A plumber in our market put it bluntly last quarter: “I spent $1,900 on Angi and HomeAdvisor in two months and booked four jobs. Is everyone getting screwed, or just me?”
Neither, exactly. Lead marketplaces like Angi, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor can work — but the way they’re sold, the way they changed in 2025, and the way most owners measure them all conspire to make a bad deal look fine and a fine deal look bad. This is the honest operator breakdown: what each one actually charges, what changed, what the FTC found, what they will and won’t refund, and the single number that decides whether any of it is worth it.
The three platforms, and who owns them now
Start with the corporate map, because it explains a lot of the behavior. Angie’s List (the old review directory) and HomeAdvisor merged in 2017 to form ANGI Homeservices, now Angi Inc., which is majority-controlled by IAC (InterActiveCorp). So when you “shop” Angi versus HomeAdvisor, you are largely shopping two front doors to the same company: HomeAdvisor leads are now sold as Angi Leads under Angi Inc. That consolidation matters — it means less real competition between them than the marketing implies.
Thumbtack is the independent one. No annual fee, a different bidding model, and a separate company — which is why its pricing and refund rules don’t mirror Angi’s.
What they actually charge
Here are the real numbers, current as of this writing.
- Angi (and HomeAdvisor / Angi Leads): an annual membership around $300, plus per-lead charges that commonly run $15 to $85+. Big-ticket trades — HVAC, roofing, remodels — sit at the high end because the jobs are worth more.
- Thumbtack: no annual fee. It uses dynamic pricing that changes weekly by category and area, typically swinging from around $10 on the low end to $50+ for competitive, high-value jobs. Thumbtack also offers Thumbtack Direct Leads — a higher-cost option charged only on a booked job — which is the closest thing it has to pay-on-performance, alongside its standard Instant Match leads.
None of these numbers mean anything on their own, which is the whole problem. We’ll get to the math that does matter below.
The 2025 change everyone is missing on Angi
This is the most important update, and most articles still describe the old product. As of January 13, 2025, Angi made homeowner choice its default model. Instead of instantly blasting one lead to every pro in the area, the homeowner now picks which pro contacts them. The old instant-shared-blast — the “network” lead everyone competed for in minutes — has been demoted to a supplementary fallback for when a homeowner doesn’t choose someone specific.
This wasn’t a small regional test. Angi’s own Q3 2025 investor reporting showed Network Service Requests down about 67% year over year and Network Leads down about 81% as the shared model was wound down. The practical takeaway: Angi’s flagship product now behaves closer to a chosen, semi-exclusive lead than the free-for-all it used to be. Any advice that still tells you to “answer in five minutes before the other four pros do” is describing Angi as it was, not as it is. Thumbtack, by contrast, still typically exposes a standard lead to several pros.
Shared vs. exclusive: why the model decides your real cost
The math that buries owners is shared leads. When one lead goes to four or five pros, you’re not paying for a customer — you’re paying for a chance to reach a customer who’s also being called by your competitors. Two hidden numbers eat the deal:
- Contact rate — the share of leads you actually reach by phone. On shared leads this is brutal; many never answer because someone else got there first. Speed to lead is real (a large share of buyers hire the first pro to respond, and responding within ~5 minutes is the well-documented edge), but it’s a treadmill.
- Close rate — of the ones you reach, how many book.
Run the numbers: a $40 shared lead with a 20% contact rate and a 25% close rate costs you $800 per booked job — before you’ve earned a dollar. That can still be fine for a $9,000 HVAC install and ruinous for a $180 drain clean. This is exactly why the alternative — exclusive leads that go to you alone — exists. For trades like HVAC, roofing, and solar, exclusive-lead vendors such as Modernize and CraftJack sell pricier-but-yours-only leads, and platforms like Yelp (Request a Quote), Houzz (remodeling and design), Porch, Networx, and Bark round out the shared-lead landscape you’ll run into. More marketplaces don’t fix the core issue; only measuring cost per booked job does.
The FTC case against HomeAdvisor — what it really found
You’ll see “HomeAdvisor got sued by the FTC” thrown around. Here’s the accurate version, because the details tell you what to verify before you spend.
