What Angi and Thumbtack leads actually cost — and the alternative
Contractors routinely report paying $25 to $100 or more per lead on the major marketplaces, for leads shared with several competitors and a meaningful share that never respond. This page works through the real arithmetic, then shows what the same money buys on your own website.
The advertised price is not the price
A marketplace lead has a sticker price, but three things sit between that number and a booked job. The lead is usually sold to several contractors at once, so you are paying for a race you may lose. A large share of leads never reply at all. And some are outside your area, outside your trade, or simply not real.
Work it through with round numbers you can change. Say a lead costs $60, four contractors receive it, and you win a quarter of the ones that respond — and say only two in three respond at all. Your cost per booked job is not $60. It is $60 divided by (0.67 × 0.25), or roughly $360. That figure is why so many contractors describe marketplace leads as a treadmill.
Shared with rivals
The same enquiry is commonly sold to three to eight contractors at once.
Ghost rate
A large share of purchased leads never respond to any contact attempt.
Never stops
Stop paying and the leads stop that day. Nothing accrues to you.
The traffic you already paid for
Meanwhile, people are already visiting your website. You paid for that traffic once — through your van, your reviews, your ads, or years of word of mouth. Most of those visitors leave without contacting anyone, because they arrived at 9pm and the only options were a contact form and a phone number nobody was answering.
Those visitors are not shared with three competitors. They came looking for you specifically. A receptionist that answers them costs $29 a month flat, includes 200 conversations, and every lead it captures is yours alone.
| Marketplace leads | Your own website | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost model | Per lead, variable | $29/month flat |
| Exclusivity | Shared with 3–8 contractors | Yours alone |
| Cost when busy | Rises with every lead | Unchanged |
| Who they asked for | Anyone available | You, by name |
| If you stop paying | Leads stop that day | Website still yours |
Where marketplaces still make sense
They are genuinely useful when you have no website traffic to convert. A new business with no reviews and no ranking has to buy attention from somewhere, and a marketplace sells exactly that. The trap is staying on it for years once your own site is drawing visitors you never answer — at which point you are paying twice for the same customer, and sharing the second one.
Not a contractor? The arithmetic is the same
Angi and Thumbtack are home-services marketplaces, so this page uses their numbers. Every other local industry has its own version of the same bargain — Zocdoc for dental and medical practices, Avvo and LegalMatch for law firms, directories and paid directories for salons, clinics and repair shops. The mechanics do not change: you rent an introduction, you share it with competitors, and the price rises with your success. A visitor already on your own website is one you have paid for once. See how the questions change by industry.
Try the arithmetic on your numbers
The ROI calculator on the pricing page takes your average job value and traffic and shows what a given conversion rate is worth per month. Substitute your own figures rather than trusting ours.
Open the calculatorAnswer the visitors you already have
Free plan forever, no card. Every lead exclusive, every month the same price.