Guides / The True Cost of Angi & Thumbtack
Per-lead prices are the number they show you. Cost per booked job is the number that decides whether you make money. This guide does the arithmetic by trade, explains shared leads and the answer-speed race, and lays out how to stop renting your pipeline.
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Every lead platform sells you on one number: the price of a single lead. Twenty-five dollars, sixty dollars, ninety dollars. That number feels manageable, so you sign up. The problem is that the per-lead price is not what a customer costs you. A lead is a phone number and a name, not a signed job. What actually costs you money is the pile of leads you pay for and never close, and almost nobody sits down and works out that real figure before they hand over a card. This guide does that arithmetic out loud, by trade, with current 2026 prices, so you can see whether these platforms make you money or quietly drain you.
Here is the shape of the trap. A platform charges you, say, sixty dollars a lead, then sells that same lead to four or five other contractors at once. You reach maybe one in three. Of those, the homeowner already talked to competitors and booked the fastest responder, so you win a fraction. Run that chain and your true cost to land one paying customer is often five to ten times the headline lead price. The lead looked cheap. The customer was expensive. That gap is where contractor budgets quietly go to die.
We sell websites, so you might expect us to just trash these platforms. We will not. For some contractors, at some moments, paying for leads is the right call, and we will say exactly when, later, in plain terms. But you cannot make that call on the sticker price alone. You have to know your real cost per won job, your close rate, and how the math shifts once a lead is shared with a crowd. Once you can run those numbers yourself, no salesperson can talk you into spending money that does not come back.
What a lead actually costs
These are current ranges pulled from 2026 reporting, not memory. Prices swing with your market, the season, and how many competitors are bidding, so treat these as the middle of the road, not a quote. Note the two platforms charge in completely different ways.
Angi charges roughly $300 a year for access, then sells you leads on top, commonly $15-85 each and $100 or more in high-value trades. Many contractors report a minimum spend near $400 a month and a 12-month contract that auto-renews. That is a fixed cost you carry whether the leads close or not, which already changes the math before a single job lands.
Thumbtack has no annual membership. You pay per lead, and only when you contact a homeowner or they reply to your quote. That sounds friendlier, and the entry cost is lower, but prices move weekly with supply and demand, so an HVAC lead in July can cost far more than the same lead in January. Pay-as-you-go is not the same as cheap.
On Angi, plumbing leads commonly run $40-85, electrical $35-80, and HVAC $45-100. On Thumbtack, plumbing repair runs about $30-95, HVAC repair $35-110, and an HVAC install lead can reach $150 because the job behind it is worth more. Urgent and after-hours work pushes the top of every one of these ranges.
Big-ticket trades carry the priciest leads because the job is worth thousands. On Angi, general remodeling commonly runs $50-100 or more and roofing $50-120 or more, with exclusive roofing leads reported well past $200. On Thumbtack, a kitchen remodel lead can run $90-200 or more. The lead is expensive precisely because everyone wants it.
Lighter trades have cheaper leads, which is why the per-lead price feels harmless here. On Thumbtack, house cleaning runs roughly $8-25, lawn care about $10-30, and handyman work $12-40. The catch is volume: at low ticket sizes you need a high close rate for these to pay, and shared leads make a high close rate hard, as the next section explains.
Pricing is dynamic on both platforms. Dense metros run well above national averages, seasonal demand spikes prices, and the more contractors bidding in your category, the higher the lead climbs. The result is that your cost per lead is not a stable line item you can budget cleanly. It drifts upward exactly when demand is hot and you can least afford surprises.
Why close rates collapse
The single most expensive fact about these platforms is that leads are not yours alone. Angi commonly sells the same lead to anywhere from three to eight contractors at once. Thumbtack typically shows each project to four or five matching pros, all of whom can quote. You are not buying a customer. You are buying a seat at an auction against three to seven competitors, and every one of you paid the same fee for the same name. The homeowner has not promised anyone anything. They posted a request and now their phone is ringing off the hook.
