Angi vs Thumbtack vs Yelp: Are Shared Leads Worth It?

You bought the lead. You called in four minutes. The homeowner had already talked to two other guys and was waiting on a third quote. You paid full price for that conversation anyway.

That is not bad luck and it is not your sales process. It is the product working exactly as designed. Shared-lead marketplaces make money on leads sold, not jobs won, and those are very different businesses. Here is the arithmetic the marketplaces will never put in the pitch deck.

Are Angi, Thumbtack, and Yelp leads worth the money?

They are worth it only if your cost per booked job — not per lead — beats your other channels, and on Angi that math has been challenged by a federal regulator. In January 2023 the FTC issued an order requiring HomeAdvisor, which also does business as Angi Leads, to pay up to $7.2 million over what the Commission's complaint called false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of its leads.

The FTC's complaint says HomeAdvisor told service providers its leads turned into jobs at rates higher than it could substantiate, and the order bars the company from making unsubstantiated claims about how often leads convert. Read that twice. The conversion rate you were sold on is the exact thing a regulator made them stop claiming.

That does not make every marketplace lead worthless. It means the burden of proof is on you, and the only number that settles it is cost per booked job.

How many competitors get sold the same lead you just bought?

Angi's own homeowner-facing forms say it out loud — 'Get quotes from up to 3 pros!' is printed on Angi's own contractor-leads article, next to a zip-code box. Three quotes means three pros paying for one kitchen.

Thumbtack is more honest about the mechanics. Its help center defines Opportunities as jobs from 'customers who've reached out to other pros but haven't hired anyone yet' — an entire product built on the assumption that the homeowner is already shopping several of you. And Angi's own contractor advice article warns that when a homeowner posts a request, 'companies will bombard them,' making it 'really easy for you to get lost in the shuffle.'

So the shared part is not a rumor from a forum. It is in the vendors' own copy. What changes is how many, and nobody publishes that number per lead.

What does a shared lead actually cost per booked job?

Cost per booked job equals the lead fee divided by your close rate — so at a 15% close rate, a $75 lead is a $500 job-acquisition cost, not a $75 one. That single division is the whole argument. Run it on your own last 30 days before you renew anything.

That table is arithmetic, not a study — plug in the lead fees on your own invoice and the close rate from your own CRM. The point is the slope. Halving your close rate doubles your cost per job, and the thing that halves your close rate is the other three pros holding the same phone number.

Marketplaces price on the value of the job, not the odds of winning it. Thumbtack's help center says the cost is set 'to match how valuable the job is,' varying with job type and size. So the leads you most want to win — the roof replacement, the panel upgrade — are the ones you pay the most to lose.

How does that compare to Local Services Ads?

Google Local Services Ads is also pay-per-lead, but Google's own documentation frames the lead differently: 'Customers choose you: You only hear from customers who have specifically selected your profile out of all the rest.' The homeowner picked your face and tapped call — they did not fill in a form that got distributed.

That is not exclusivity. A homeowner can absolutely tap three LSA profiles. But the selection happens in the customer's head before the charge, not in a routing engine after it, and the Google Verified badge does screening work your own website cannot fake. Yelp is a third model again: Yelp Ads is cost-per-click, and Yelp charges you 'each time your ad is clicked,' at a price that moves with supply and demand. You pay for the click and still have to earn the call.

Verdict: for the trades where it is available, Google Local Services Ads is the best of the paid-per-lead options, because the customer selects you before you get billed and Google credits bad leads automatically. Thumbtack is the least bad of the marketplaces because you set the exact lead price yourself. Angi is the one to audit hardest. And none of the four leave you owning anything.

Can you dispute or refund a bad lead, and does it work?

On Google LSA, disputes are largely automated and the credit lands within 30 days — but Google narrowed the rules, and its help docs now state plainly that it 'no longer supports credits for job type not serviced and geo not serviced leads.' The two complaints you most want to make are the two you can no longer make.

Google also excludes lead credits entirely for health care verticals and tax specialists. Thumbtack's protection is structural rather than after-the-fact: a partial-match lead gives you 24 hours to accept, and Opportunities are free to quote — you are only charged if the customer replies. That is a better deal than arguing after the money is gone.

Angi's dispute process is a support conversation, not a policy you can point to. The FTC's redress program tells you how much that argument is worth in practice: affected service providers were eligible for payments of up to $30 each for the lead-quality misrepresentations. That is one lead.

What happens to your lead flow the day you stop paying?

It goes to zero the same day — every one of these channels is rented, and none of them leave a residue. Pause the card and the phone stops. That is the difference between an ad spend and an asset, and it is the whole reason we push home services SEO alongside paid channels rather than instead of them.

There is also a membership tax on top of the lead fees. The FTC's order noted HomeAdvisor providers 'generally pay an annual membership fee of $287.99, in addition to a separate fee for each lead they receive.' You are renting the right to buy leads.

We run a 90-day rule on every channel: if it has produced no qualified booked work in 90 days, it gets cut. Apply that to Angi with the same nerve you would apply it to a truck that will not start.

When does a shared-lead marketplace genuinely make sense?

In exactly three situations: you are brand new with zero reviews, you have crew idle time worth more than the lead fee, and you can answer inside a few minutes every single time. Miss any one of the three and the math stops working.

• Brand-new company, no reviews, no rankings — buy leads to buy your first 20 reviews, then taper.
• Filling a slow week for a crew you are already paying — a marginal job at a bad cost per lead still beats an idle truck.
• You answer in minutes, not hours. On a shared lead, the second caller is a quote comparison and the fourth is ignored.
• Low-ticket, high-frequency work where one won job pays for many lost leads.
• You are testing a new service line and want demand signal before you build pages for it.

What it never is: a permanent acquisition strategy. Angi's own pro signup page advertises 'over 1.5M opportunities on Angi last month' — that is a marketplace optimizing for volume of leads sold, and you are on the buy side of that trade.

What would you get for the same money building your own demand?

At a $500-to-$1,000 real cost per booked job, three or four marketplace jobs a month is the same money as a full search program — and unlike the lead fee, that spend compounds. Rankings you earn in month four are still there in month twenty-four. A lead you bought in month four is gone the second the homeowner hangs up.

The practical stack for a trade business, in order: fix your Google Business Profile and review velocity, get Local Services Ads running because Google-verified pay-per-lead is the cleanest paid channel you have, then build the service and city pages that rank for the jobs you actually want. If you are deciding between LSA and standard search ads, we broke that down in LSA vs Google search ads.

Keep buying leads while that builds if the unit economics hold. Just stop pretending the lead fee is the cost. The cost is the lead fee divided by the close rate on a customer three of your competitors are also calling.

If you are a roofer, plumber, HVAC or electrical contractor tired of renting your pipeline, our roofing SEO program and paid ads management run month to month with no lock-in, and you own everything we build. Get my free audit and we will show you what your true cost per booked job looks like next to a channel you own.