A locksmith whose rate before you commit.

Baylands Lock & Access works Sunnyvale and the towns beside it out of a van rather than a storefront, because a lock is bolted to a door and does not come to a counter. The name comes from the marsh and levees at the north edge of the city, where Sunnyvale meets the bay, and the van is based just short of them in Moffett Park. Every minute quoted on this site is measured from there: fifteen to the towers on Java Drive and fifteen to the Heritage District, seventeen to the apartment spine on Fair Oaks and Wolfe, nineteen to Lakewood and to Sunnyvale West, twenty-one to Cherry Chase and Ponderosa, twenty-three to Birdland, and longer to Los Altos, Cupertino and Los Altos Hills. Twenty-one minutes is the average. Calls are answered 24/7, nights, weekends and holidays.

The argument this business runs on is what a door means in this city. More people here reach their own bed through a street gate, a lobby reader, a garage clicker and an elevator than through a front door that opens onto a sidewalk, and any one of those links can be the one that fails. So the van is loaded for both: pins, cylinders, fifties-era knob and deadbolt stock for the orchard-era streets, and readers, maglocks, sensors, gate operator boards and blank fobs for the blocks that went up around Moffett Park. It also means being exact about who may order what. A resident can arrange work on their own unit door and their own fob. A gate, a lobby, a parcel room or an amenity room belongs to the building, so the manager, the owner or the HOA has to authorize it, and that is settled on the call rather than argued in a hallway.

Pricing follows the same list every time and the $89 visit sits inside every figure. A house or unit lockout is $125 to $219, a car lockout $105 to $199, a business lockout $139 to $249, post break-in repair $175 to $429. A rekey is $28 to $45 per cylinder and a whole property comes back as one figure. Replacement hardware runs $125 to $315, a keypad lock $189 to $469, a safe opening $195 to $519. Access control, meaning gates, call boxes, keypads, readers, maglocks, sensors, clickers and fob enrollment, is $149 to $429 and is priced here instead of quoted. Exit devices are $299 to $769 per door and storefront locks $165 to $469. A car key is $159 to $399, a vehicle fob $89 to $195, an ignition $185 to $439, motorcycle keys $119 to $279. Master key systems are walked and counted before a figure is given. An arrival between 8pm and midnight adds $50 and between midnight and 7am adds $85, both counted in before you say yes, so a late job moves up inside its range and never past the top of it.