That setup turns lead generation into a footrace, and speed beats skill in it. Lead-response studies across home services consistently find that roughly 78 percent of homeowners go with the first contractor who responds. Not the best priced, not the most qualified, the fastest. So unless you can call back within minutes, every minute you spend on a ladder or under a sink is a minute a competitor is closing the lead you both paid for. The platform has your money either way, and you carry all the risk of being second, which is common when you actually have jobs to run.
Now stack the losses. You reach only a share of the leads you buy, because plenty go cold, hit voicemail, or were never serious; contractors routinely report that a large fraction of paid leads are unreachable. Of the ones you do reach, you win only the fraction where you answered first and quoted right. Reported close rates on these shared platforms commonly land between roughly 8 and 30 percent. That range is the whole game: a 10 percent close rate costs you three times as much per booked job as a 30 percent one, even at an identical per-lead price, and you only learn which you have after the money is spent.
Do the arithmetic
This is the math the platforms never put in front of you. You can run it on the back of an invoice. Do it before you renew, not after. All you need is your own numbers from the last two or three months.
Take a real month. Add the lead fees, the membership or access fee, and any minimum-spend top-up you paid just to stay active. On Angi that membership and minimum are easy to forget because they hit whether or not you bought leads. This total, not the per-lead sticker, is what the month actually cost you. Write it down as one honest number.
Out of every lead you paid for, how many turned into a real conversation with a real person who wanted the work? Be strict. Voicemails that never called back, wrong numbers, and tire-kickers do not count. This is usually a painful number, often half or fewer of the leads you paid for. Reaching a person is the first place the funnel leaks, and you paid full price for the leaks.
Of those real conversations, how many became signed, paid jobs? That fraction is your close rate on this platform. If you reached twenty people and booked four, your close rate is twenty percent. Most contractors guess their close rate is higher than it is, so use the real count from your calendar and your bank, not your gut feeling about how it went.
Take Step 1, your full monthly spend, and divide it by Step 3, the jobs you actually booked. That single number is your true cost per won job. If you spent $1,000 and booked four jobs, every customer cost you $250, regardless of what each individual lead was priced at. This is the only acquisition number that should ever drive a renewal decision.
If your true cost per won job is $250 and your average job nets you $1,500 in profit, the platform is paying off and you should probably keep buying. If a job nets you $400 and each one costs you $250 to land, you are working for the platform, not for yourself. Most contractors who run this honestly are shocked which side of the line they fall on, and many on lighter trades land on the wrong side.
The exits are not free
Knowing your cost per won job is useless if you cannot act on it. The platforms understand this, so the way out is engineered to be sticky and expensive. Here is what to read before you sign and what to expect if you try to leave.
On a model with a monthly minimum, you pay even in a slow month with no good leads. Fall short of your lead quota and you can still be charged for the shortfall. The cost is decoupled from results, so a dead month for your business is still a billed month for the platform. That is the opposite of how a tool should behave when work dries up.
Angi commonly locks contractors into 12-month terms that renew automatically. Renewal can also come with a fee bump. You do not get to quietly stop in a bad quarter; you are committed for the year and re-committed unless you actively cancel inside a notice window. The default is always you keep paying, which is exactly how it is designed to work.
Try to leave a 12-month Angi contract early and contractors report penalties around 30 to 35 percent of the remaining contract value, with roughly 60 days notice required. Some report cancellation threats of collections and disputed charges that had to be fought through the credit card company. The exit is priced to make staying feel cheaper than leaving, even when the leads are bad.
When leads are unreachable or were never real, you can sometimes claim a credit, but it takes time and is granted at the platform's discretion. Contractors describe getting dozens of leads where only a handful were genuine and fighting for refunds on the rest. Even when you win, the hours you spend disputing are unpaid, and that labor is a real, uncounted cost of the channel.
Be fair about it
There are real moments when paying for leads is the smart move, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The clearest one is a brand-new business with empty days on the calendar and no reputation yet. When you have crew standing around and zero inbound calls, a lead that costs you $250 to close but fills a $1,500 job is a bargain, even on a bad platform, because the alternative is an idle truck earning nothing. Cash flow today beats pipeline equity that pays off in a year. Buy the leads, fill the schedule, and use the income to build something you own.
