Questions people actually ask

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.

Yes, in the van.

House keys, office keys, mailbox and cabinet keys, padlock keys. And car keys, which is the part we are actually set up for in a way most places are not. A hardware store can cut a flat metal key. It cannot cut and program a transponder key or a proximity fob to your car, and that is the machine sitting on the bench in our van.

If you want spares made it is worth doing while you still have a working key. A spare cut today costs a fraction of what a lost all keys call costs at midnight.

Fixable, on the street where the car is sitting, and in most cases for well under what the dealership charges.

With no key at all we read the code or decode the lock, cut a new key, and program it to the car so the immobilizer accepts it. It is one of the jobs we take most often. We can also delete the old keys from the car, so a key lying in a gutter somewhere stops mattering.

Most makes are covered, push to start included. Tesla is the exception, we do not touch it. Give us year, make and model and you will know within a sentence whether this is ours.

The aim is always to open it without touching anything, and almost always that is what happens. A standard deadbolt gets picked and the lock is exactly as it was before.

Some locks cannot be picked. High security cylinders, locks already seized, hardware that was failing before you got locked out. In those cases drilling is the way in, and it destroys the cylinder, which then needs replacing.

What we will not do is start drilling and tell you afterwards. If that is where a job is heading you will be told what it means and what it costs, and you decide.

Anything that ties you to the address. The license in your wallet if it still shows that address, a signed lease, a bill, an envelope with your name on it, or a building manager or neighbor prepared to say out loud that you live there.

This is not bureaucracy. It is the line between a locksmith and a burglar, and California expects a licensed company to hold it. Any locksmith who opens a door for a stranger without asking is one you should not be calling.

If the ID is the thing locked inside, say so on the phone. There is almost always another way to establish it.

Sí. Gadi speaks fluent Spanish and the phone is answered in Spanish at any hour, including the middle of the night.

In this neighborhood that is not a feature we are advertising, it is simply what working in the Mission requires. Todo este sitio está en español aquí.

Quick Locksmith Inc holds California Locksmith Company license LCO 7840, issued by the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. It is current and it runs to 30 April 2027.

Do not take our word for it. The state keeps a public lookup and the record is right here. You can check any locksmith in California the same way, and before you let a stranger work on your front door, you probably should.

Cash, credit or debit card, on the spot. You get an itemized receipt with the license number on it, which also matters later if there is ever a warranty question about the hardware.