In a 2023 final order, the FTC required HomeAdvisor (an Angi Inc. company) to pay up to $7.2 million to settle charges of deceptive and unfair practices in selling leads to service providers — brought under Section 5 of the FTC Act (unfair or deceptive acts or practices). The complaint found that HomeAdvisor:
- Overstated how often its leads turned into actual jobs.
- Sold leads that didn’t match the pro’s selected service type or geography.
- And the most damning part: represented that leads came from consumers who knowingly sought HomeAdvisor’s help, when many leads were actually purchased from third-party affiliates and never came from HomeAdvisor’s own site. In other words, the company was, in part, a lead aggregator reselling affiliate leads dressed up as native demand.
The FTC also charged that the bundled mHelpDesk software subscription was deceptively marketed as “free.” The agency has returned more than $3 million to affected businesses to date (roughly $1.8M in late 2023 plus another ~$1.1M tied to mHelpDesk in 2024). “Up to $7.2M” is the cap, not the amount actually disbursed — keep that distinction straight.
This doesn’t make the platform unusable in 2026. It tells you precisely what to confirm: where the lead came from, whether it matches your service and area, and to ignore any vendor’s quoted conversion stats in favor of your own tracking.
Refunds and disputes: what you’ll actually get back
Both platforms have credit/refund policies, and both are narrower than the pitch implies.
Angi issues credits, not cash refunds, applied to future charges. Per its Lead Credit Guidelines, you generally have a ~45-day window to report a bad lead, there’s a cap of roughly 5 credits per territory, and credits expire in about 6 months. Wrong number, duplicate, or out-of-area leads are the clean cases.
Thumbtack refunds invalid leads — invalid phone numbers, spam/fraud, duplicates, and TOS violations. It does not refund a customer who simply never responds or who hires someone else. Be precise here: a non-responsive contact is exactly the kind of lead Thumbtack will not refund, so don’t budget around getting that money back.
For contrast, the owned alternative changed too: Google removed manual lead disputes for Local Services Ads in 2024 in favor of an automated credit system that auto-credits spam, wrong-number, and duplicate leads within roughly 15-30 days — but notably no longer credits “job type not serviced” or “geo not serviced” leads. Every channel has fine print; the question is whether the channel earns its keep after the fine print.
The only number that matters: cost per booked job
Forget cost per lead. The metric that decides everything is cost per booked job — total spend divided by jobs you actually closed. Layer on the standard economics and the picture gets clear:
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) / customer acquisition cost (CAC): what one booked customer costs you, all-in.
- Customer lifetime value (LTV): what that customer is worth over years — the number that justifies a high CPA on repeat-service trades like HVAC maintenance. A healthy LTV:CAC is roughly 3:1 or better.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): revenue per dollar spent, the universal yardstick to compare a platform against your owned channels.
You can’t manage any of this on a spreadsheet of guesses. You need call tracking (a tool like CallRail with dynamic number insertion) to attribute each call to its source, and a field-service CRM — ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber — to tie that lead to revenue. Getting conversion tracking and call tracking wired correctly is the precondition for judging any lead source honestly; without it, you’re flying blind on the one number that matters.
Rented leads vs. owned channels
Shared-lead platforms are rented demand. The customer, the review, the pricing, and the relationship belong to the platform — stop paying and the leads stop cold. Owned channels do the opposite: they compound and keep working after you stop spending.
- Google Business Profile (GBP) — the free engine behind your reviews and your spot in the Local Pack (Map Pack). Claimed, optimized, and fed steady reviews, it’s the single best-ROI asset most home-service owners own.
- Local Services Ads (LSA) — and this is a hard correction to a common myth: LSAs are pay-per-lead, not pay-per-click. You’re charged only when a customer calls, messages, or books, the leads are exclusive to you, and the Google Guaranteed badge (or Google Screened for certain verticals) is the trust signal that makes them convert. Average home-services LSA cost per lead runs around $50. That’s a fundamentally better structure than a shared lead. (Confusingly, Google’s own directory page once lumped LSA in with paid clicks — don’t; they’re different products.)
- Google Ads (Search) and Performance Max — true pay-per-click, but exclusive, high-intent traffic that’s yours alone.
