Why We Charge Zero Callout Fee — And Why It's Got Everything To Do With Our Black Geely EX5

Most Adelaide IT companies charge a callout fee just to roll up to your door. Anywhere from $80 to $120 — sometimes more — *before* anyone has touched the problem.

We don't.

That's not because we're trying to be heroes. It's because the maths actually works in our favour, and we'd rather pass the saving back to you than pocket it. Here's the story behind the black Geely EX5 you'll see parked on your driveway — and why charging it up between jobs is the reason your callout is free.

The petrol-to-electric switch

A traditional mobile IT business runs a diesel ute or a petrol van. Realistic numbers for an Adelaide-based business doing four to six call-outs a day:

• Fuel: $80–$120 per day
• Servicing, oil changes, exhaust components
• Engine wear, gearbox wear, brakes wearing twice as fast because of stop-start city driving

The standard answer to all of that has always been: charge the customer a callout fee to cover it. Fair enough.

But the moment we did our first round of Adelaide jobs in a fully-electric Geely EX5, the spreadsheet broke.

$80 of petrol becomes $8 of electricity

That's not a typo. The numbers are roughly tenfold.

A full charge of the EX5's battery — enough to comfortably handle a full day of metro Adelaide call-outs — costs us about $8 to $10 of off-peak electricity from the wall. Charging up during a job (which is the photo you can see at the top of this post) takes around 20–40 minutes on a fast public charger and costs us a few dollars more. Either way, the fuel cost per kilometre is now somewhere around 20–25 percent of what a comparable petrol van costs.

Servicing's a similar story. An electric drivetrain has dramatically fewer moving parts than a petrol engine. No oil changes. No spark plugs. No exhaust. The brakes barely wear because most of our deceleration is regenerative — the motor itself slows the car down and tops up the battery while it does so.

When your single biggest day-to-day operating cost drops by 75–80 percent, you have two choices: pocket the difference and quietly extend your margins, or hand the saving straight back to your customers.

We picked the second one.

What "Zero Callout Fee" actually means in practice

Here's how it works in plain English:

• You ring 1800 836 390 and tell us what's broken
• We do free over-the-phone triage and tell you honestly whether it needs a visit
• If it does, we drive out to you with no callout fee on the meter
• You get a fixed, upfront quote *before* any work starts
• You only pay when we've actually fixed your problem
• All our labour is backed by our [No Fix · No Fee promise](/) plus a 7-day labour warranty

The dollars that *would* have been your callout fee, in the old model, are now your savings. Same fix, less money.

The South Australian renewables angle

There's a bonus you might not have thought about. Every kilometre we drive in the EX5 is powered by the South Australian grid — and SA's grid is famously renewable-heavy. On any given sunny weekday afternoon, well over half of the state's electricity is coming from solar and wind. There are still days when SA hits 100% renewable generation for hours at a stretch.

That means when we drive across town to fix your slow PC, recover your data, or set up your Ubiquiti gear, we're doing it on energy that's largely come from rooftops, solar farms and wind turbines in SA. There's no exhaust pipe emitting anything in your driveway. There's no diesel engine idling outside your home while we work.

We don't make a song and dance about it on every job — most customers are just delighted not to be hit with a callout fee — but if you're someone who cares about that side of things, it's a real and genuine benefit.

Quiet, clean, and small enough to park anywhere

A few other things we honestly didn't anticipate:

It's silent. When we pull up outside a job at 9am, your neighbours hear nothing. No diesel rattle, no engine note. For aged-care home visits and early-morning business calls in particular, customers regularly mention it.

It's clean. No exhaust film on your driveway. No diesel smell in tight indoor car parks at retail tech jobs. Inside the car the cabin stays fresh.

It fits everywhere. Adelaide CBD parking, hill towns with narrow streets, modern townhouses with tight driveways — the EX5 fits all of them comfortably. We've never had to refuse a job because we couldn't physically get the vehicle in.

Charging during jobs. Many of our commercial customers have an [EV charger on site](/services/data-cabling), and the public charging network across Adelaide has gone from rare to genuinely good in the past 18 months. Charging up between jobs at Reynella, Mile End, Glenelg or any of the Tea Tree Plaza chargers is now a normal part of the day.

"But what about long drives?"

Fair question. The honest answer: we service metro Adelaide and immediate surrounds. From the CBD, that's everything from Gawler in the north to Aldinga in the south, from Glenelg in the west out to the Adelaide Hills in the east. The EX5 covers that comfortably on a single charge, often with energy to spare.

For genuinely long-distance jobs (interstate, country SA) — which represent less than 1% of our work — we'd handle them separately and tell you upfront. But realistically, if you're searching "[computer repairs Adelaide](/services/computer-repairs)" or "[business IT support Adelaide](/business)", you're in our coverage area and the maths still works.

What this means for you as the customer

The big picture:

1. No callout fee, ever — you only pay when we fix something
2. More competitive quotes — our lower fuel costs make us cheaper on small jobs that bigger competitors won't profitably attend
3. A quieter, cleaner, lower-impact visit — no diesel idling outside your house
4. Genuinely faster response on small jobs — we can profitably take a 20-minute call-out that traditional IT companies would say no to
5. A small business that's living the future of work, not just talking about it

When tech breaks down, we drive over. Quietly. Cleanly. With zero callout fee.

Call 1800 836 390 or [book online](/book) — we'll tell you honestly whether it even needs a visit, then we'll show up at your door without charging you for the privilege.