Someone has to be trusted with your keys.
That is the whole business, really. Everything else, the prices, the schedules, the products, is downstream of it.
Hiring a cleaner is a strange kind of purchase. You are not buying a product you can inspect. You are deciding whether to hand a stranger a key to the place where your children sleep, and then leave for the day and hope.
Most of the industry treats that as a formality. You fill in a form. Someone calls you back and will not give a number until they have talked you through a package. A crew arrives, a different one each time, and you find yourself at the door trying to work out who these people are while pretending you are not.
We started Heron because that is a strange way to treat something so personal, and because the fixes are not complicated. They are just inconvenient for the companies doing it.
The company started with a habit I couldn’t switch off.
I’m the person who straightens the towels in other people’s bathrooms. Who wipes the kettle while the tea is still steeping. Who cannot walk past a smudge on stainless steel. I’ve tried, it follows me into the next room. My family teased me about it for years. Then it occurred to me that the thing I couldn’t turn off is exactly the thing most cleaning companies never manage to turn on: caring about the last two percent, the part nobody’s checking.
So I started Heron, here in Oakville, with rules that felt obvious to me and apparently radical to the industry: clean every home the way I clean my own. Publish every price, so nobody has to bargain in their own kitchen. Send familiar faces whenever we can, because a door that’s expecting a friend shouldn’t open to a stranger. And when something isn’t right, fix it within 24 hours, free. Not because a policy says so, but because I wouldn’t sleep otherwise.
Sadie Burki
Founder, Heron Cleaning · Oakville, Ontario · Rate card 2026-09-11
Three decisions, and what each one costs us
We publish every price. Not a range, not "starting from". The actual number, on the pricing page, where anyone including our competitors can read it. It costs us the ability to charge more to people who seem able to pay more. We think that is a good thing to give up.
We send a familiar two-person team whenever possible. Scheduling around the same pair is harder than pooling crews, and sometimes life gets a vote, but the aim is simple: after three or four visits nobody has to explain anything. They know the house. They know the cupboard that sticks and which rug you like moved.
We pay well above minimum wage. That is why our recurring discounts are 3–5% and not 30%. A cleaner who is paid properly and who is coming back to your home next fortnight behaves differently from one who was sent once and will never see you again. You can feel the difference in the corners of a room.
Every cleaner is background-checked before their first visit. Not because it is a nice marketing line, because we would not send someone into a family's home otherwise.
What we will not do
We will not quote you a number and then find reasons on the day. If something about your home would change the price. It is much larger than typical, or it has not been cleaned professionally in a long time, you hear that before we start, and you can say no. Never after, and never on the invoice.
We will not lock you into anything. No contracts, no minimum term. Recurring clients can move or cancel a visit with a day's notice, and plenty do.
And if we get it wrong, tell us within 24 hours and we come back and put it right, free. No forms, no argument, no partial credit. It is the cheapest possible way for us to keep a client we would otherwise lose, so it is not generosity, it is arithmetic. But it is also just how you should treat someone whose home you were let into.
Modern on purpose
A lot of cleaning companies still run the way this industry did twenty years ago: a form to fill in, a wait for the call back, a price that only appears once someone has sized you up on the phone, and whichever crew happened to be free that morning. None of that builds trust. It just fills a pipeline.
We built Heron the way you'd build it today. The prices live on the website, where anyone , including our competitors, can read them. A calculator does the math before you ever talk to us. One call books it. And the people who arrive are a background-checked pair you already know, not strangers with a clipboard.
None of it is complicated. It's just newer than the way this business likes to work, and it leaves us nowhere to hide, which is exactly how we want it.
Two people. Everything brought with them.
A standard visit is two cleaners, arriving in a window you agreed, with the vacuum, the mop system, the cloths and the products already in the van. You do not need to buy anything or be home. A key or a lockbox code is fine, and most of our recurring clients are at work when we come.
If you would rather we used your own products, because of a surface, an allergy or a preference, leave them out and we will use those instead.
Where we clean
We are based in Oakville, so that is where we are fastest. We work across Burlington and Milton, and all of Mississauga on the same rate card.
Our home base
Joshua Creek, Glen Abbey, Bronte, River Oaks, Old Oakville, West Oak Trails, Uptown Core.
Across the whole city
Aldershot, Roseland, Millcroft, Alton Village, The Orchard, Headon Forest.
Including the new builds
Hawthorne Village, Beaty, Clarke, Old Milton, and post-construction work on new homes.
The next city over
Served city-wide on the same rate card, from Clarkson and Lorne Park on our border out to Erin Mills, Meadowvale and East Credit, with no surcharge for crossing the line.
Ready to hand over the keys?
The price is already on the site. No quote form, call to book.