Lead platforms like Angi (which absorbed HomeAdvisor) are the first marketing most contractors ever pay for, because they're easy: sign up, set a budget, leads arrive. Some businesses make them work. Many quietly lose money for years without knowing it, because they never calculated what a lead actually costs them per job. Here's how to do that math, and what to do with the answer.
How the model works
You pay per lead, in your trade and area, whether or not you ever speak to the homeowner and whether or not you win the work. The homeowner's request is typically sent to several contractors at once, who all call within minutes. You're competing on speed and often on price against three or four other businesses who paid for the same name and phone number. The platform's incentive is to sell each lead as many times as it can.
None of that is a secret. It's just rarely written down next to the invoice.
The math most contractors never do
Work it through with your own numbers. Suppose:
- A lead costs $60.
- You reach about 60% of them (the rest never pick up or already hired someone).
- Of the ones you reach, you close 25%, because you're one of four quotes.
Out of 100 leads ($6,000), you reach 60 and close 15. That's $400 per job. Whether that's good depends entirely on your job value. For a $300 drain cleaning, it's a disaster. For a $12,000 roof, it's a bargain. Neither answer is obvious until you do the division, and most businesses looking at a $6,000 monthly bill have never done it.
Now add the hidden cost: the hours spent calling leads who already hired someone, the price pressure from being one of four quotes, and the fact that none of it builds anything. Stop paying and the leads stop the same day.
What "building something" means
Compare that to the same $6,000 spent on channels you own:
- Local SEO. Rank in the map pack for "roofer near me" in your city and those calls arrive free, every month, to you alone. It takes months to build, and then it keeps paying when you stop spending. The checklist shows what the work actually is.
- Your own Google Ads. You choose the searches, the homeowner lands on your site, and the lead is yours alone. Cost per job is usually comparable to or better than lead platforms once the landing page is good, and you control every variable.
- Reviews. Free, compounding and the reason homeowners pick you off the map instead of the next listing.
The difference isn't that owned channels are magically cheaper on day one. It's that a dollar into them buys an asset and a dollar into a lead platform buys a rental. After a year, the owned channels are producing calls for less and less, and the rental costs exactly what it did.
If you're going to stay on the platforms
Fine, plenty of profitable businesses do. Three rules:
- Track cost per job, not cost per lead. Tag every platform lead and follow it to a signed job or not. Monthly.
- Be first. The lead is going to four businesses. The one that calls in the first two minutes gets the conversation. If nobody in your business can do that during the day, the leads are wasted. This is the same speed problem that decides every other lead source.
- Dispute aggressively. Wrong service, outside your area, disconnected number: request the credit, every time.
The transition that actually works
Don't quit cold. Keep the platform running while you build the foundation (site and profile), turn on your own ads, and get the review system firing. Track cost per job on both sides. Over a few months, as organic and owned-ad jobs come in cheaper, lower the platform budget. Most businesses that run this sequence end up off the platforms within a year, not because someone told them to, but because the spreadsheet did. That sequence is our process, and the strategy call starts with your current cost per job.