I do not pay for basic or moderate level detailing. 99% of what you'll ever need falls into this category. The hourly rate of a legit professional detailer (and not just a guy at the local car wash with an orbital buffer being paid minimum wage) makes it a "splurge" since none of it is rocket science and can be learned rather quickly.
Also professional detailing rates are better avoided and better spent on equipping your garage with the machinery and products. With practice you can learn to do almost all basic or moderate level detailing quickly. And the detailing that can take an hour or more is seasonal only, meaning you'll only have to something that time consuming once a year. If you're doing this type of time intensive detailing a regular practice then most likely you are over-detailing the car and probably introducing more swirls or whittling down the clear coat more than necessary.
Also, there is no need to over-spend on detailing products or buy into the whole marketing hype of "multi step" product lines, as in more than basic polish/wax routine. You only need a few basic items, the first being a decent clay bar. Right now imho Griot's Garage are one of the best deals as they do not bundle the clay with a quick detail spray which is just a way to pump up the price. You don't need a specific product to use with clay bar, a basic car wash soap will do once you get the paint surface full of suds. After first washing the car and then cleaning with the clay bar, wash the surface again with a new $5 wash sponge or mitt. Preferably the kind that does NOT have a prickly microfiber surface. The basic chenille wash mitt that you can get at Target will do. Secondly you do not need an over-priced car wash soap this is yet another way they try to squeeze another couple of bucks out of you. If after washing and claying (carefully) the paint surface does not pass the "white glove" test which basically means applying a small amount of wax and buffing out (there should be no dirt on the buffing towel, then you probably didn't clay bar enough. Or if the paint has been neglected for a very long time or the car has spent many years outside then you might want to consider rehab with a something like
Finish Kare Paint Decontamination System, auto paint cleaning system, de-contamination solution. This will clean into the swirl channel that the clay bar can't get at since the clay only clear the surface area. Do NOT get this on glass. And if you're clusmy type in general that doesn't like to read directions beforehand avoid this product and ask a professional detailer to decontaminate your paint. It should not be that expensive since it will be quick. But they'll most likely charge you retail for the product itslef though... bit of a trade off there. Or he'll just wash your car with Dawn or Palmolive.
That stuff strips everything right off your paint and costs $3.
Then you've got to take care of "cleaning" the paint with a polish that contains a mild abrasive (obviously the car wash soap and clay bar do not contain abrasives). In my experience ANY paint polish will do a good job of this. Unless you live somewhere that the EPA has to visit often, most paint, particularly garaged cars, will NOT need super concentrations of the various cleaning agents to break loose contaminants. Even Turtle Wax sold your local Wal Mart will do the job on a first application (assuming you have done a thorough wash and clay bar). Everyone has their personal favorite but the fact is that I could polish a car with Turtle Wax and another with a product costing twice as much and you could not tell the difference unless you were a professional detailer, so like "half of 1%" of the population.
The second thing you'll be doing is "sealing" but I'm not sure that even this is necessary if you are an "enthusiast" who will most likely add layers and layer of synthetic wax through out the year. If instead you use a non-synthetic wax made from pure carnauba wax like S100, P21S or Souveran, etc. you'll need a dedicated sealant since pure carnauba waxes are not meant to withstand heat and rainfall. These have a wetter shine but do not have the durability of synthetic wax which cost much less and make up the bulk of the wax market. The price of carnauba waxes go up the higher the amount of carnauba and the less filler is used. If you are a carnauba wax user then any basic sealant will do. Even the most inexpensive products I've used have held up seasonally. These have all managed to hide swirls for a few weeks if left as the final layer with no wax on top. But this is not something an enthusiast will ever do, more so someone who drives a beater car and may only bother to polish the car once a year if that. I doubt this type of person will bother with a sealant and they definitely are not coming back after a day (to allow for sealant curing) to add additional waxes or anti-static finishing. But as general rule if you can see swirls return, the sealant has dissipated along with your wax below the depth of the swirl channel, enough to still produce a shine, not deep enough fill swirls.
