review. You can report one that breaks policy, and you can reply to the rest. Don't try to make complaints vanish. The ACCC's guidance says removing or editing genuine negative reviews to mislead consumers can breach the Australian Consumer Law. See can you delete a Google review.
What you probably don't need
Enterprise suites bundle a lot. Ask yourself whether you'd open each of these in a normal week.
- Review monitoring across 50 sites. You have Google and perhaps Facebook.
- Sentiment analysis dashboards. You know which jobs went sideways.
- Multi-location reporting. Useful for chains, dead weight for one depot.
- Review widgets for your website. Nice, but secondary to getting reviews.
- Review gating. Sending unhappy customers somewhere private and happy ones to Google is against Google's policy. Avoid any tool that offers it.
A multi-crew business with several branches is a different story, and those tools earn their price there.
How to compare options
Ask each vendor these before you sign anything:
- Do I own the reviews and the profile? (You should, because they live on Google.)
- Is there a contract, and what does it cost to leave?
- Does it ask every customer, or only the ones I pick?
- Does it ask consent before texting?
- Can I see the price without a sales call?
For comparison, hiring a marketing agency typically runs A$800 to A$2,500 a month, usually on a 6 or 12 month contract, and reviews are one line item among many.
Where Mitch fits
Mitch is a marketing tool for tradies that covers reviews alongside your Facebook and Instagram posts and your Google profile. After you send in a finished job, it texts your customer a review link 24 to 72 hours later (the customer needs to have given consent, and you tick that when you enter their mobile). When a review comes in, Mitch drafts a reply for you to edit and approve. It is month to month with no contract.
It won't verify claims or write reviews, and it doesn't do enterprise reporting.
Plan: Where reviews sit in the plans
Reviews start on Local (A$249 a month), which adds review requests, AI-drafted replies and an inbox to the Facebook, Instagram and Google profile posts. Complete (A$579) adds website SEO fixes and a new blog page every week. See [pricing](/au/pricing).
The setup that works for most trades is plain: a review link on every invoice, a text after each job, and a weekly reply session. Start with the pillar guide on getting more Google reviews, and see the reviews page for what Mitch does. More in the Google reviews hub.
Review management without the enterprise price tag
Try Mitch free for 14 days. No card needed, cancel any time.