A locksmith who actually lives in the Mission

In the Mission and the blocks around it, usually fifteen to twenty five minutes. We are based at 2431 Mission Street and the bulk of our work is inside this zip code, so the van is genuinely nearby most of the time rather than nearby in a marketing sense.

Further out in the city it is longer, and at two in the morning it depends entirely on where the van finished its last job. We will give you a real number on the phone. If it is forty minutes we will say forty minutes, because telling you twenty and showing up at forty just makes a bad night worse.

A large share of our calls start after eight at night, and plenty of them after midnight.

Nobody gets locked out at a sensible hour. It happens on the way back from a late shift, in the thirty seconds you spent outside, or because whoever left last was carrying the only key. The phone gets picked up at three in the morning, and a van leaves.

We will give you a price. What we will not do is promise that a price is final before anyone has seen the lock.

You are describing something you do not work with every day, and that is completely fair. You say the key broke in the door. Sometimes that is a broken key and a two minute extraction. Sometimes the key broke because the cylinder has been failing for a year and the next key will break too.

So you get a number for the job you described, and if what Gadi finds is different, he stops and tells you the real price before he touches anything. You can say no then and it costs you nothing.

It happens when the job on the phone is not the job at the door, and it is the complaint we take most seriously because it is the one that feels worst.

The usual shape of it is this. You call about a lockout. The lock turns out to be dead, or it is drilled because it cannot be picked, and now there is a new lock on the bill that nobody was talking about half an hour earlier. The opening, the hardware and the call out are three separate numbers, and when they land together on one invoice it reads like a surprise even when every piece of it was explained.

What should happen, every time, is that you hear the new total before the work starts and you get the chance to refuse it. If that did not happen on your job, that is on us, and we would rather you call and say so than write it in a review and never hear from us. The number is (415) 625-5021.

Of course. Ring around, it is your money.

What we do not do is send a van across the city to sit outside while you are still calling other people. A technician driving out and waiting is an hour of a working day, and that hour gets paid for by the customers who do book. So the order is: we agree a price, then we drive.

The exception is a job where a phone price would be guesswork anyway. Several doors, a whole building, a shop that needs hardware. For those we come out, look at it properly, and give you a fixed price on the spot. That visit is free and there is nothing to sign.

No, and we would rather tell you that here than have you make the trip.

2431 Mission Street is our licensed business address. It is where the company is registered and where the paperwork lives. There is no counter, no display case and nobody standing behind a till. Quick Locksmith is a mobile operation and always has been.

Everything happens where you are. Your door, your curb, your storefront. If you need keys copied we come to you and cut them in the van, which has two cutting machines in it.