Six roofers get the same text at the same minute. A homeowner in your zip code, metal roof, insurance claim. Good job.
You call in ninety seconds. Busy. You call again. It goes to voicemail. You leave a message, send a follow-up text, and wait.
By the time she calls anyone back, she's already talked to two of the other five. You paid for that lead. So did they.
That's the HomeAdvisor model in one scene. Not the price. The price is almost beside the point. The question that decides whether any of it works is one most contractors have never actually run: after you count every lead you had to buy, what did one signed job cost you?
This article isn't here to tell you to cancel HomeAdvisor. It's here to hand you the number that tells you yourself.
What is HomeAdvisor, exactly?
HomeAdvisor is a pay-per-lead marketplace for home-service contractors, and in 2026 it goes by a new name.
It now operates as Angi Leads, under Angi Inc. HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, and ServiceMagic all folded into the same company over the years, and Angi Inc. became a fully independent public company after spinning off from IAC in April 2025. So if you signed up for "HomeAdvisor" and your bill now says Angi, nothing changed under you except the logo. Same marketplace, same model.
The scale is real, and it's worth stating plainly. More than 150 million homeowners have used the platform. When someone in your area needs a roof, a furnace, or a remodel and types it into Google, there's a strong chance they land on a form that feeds this network. That reach is the product, and it's genuinely big.
That's what you're buying: access to a firehose of homeowner demand you didn't have to generate yourself. Keep that in mind, because what follows is not a hit piece.
What does HomeAdvisor do well?
Two things, and they matter most if you're just starting out.
It puts jobs in front of you fast. A brand-new contractor with no website, no reviews, and an empty calendar can sign up today and have homeowner contacts by the end of the week. There's no waiting for SEO to kick in or an ad account to learn. For someone who needs work now, that speed is worth something real.
It handles the demand side for you. You don't have to run ads, build a site, or figure out tracking. The platform does the finding. You just answer the phone. For a contractor who wants to be on roofs, not in an ad manager, that's a genuine convenience.
That's the honest case for HomeAdvisor, and for a new shop it's a strong one. Now here are the things you can't see on the pricing page, and they decide whether it pays off.
What does a HomeAdvisor lead actually cost?
There's no public flat rate, because the price moves.
Contractors report paying roughly $15 to $120 or more per lead, depending on the trade and the size of the job, plus an annual membership fee to be in the network. A small handyman task sits at the low end. A roof replacement or a full remodel sits at the top.
Here's the part that changes the math. Most leads are shared. The same homeowner who filled out one form is sold to several pros at once, commonly 3 to 8 of you. So you're not buying a customer. You're buying a chance to race 3 to 7 other companies to a customer who is now getting a lot of phone calls.
That's not hidden, exactly. But it reframes the price. A $60 lead isn't $60 to book a job. It's $60 for a lottery ticket, and you don't win most of them. Which brings us to the only number that settles anything.
Do the leads turn into jobs as often as you were told?
This is the exact question that got HomeAdvisor in trouble, so it's worth being precise.
In January 2023, the Federal Trade Commission issued an order requiring HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million and stop deceptively marketing its leads. The FTC's complaint charged that since at least mid-2014, the company made false or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of its leads, telling service providers that its leads turned into actual jobs at rates higher than HomeAdvisor's own internal data supported. The FTC ended up sending 110,372 refund checks to affected home-service providers.
We're not telling you that story to pile on. We're telling you because it points at the one thing you have to measure yourself: a lead is not a job, and nobody selling you leads is a neutral source on how often they convert. The FTC action is a matter of public record, and the lesson in it is simple. Don't take the conversion rate from the company being paid per lead. Take it from your own closed jobs.
What changed with the "homeowner choice" model?
One recent shift is worth knowing before you sign.
In January 2025, the platform moved to a "homeowner choice" model. Instead of a homeowner's form auto-blasting to a set of contractors the instant they hit submit, homeowners now pick which pros get to contact them. On paper that's better for everyone: fewer junk leads, warmer homeowners.
In practice it moved the whole business around. The company's network revenue, the shared-lead side, dropped sharply after the change, while its own proprietary channels kept growing. What that tells a contractor is straightforward. The marketplace itself is in flux, and the terms you sign up under this quarter may not be the terms you're operating under next year. That's another reason to know your own numbers, so a change on their side doesn't leave you guessing about yours.
Three questions to email any lead marketplace before you sign
- Is this lead exclusive to me, or shared, and if shared, with how many other contractors?
