The gutter is not the point. The ground is.

A gutter exists to take a roof's worth of water and put it somewhere other than the six inches of soil against your house. When it clogs it stops doing that. Water sheets over the edge and lands in a trench of its own making, right at the foundation, every time it rains, for years.

Saturated soil swells, pushes on the wall, and finds every hairline crack. That is how you get a wet basement, a bowed wall, or settling — and every one of those is a five-figure conversation. It is also why the range above is so wide: water at the foundation is the most expensive thing that can happen slowly, and what it costs depends entirely on how long nobody looked.

Twice a year, and one of them counts more

Clear them in spring, after the seeds and blossom drop. Then clear them again after the leaves come down — and that autumn pass is the one that actually matters.

Packed wet leaves hold water, water freezes, and a gutter full of ice is heavy enough to tear itself off the fascia and take a strip of the roof edge with it. A gutter that comes off in January was full in November. If you have trees over the roof, the autumn clean-out is not optional and the interval is shorter than you would like; Homeward asks about overhanging trees for exactly this reason.

Ninety minutes, if you are honest about the ladder

It is a genuine do-it-yourself job on a single storey: a ladder, gloves, a bucket, and a hose to prove the downspout actually runs.

It stops being one the moment the roof is steep, the ladder is tall, or you are working alone. Falls from ladders are the injury that turns a maintenance page into a hospital bill, and no gutter is worth that. Pay somebody for the second storey.

Not everyone owns this job

If you live in a condo the gutters are almost certainly somebody else's problem, and a schedule that nags you about them is noise.

Homeward drops the gutters, the roof check and everything else you do not own the moment you say what kind of home you have. A condo owner gets a short list, and the app says so rather than padding it out to look worth the money.

Typical US repair ranges, not a quote. Homeward is a schedule, not an inspection, and it cannot see your actual roofline. Work at height is a genuine risk; hire it out when it should be hired out.