Bottom line: for any future drain/sewer issues, I'll be calling Mark at Pro Power Rooter. If you like all the dirty details, read on:
The great: same day service by the owner, and it appears he does all or at least most of the work, so you know WHO will be coming and what to expect. He specializes in drain/sewer cleaning, so he doesn't have the incentive to upsell you more expensive unnecessary work! When i researched he has an A- BBB rating (the minus only due to length of time in operation).
The good: made quick work of my kitchen sink problem. He was concerned about rolling dirty equipment through my carpeted areas.
The meh: I didn't discuss prices at all until it was time to pay because it appeared to be pretty standard work and I wasn't concerned about it. I was charged $140 for cleaning the kitchen drain with a 100' 1/2 cable. I was told I would get a 10% discount because he had to change times on me which ended up being 14.2% and was actually charged $120. seems great, and I'm willing to bet this is cheaper than I would have got from, say, roto-rooter. (I never got as far as getting quotes from other places) So why is this in the meh section? I feel pricing is usually most people's main concern, particularly that you almost never know in advance what something will cost and you feel helpless because you know you can't do it yourself and it needs to be done. This is the best way businesses of this type could differentiate themselves. I found out later that the website quotes a price of sewer mainline cleaning by removing a toilet (which we had discussed due to my concerns about my main line, and he said that uses a different, i'll assume larger machine and clearly would be a much crappier job - both literally and figuratively) this price was $125? So, now I'm wondering if this was a situation where you get a discount but the price is raised to compensate? Then I also found a new customer discount which wasn't discussed (maybe that's the extra 4.2% discount i received?) . I also now see a yelp discount that I wasn't aware of... upsetting? not exactly. My judgement call here is none of this pricing questions were intentional. I think it's probably hard to handle all aspects of a business while also doing the actual work. It's not about the $30ish dollars, and if I missed out on discounts or even was given too high a price, I'll chalk that up as a tip on this job. But that's how you get that 5th star, because as good as it gets would be completely transparent pricing.
Just to re-iterate , I'm guessing if you shop around this is still a very good deal, and if you found one for better, Mark will likely beat that price too. And at the end of the day you REALLY don't want someone to come tell you you need to unnecessarily replace your sewer main, which my situation would have been ripe for, but Mark said from the beginning that it didn't appear I had a sewer main problem.