- What is your annual commitment and cancellation window, in writing?
- If I dispute a bad lead, what actually qualifies for a credit, and who decides?
A clear written answer beats any sales pitch, including this one. If the answer stays vague, that's already an answer.
The only number that settles it: cost per signed job
Not the price per lead. Not the membership tier. The cost to turn strangers into one signed job.
The math fits on the back of an invoice.
Everything you spend on a lead source in a month, divided by the number of jobs you actually signed from it.
An example with round numbers, to swap for your own. Say a shared lead costs you $50, and because it went to five other pros and you couldn't always call first, you close 15% of them. To sign one job you buy about 7 leads. That's roughly $333 per signed job.
Now change one thing. An exclusive lead, one only you receive, costs more, say $50 too but let's be honest and say it costs more, and it closes at 40% because nobody else is calling. Now one job costs you closer to $125.
Across home services, that gap is the pattern, not the exception. Shared leads tend to close in the 10 to 20% range; exclusive leads, the ones you own from your own site, ads, or profile, tend to close two to three times higher. Those are cross-industry home-service figures, not a number for your specific trade, so run yours. But the direction holds everywhere: a $50 shared lead and a $50 exclusive lead are not the same expense. We walked through this exact trap for one trade in why roofers lose money on Angi leads, and the shape repeats in every marketplace, pool installers included.
[If you're buying leads and can't say what a signed job costs you, that's the first thing worth fixing. Book a free audit and we'll pull your real cost per signed job, even if you keep every lead source you have.]
Software cost and lead cost are two different problems
Quick aside, because contractors mix these up all the time.
Your field-service software, your marketing spend, and your lead-buying are three different invoices doing three different jobs, and blending them is how you lose track of which dollar is working. We wrote the full version of that for the field-service platform most trades run on, but the short version is this: software that organizes jobs is overhead, and it should make each job cheaper to run. Lead-buying is acquisition, and it should produce signed jobs below your average job profit. When you can't tell them apart on one dashboard, you end up blaming the software for a lead problem, or the leads for a follow-up problem.
Should you cancel HomeAdvisor?
No, not on a hunch. Here's the honest read, in three cases.
You're brand new, no reviews, empty calendar. Keep it for now. The reach does something you can't do overnight, and a job today beats a perfect funnel next quarter. Just track your cost per signed job from day one, so you know when you've outgrown it.
You're established, and you're buying shared leads to "stay busy." Run the number honestly. If a signed job from shared leads costs you three times what one from your own ads or referrals costs, you're paying a premium to race five competitors to a homeowner who's annoyed by all six calls. That premium is usually where a real acquisition system pays for itself.
You dispute half your leads and dread the renewal. That's not a pricing problem to negotiate. That's a signal the fit is wrong for your trade and your close rate. Before you re-up, figure out what a job costs you here versus what it would cost from a channel you own.
One last thing, true of any marketplace. A lead source you don't control isn't a strategy. If the terms change again, or your zip fills with contractors bidding up the same leads, you want to already know your numbers, because that's your only leverage.
And if the tap were yours?
There's another way to get the phone to ring, and it's the opposite of renting a shared lead: you own the demand.
When a homeowner sees your ad, recognizes your name, reads reviews from their own town, and calls you directly, you're not racing anyone. You're the only number they dialed. That lead is exclusive by definition, it closes higher, and the cost per signed job drops as the system learns who your best customers are. Renting a lead resets to zero every month; owning the channel compounds.
We keep our client numbers out of trades we don't publish figures for, so here's a cross-industry order of magnitude, not a home-services number. For a med spa we work with in Nice, €620 of ad budget produced 193 leads, that's €3.21 per lead, and 88 clients at the end of it. Different trade, and your cost per roofing or HVAC job will be much higher. What transfers is the shape: own the tap, answer fast, and the cost per signed job falls instead of renewing higher every year.
30-Second Audit
Three honest questions before your next renewal. Answer yes or no.
- Can you say, without opening a spreadsheet, what a signed job from your leads costs you this month?
- Do you know how many other contractors got the last lead you paid for?
- If your top lead source doubled its price tomorrow, do you have a channel you own to fall back on?
If any answer was no, that's not a marketplace problem, it's a measurement problem, and it's faster to fix than you think. Book a free audit and we'll pull your real cost per signed job, even if you decide to keep buying leads exactly as you are.
A lead you rent is a job you might get. A tap you own is one you already have.