By Timothy Oommen, Owner — Laundini Laundromat | laundinilaundromat.com
Pricing is one of those decisions that looks simple from the outside and is anything but from the inside.
Set it too high and you lose customers before they even try you. Set it too low and you build a business that runs you into the ground while technically growing. Get it right and you have something sustainable — a price that works for the customer, covers the real costs, and leaves enough margin to actually reinvest in the service.
Here is exactly how I arrived at our pricing, what I looked at, what surprised me, and why I made the specific choices I made. No spin. Just the math and the thinking behind it.
What the Market Looks Like
Before I set a single number, I looked at what everyone else was charging.
Local laundromats offering pickup and delivery in the Chicago area were landing between $1.50 and $1.79 per pound — with delivery charged as a separate fee on top. So you’d see $1.50/lb plus a $5 or $7 delivery fee tacked on at checkout. The actual cost to the customer was higher than the headline number suggested.
Then there are the big players. Companies like Poplin are charging around $2.25 per pound. They have marketing budgets, brand recognition, and venture capital behind them. They also, in many cases, don’t own their own infrastructure. They’re aggregating labor. Coordinating third-party drivers. Building margin on top of margin on top of margin to cover the layers between the customer and the actual person doing the wash.
I looked at all of that and asked a different question than most people ask.
Not: what can I charge?
But: what can I charge if I own everything myself?
The Advantage Nobody Else Has
I have my own laundromats. Four of them across Cook County. I am not paying a facility fee to wash your clothes. I am not renting machine time from someone else. The infrastructure exists and I own it.
I have been running delivery operations since November 2022 — first with BiteBring, now with Laundini. I know this business from the inside out. I know where the costs are, where the waste is, and where efficiency saves money that can be passed directly to the customer.
And I have my own van and dedicated drivers. Not gig economy contractors who are also delivering groceries and furniture and whatever else the app sends them. Dedicated drivers who work for Laundini, represent Laundini, and are accountable to Laundini.
That combination — owned facilities, owned delivery, owned marketing, owned operations — means my cost structure looks fundamentally different from a company that’s outsourcing any piece of that chain. And a different cost structure means I can charge what the big guys charge for delivery alone, cover everything, and still come out ahead.
So I set the rate at $1.50 per pound with free delivery included.
Not $1.50 plus a delivery fee. $1.50, everything in. Door to door. Washed, dried, folded, returned.
The Real Costs — What People Don’t See
Let me walk you through what actually goes into a pickup and delivery order, because I think most customers have no idea how many variables sit behind that per-pound number.
The van. We run a dedicated delivery vehicle that gets 13 to 15 miles per gallon. Fuel costs are real and they fluctuate. A week where gas prices spike is a week where the margin on every delivery tightens. I absorb that rather than passing it to the customer with a fuel surcharge, because surprise fees are exactly the kind of thing that erodes trust and I’m not interested in eroding trust.
Driver time. A dedicated driver is not free. They are a human being who deserves to be compensated properly for showing up on time, handling customers’ belongings with care, and representing Laundini at every doorstep they visit. The driver is the face of this service. Treating that role as a cost to minimize rather than an investment to protect would be a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the service worth using.
Tips go directly to the driver. All of them, in full. If you’ve had a great pickup or delivery experience, that’s the person who earned it.
Utilities. The dryers at Laundini run on gas — which is more cost-efficient than electric at commercial scale, but still a real and fluctuating operating cost every single month. The washers are a different story entirely. Water in Evanston is expensive in a way that catches most people off guard — I pay per gallon coming in and per gallon going out through the sewer line. Every wash cycle costs money twice. Once to fill the machine and once to drain it. That is not a figure of speech. That is literally money going down the drain, and it compounds across hundreds of loads a week in a way that adds up faster than you’d think. It is one of the less glamorous realities of running a laundromat that nobody puts in the brochure.
Machine maintenance. Commercial equipment requires maintenance. Parts break. Technicians cost money. A machine that’s out of commission is a machine not generating revenue while still representing a capital investment that needs to be serviced. That cost lives in the per-pound rate whether the customer thinks about it or not.
Operations. The sorting, the washing, the drying, the folding, the quality checking — every step has a labor cost. Doing it right takes time. I don’t want to rush any of it, which means the time has to be priced into the service honestly.
Marketing, website, app. Built and managed entirely in-house. No agency fees, no outsourced developers. I build and maintain everything myself, which keeps this cost lower than it would be for most businesses — but it’s still a real cost of running the operation.
Why I Will Never Outsource Delivery
This is the part I feel most strongly about, so I’m going to say it plainly.
The delivery driver is the face of Laundini. They are the human being who shows up at your door, handles your belongings, and represents everything we’ve built. They are the last touchpoint before your laundry gets back to you and the first touchpoint when it leaves.
Outsourcing that to a third-party gig platform — an Uber, a DoorDash, a contracted courier service — would be, in my honest opinion, grossly irresponsible. Not because those platforms don’t have good drivers. But because a driver who is also delivering groceries and furniture and pharmacy prescriptions in the same shift has no particular reason to treat your laundry bag with the specific care it deserves. They have no accountability to Laundini. They have no training from Laundini. They have no investment in whether you come back.
Everything at Laundini is handled in-house. Delivery, operations, washing, drying, folding, marketing, website, app. A to Z. Nothing is outsourced — not even to save a few dollars per delivery. Especially not to save a few dollars per delivery.
I have done every part of this job myself. I have driven the van. I have washed the loads. I have folded the laundry. I have built the website and written the marketing. If something needs to get done and no one else is available to do it, I will do it myself — because this is my business and I refuse to let any part of it be handled carelessly just because it’s inconvenient or expensive to do it properly.
The only scenario in which I would consider third-party delivery is if Uber offered to do it for free and guaranteed the same standard of care. They don’t. So we won’t.
What the Pricing Actually Means for You
At $1.50 per pound with free delivery, a typical residential order of 20 to 25 pounds costs $30 to $37.50. Door to door. Sorted, washed on the right cycle, dried carefully, folded, and returned within 24 hours.
Compare that to the time cost of doing it yourself — driving to a laundromat, waiting through wash and dry cycles, folding everything, driving home. That’s an hour and a half to two hours of your time, minimum, plus the cost of the machines, plus the gas to get there and back.
What is two hours of your time worth? Because that’s really the comparison.
For Northwestern students and staff, the rate is $1.00 per pound with the first pickup free — because I know what it means to be a student managing classes, work, and life simultaneously, and laundry should be one less thing on the list. More universities coming soon as we build capacity at our South Side location.
For commercial clients — restaurants, bars, hotels, gyms — it’s $1.25 per pound with a 30-pound minimum and bleach included. Scheduled recurring pickups so your operation never stops.
The Honest Version
I priced this service the way I priced it because I own the infrastructure, I know the delivery business, and I am genuinely committed to giving customers the best possible price without cutting corners on anything that matters.
I could charge more. The market would probably bear it. But I got into this to build something I’m proud of, not to extract maximum margin from people who just need clean laundry.
The price is fair. The service is as close to perfect as I can make it every single day. And if something ever falls short of that — you know where to reach me.
Book your pickup at laundinilaundromat.com. All of Cook County. 24-hour turnaround. Free delivery, always. Questions about pricing? Email info@laundinilaundromat.com — I’ll give you a straight answer.
Timothy Oommen is the founder and owner of Laundini Laundromat, with locations in Evanston, Bucktown, Skokie, and Wheeling, IL.