The same logic holds when you are deliberately expanding capacity faster than your reputation can fill it. Hired two new techs and need work for them this month? A lead platform can bridge the gap while your owned channels catch up. It also makes sense as a controlled experiment: a few hundred dollars to learn what a closed job in your trade and market really costs you is cheap market research, as long as you actually run the Step 4 math afterward and quit if the number is ugly. Used this way, deliberately, with eyes open, lead platforms are a tool, not a trap.
What does not make sense is treating rented leads as your permanent marketing plan. Every dollar you spend there buys a single job and then vanishes; it builds nothing you keep. You do not accumulate a reputation you own, a website that ranks, or a list of past customers you can call again. You are renting access to demand that the platform controls, at prices the platform raises, sharing every lead with the competitors next to you. Fine as a bridge. Ruinous as a destination. The goal is to graduate off it, which is the next section.
Get off the treadmill
You do not have to quit cold turkey. The move is to slowly shift spend from rented leads to assets you own, until the owned channels carry the load and the platforms become optional. Work it in this order.
Before you spend another dollar on leads, set up and fill out your Google Business Profile completely: services, service area, hours, and real photos of finished jobs. It is free, it puts you on the map when neighbors search your trade, and for many local contractors it produces more booked work than any paid platform. This is the single highest-return hour of marketing available to you, and it costs nothing.
Reviews are the currency that makes the free channels work, and they are an asset the platforms can never take from you. Ask every satisfied customer for a Google review, the same day, with a direct link. A steady stream of honest reviews lifts how often you show up and how often strangers trust you enough to call. Never buy reviews; the FTC's rule banning fake and paid reviews took effect October 21, 2024, with penalties up to $53,088 per violation for knowing offenders.
A site you own is the hub the free channels point to and the only lead source that compounds instead of vanishing. You can DIY it on a builder like Squarespace ($16 a month and up), Wix ($17 and up), or GoDaddy (from $9.99), or hire it out. The non-negotiable is ownership: the site, the domain, and the customer data must be yours and transferable, or you have just rented a different leash.
You cannot shift budget intelligently if you cannot see what is working. Put call tracking on your website and use a distinct number for any paid platform, so you know whether a booked job came from Google, from your site, or from a lead you bought. Without this, you are guessing, and guessing is how contractors keep paying for channels that quietly stopped paying them back months ago.
As your profile, reviews, and site start generating calls, cut platform spend in measured steps and watch your total booked work. The aim is not zero paid leads forever; it is to make the platforms an optional faucet you open for a slow month, not the pipe your whole business depends on. When you own the demand, you negotiate from strength and you keep the equity you build.
Where we fit
We build and run websites for US contractors, working remotely and over email, and we will be as plain about our number as we asked you to be about everyone else's. We charge $500 to set up and $1,500 a month, flat, billed quarterly at $4,500 a quarter, and you can cancel at the end of any quarter. Compare that honestly to your true cost per won job on the platforms before you decide we fit, because if buying leads is genuinely paying you back right now, you should keep doing that and not hire anyone, us included.
Two things make this the opposite of the contracts above. You own one hundred percent of every asset in writing from day one: the website, the content, the domain, all of it, transferable to anyone you choose the moment you want it, with no termination penalty and no leash. And we install call tracking from the start, so rather than promising you rankings or a lead count we cannot honestly guarantee, we promise the work plus a way for you to see exactly how many calls the site brought in. That is the same proof we told you to demand in the pivot plan, built in from the first month.
If you are done renting your pipeline and want an owned channel that compounds while the platforms stay optional, email [email protected] and we will tell you honestly whether it fits your trade and market. If you are a brand-new business filling empty days, keep buying leads for now and revisit this when your calendar is fuller. The whole point of this guide is that you spend your marketing money where it actually comes back, whether that turns out to be us or not.
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$500 to set up, $1,500 a month flat, billed quarterly, cancel any quarter, you own everything from day one, with call tracking that proves it pays. Email [email protected].