- Local SEO — reviews and ratings, NAP consistency across citations, and steady content build rankings that no platform can repossess. Add Nextdoor as a local word-of-mouth channel that behaves more like owned reputation than a paid marketplace.
We run Local Services Ads and Google for exactly this reason: the leads are yours, the cost per booked job is usually lower, and the asset survives a budget cut.
So — are they worth it?
Honest answer: sometimes, as a supplement, never as your foundation. They can fill slow weeks, test a new service line, or bootstrap a brand-new business with no Google presence yet. But run them like an experiment: 60-90 days, every lead tracked to a booked job, and a hard comparison against your owned channels on cost per booked job. Keep what beats your Google channels; cut what doesn’t. And remember what 2025 proved on Angi — these platforms change the rules whenever it suits them. The leads you rent can be repriced or rerouted overnight. The Google presence you own can’t be taken away. Build the asset, rent the rest only while the math works.
FAQ
Are Angi, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor leads worth it for home-service businesses? Sometimes — but only if you measure cost per booked job, not cost per lead. These are lead marketplaces, and historically most leads were shared with several pros, so the contractor who answers in minutes wins and the rest pay for nothing. Angi changed this in January 2025: its main product is now homeowner-choice (the homeowner picks who contacts them), with old-style shared “network” leads relegated to a fallback. Thumbtack still typically exposes leads to several pros on dynamic weekly pricing. They can work as a starter channel or for filling slow weeks, but the platforms own the customer relationship, the reviews, and the pricing — so treat them as rented demand, not an asset you build. Run them for 60-90 days, track every lead to a booked job, and keep only what beats your owned channels on cost per booked job.
How much do Angi and Thumbtack actually cost? Angi pairs an annual membership of roughly $300 with per-lead charges that commonly run $15-$85+, with big-ticket trades (HVAC, roofing, remodels) at the high end. HomeAdvisor is now part of Angi Leads under the same owner, Angi Inc. (majority-controlled by IAC), so its lead pricing works the same way. Thumbtack has no annual fee and uses dynamic pricing that changes weekly by category and area — often around $10 on the low end to $50+ for competitive, high-value jobs — and now also offers Thumbtack Direct Leads, a higher-cost option charged on a booked job. None of these prices mean much until you divide total spend by jobs actually booked: a $40 shared lead with a 20% contact rate and a 25% close rate is really costing you $800 per booked job before you’ve netted a dollar.
What did the FTC find against HomeAdvisor? In a 2023 final order, the FTC required HomeAdvisor (an Angi Inc. company) to pay up to $7.2 million to settle charges that it used deceptive and unfair practices to sell leads to service providers, under Section 5 of the FTC Act. The complaint found HomeAdvisor overstated how often its leads turned into jobs, sold leads that didn’t match the pro’s chosen service type or geography, and — the most damning part — represented that leads came from consumers who sought HomeAdvisor’s help when many were actually purchased from third-party affiliates and never came from HomeAdvisor’s own site. The FTC also charged that the bundled mHelpDesk subscription was deceptively marketed as “free.” The agency has returned more than $3 million to affected businesses so far. The order doesn’t make the platform unusable today, but it tells you exactly what to verify: lead source, match accuracy, and any claimed conversion stats.
What’s a better alternative to shared-lead platforms? Owned channels you control, led by Google. Local Services Ads put you above the Map Pack with a Google Guaranteed (or Google Screened) badge, and unlike shared platforms LSAs are pay-per-lead, exclusive to you, with Google auto-crediting clearly invalid leads. A claimed and optimized Google Business Profile plus local SEO builds rankings, reviews, and NAP consistency that compound and keep working when you stop paying — the opposite of rented leads. Google Search Ads and Performance Max give you exclusive, high-intent clicks (pay-per-click). The honest answer for most owners is a blend: own your Google presence as the base, and use Angi or Thumbtack only as long as they beat your owned channels on cost per booked job.
Want to know whether your current lead sources are actually paying off? We’ll trace every Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, and Google lead to a booked job, put a real cost per booked job on each, and tell you honestly which to keep, fix, or kill. Audit my lead sources.