Which then leaves you with the "bling" stage of waxing. Again, any decent wax assuming proper "prep" (wash/clay/polish/ and/or sealing) is going to produce a wet shine. You DO NOT have to spend $30. In fact I'm not sure you even need to spend $10. For instance Finish Kare sell a product called Pink Wax... in tin can so large it will probably outlive the car. The product is EXCELLENT. It's very durable, achieves wet gloss (but not quiet pure carnauba wax wet) and does not wash off easily. But its only one options of hundreds. Put it this way you could randomly pick a wax from any detailing product website, photograph it then use an "enthusiast favorite" brand of wax on the second half of the car, photograph that result and you'd be lucky to tell the difference.
Also, you don't need color specific waxes. This is more marketing nonsense. However ,there are waxes and polishes that work better with "metallic flake" paints like silver vs. flat colors like white or a flat blue, flat black and such. Jeff Werkstatt Prime polish is one example of a polish that seems better suited for mettalics. And then on flat paints or dark colors pure canuaba like S100 or Souveran work better than on metallics. But neither of these are specifically marketed for certain colors, they just happen to have more visible results with some colors. Be leary of any product pitching itself as specifically for a certain color. These seem to be rampant in retail stores, most likely because the consumer is less familiar with detailing in general... P.T. Barnum school of detailing.
Bottom line, don't believe the marketing hype. Virtually none of these products have proprietary ingredients. That means they are all using a basically similar formulation, except that some are bit more concentrated than others, but not enough a difference that a the less concentrated product won't do the job. And by doing the job I mean a concourse quality final result. The problem is that the typical guy goes from using a cheap product, that has less concentration, doesn't do enough prep work, then upgrades to these over-priced "enthusiast favorite" brands that have more concentration and the result is immediately obvious. Meanwhile, I have never heard of a person who knew the proper way to prep a paint surface come out and say "Oh my... I've been using X for years and the first time I used Y it was an instant improvement!". Unless the product has a patented ingredient and not just some marketing gimmick, a night and day difference to the eye of an expert is not possible. But it's a large market place with tens of millions of consumers so inevitably you're going to end up with dozens of brands at varying price points....but all the popular ones, be it an OTC brand sold at your local Pep Boys, or a boutique brand sold only by mail,
are basically the same. For years I used the boring 3M brand on a black car and it produced an excellent result that prompted questions like "did you have the car painted?". Total cost: $25 for their 3 step package back then. And for the record I've tried ALL of the brands. I learned the hard way. If you've ever read the marketing article
"You are not that smart - brand loyalty" you'll see what I'm talking about.
Lastly, when it comes to paint correction, or swirl removal, that can't be done by hand if there are deep swirls or if they're are a lot of swirls. Your wrists will hate you for life. You'll need your own orbital polisher like the Porter Cable, the Griots Garage, a Cyclo, or a Flex. The polishes used to remove swirl are not all concentrated equally and some brands alike Menzerna are known to have the most swirl-removing bite.
For interiors, I use either Woolite (diluted two parts water) or Griots Gargage which seems very similar to Woolite. For leather I find 1Z to get along with Porsche leather the best while leaving a matte "new look" finish. The Griots Garage leather spray is a close second and maybe better for frequent use, I use both. For wheel cleaning P21S seems to be the safest/most neutral. And as an anti-static (dust repelling) LSP (last step product) that goes on everything that isn't leather or carpet, there's no beating Finish Kare #425 as it is one of the few detailing products that does seem to have a proprietary ingredient that leaves behind a very teflon like surface. For windshield Rain X is an underrated product. I also find that the Griots Garage green and blue towels use a long nap fiber rather than the typical scratchy hooked fibers of you're basic auto store microfiber towel. Any of these over the counter towels costing $1-2 per towel are basically re-branded janitorial towels used to clean linoleum floors. Such towels are overkill for a well maintained paint surface and will do more harm than good. Granted, not as harmful as what everyone was using before these auto store microfiber towels came along: terry cloth towels, cut up bath towels, old gym socks...