If you've been in the trades more than a few years, you've probably tried one of them. Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, one of the dozen others. Maybe it worked for a while. Maybe you're still paying for it and quietly wondering if you're getting your money back.
These platforms are one of the most common things contractors ask about, and the answers you find online are usually either "they're a scam" or a sales pitch from the platform itself. Neither is useful. So let's go through what they actually cost, how the math really works, and when they make sense and when they don't.
How These Platforms Actually Work
Most of them run the same basic model. A homeowner fills out a form saying they need a roof looked at. The platform takes that homeowner's contact info and sells it to contractors. You pay for the contact information, not for the job.
The critical detail, and the one that trips up most contractors, is that these leads are usually not exclusive. The same homeowner's info typically gets sold to somewhere between three and eight contractors at once. Everybody who bought it starts calling. The homeowner's phone lights up within minutes of them submitting the form.
Worth knowing: Angi and HomeAdvisor are the same company. They merged years back and share the same lead pool behind the scenes, even though they still look like separate websites. If you're signed up with one, you're fishing in the same pond as the other.
Thumbtack works a little differently. Instead of the platform pushing leads to you automatically, you see the job and decide whether to send a quote. You pay when you respond. That gives you more control over what you're paying for, which is a real advantage.
What They Actually Cost
Here's where it gets real. Per-lead pricing varies a lot by trade and market, but current typical ranges look something like this:
Roofing runs about $50 to $120 or more per lead. HVAC lands around $45 to $100. Plumbing sits around $40 to $85. Electrical is roughly $35 to $80. Landscaping tends to run $25 to $55, and handyman work is on the lower end at $15 to $40. Rural and less competitive markets typically run cheaper than major metros.
On top of the per-lead cost, Angi charges an annual membership fee of a few hundred dollars, and often requires a minimum monthly spend on top of that. Thumbtack doesn't charge an annual fee, which is one reason a lot of smaller operations prefer it.
And here's the part that stings: on the pay-per-lead platforms, you're charged when the lead is delivered, not when you win the job. The homeowner who never answers the phone? You paid for them. The one who was just price-checking with no intention of hiring anybody? Paid for them too.
The Math Nobody Shows You
Cost per lead is the number the platforms advertise. It's also the wrong number to judge them by. What matters is your cost per job actually booked.
Run through a realistic example. Say you buy 20 leads at $60 each. That's $1,200 out the door. Of those 20, a handful never answer the phone at all. Another handful were just gathering numbers with no real intent. You end up actually quoting maybe 10 of them.
Now remember you're competing against several other contractors on every single one of those quotes, all of whom bought the same lead and are calling the same homeowner. Realistic close rates on shared leads tend to land around 10 to 15 percent. So out of 20 leads, you book one or two jobs.
That means your real cost to land a customer wasn't $60. It was somewhere between $600 and $1,200. Whether that works depends entirely on your average job value. If you're landing $15,000 roof replacements, spending a thousand bucks to get one might be fine. If you're doing $400 service calls, that math is a disaster.
That's the calculation to run before you sign up, and the one to keep running if you're already in. Not what you paid per lead. What you paid per booked job.
The Contract Trap
Read the terms before you sign anything. Angi in particular typically runs twelve-month contracts with automatic renewal and early termination penalties that can run a third of what's left on the contract. Cancelling often requires notice a couple months ahead of the renewal date, and plenty of contractors have found out the hard way that they auto-renewed for another year while they weren't paying attention.
None of that means you shouldn't use it. It means go in with your eyes open and put the renewal date in your calendar the day you sign.
Where They Actually Make Sense
Let's be fair, because there are situations where these platforms genuinely earn their keep.
You're brand new with no reviews and no presence. If you just started and nobody knows you exist, you need work now, not in six months. Paying for leads is a legitimate way to get your first jobs, build a reputation, and collect the reviews that will eventually let you get found on your own. Treat it as startup cost.
You have a slow season to fill. If January is dead and you'd rather pay for leads than have your crew idle, turning the tap on for a couple months is a reasonable business decision.
You're in a market with little competition. Lead costs are lower and fewer contractors are splitting each lead, so the economics improve.
Your average job is big enough to absorb the cost. High-ticket trades can make the math work in a way that low-ticket service work often can't.
And if you do use them, respond immediately. On shared leads, the contractor who calls first wins a hugely disproportionate share of the jobs, because the homeowner is fielding several calls and tends to go with whoever engaged them first. If you're going to pay for a lead, don't let it sit. We wrote a full guide on responding to leads faster, and nowhere does it matter more than on a lead you literally paid for.
Rented Leads Versus Owned Leads
Here's the bigger picture, and it's the thing worth actually thinking about.
When you buy leads from a platform, you're renting. The moment you stop paying, the leads stop. Completely. You've spent thousands of dollars and you own nothing at the end of it. No asset, no audience, no presence. You're right back where you started, except poorer.
When you build your own presence, through your website, your Google Business Profile, and your reviews, you're building something you own. It takes longer to get going, which is the honest downside, and we've written about how long SEO actually takes so nobody's surprised. But once it works, those leads keep coming without a per-lead charge, they're exclusive to you, and they don't disappear when you stop paying.
The contractors in the best position long-term are usually the ones who did both: used paid leads to get through the early years while quietly building the presence that eventually made the paid leads unnecessary.
What to Build Instead, or Alongside
If you want to reduce your dependence on paid leads, here's where to put your energy, roughly in order of payoff.
Start with your Google Business Profile, because it's free, it shows up above websites in local searches, and most contractors barely fill it out. Then get reviews consistently, since they drive both your map ranking and whether a homeowner picks you. Then make sure your website actually converts the visitors it gets, because traffic that doesn't turn into calls is wasted.
Also worth knowing: Google Local Services Ads are a different animal from the lead marketplaces. Leads are exclusive to you rather than shared with a half dozen competitors, and close rates tend to run substantially higher as a result. If you're going to pay for leads at all, that's generally a better place to start than the shared-lead platforms.
The Bottom Line
Contractor lead sites aren't a scam, but they're also not the deal they appear to be at first glance. You're paying for shared contact information, competing against several other contractors for every one, and paying whether or not you win. The advertised cost per lead is a fraction of what a booked job actually costs you.
They make sense when you're new, when you're filling a slow season, or when your job values are big enough to absorb the cost. They stop making sense when you're paying a fortune to compete for the same tire-kickers year after year with nothing to show for it.
The way out is building something you own. It's slower, but it compounds, and it doesn't send you an invoice for every phone call.
Want to know whether your own website could be pulling in leads instead of the lead sites? Grab a free website audit and we'll show you what's working and what's holding it back. Or see what we build for contractors who'd rather own their leads than rent them.