There's no single best pick among lead services for contractors, because "contractor lead generation" covers three different businesses: marketplaces that sell you leads, paid channels you buy clicks or calls on, and owned channels you already have and probably under-use. This page ranks all 23, cheapest to most expensive, by cost per booked job wherever that number is sourceable, falling back to cost per lead everywhere else (we say exactly where each figure comes from). Quick answers: sitting on an idle customer database, work it before buying anything new. Need exclusive leads and can pay for quality, look at Service Direct or 33 Mile Radius. Starting from zero, Google Business Profile costs nothing and compounds.
Every number below is cited to its source, published pricing where a vendor discloses it, contractor-reported figures labeled as such where they don't. Nothing here is a guess dressed up as a fact.
If you have an idle customer database, work it before you buy a single new lead. Reactivating past customers costs nothing beyond staff time, and it's the highest-ROI channel in this entire list.
If you want exclusive leads and can pay for quality, Service Direct or 33 Mile Radius are the two marketplaces built specifically around not sharing your lead with competitors.
If you're a licensed trade in a competitive metro and can staff phones well, Google Local Services Ads is the best-documented paid channel researched here, because Google publishes exactly how the ranking algorithm rewards responsiveness.
If you're starting from zero with no marketing budget, Thumbtack or Bark can work, but only if you answer within minutes and you go in knowing the leads are shared 4–5 ways.
If storms just hit your market and you're a roofer, door-knocking beats every paid channel on this page. Near-zero cost per lead, same-day results.
Avoid CraftJack and HomeGuide unless you enjoy chasing refunds. Both are among the worst-reviewed vendors in this research, and CraftJack may not be a going concern anymore.
This is every one of the lead services for contractors we could find real numbers on, marketplace and owned, in one table. We sorted this by cost per booked job wherever a source actually publishes that number, since that's the only cost that tells you anything real. Almost nobody does. Google's Local Services Ads program is the one paid channel with a sourced cost-per-paying-customer figure ($233, cited below). Angi is the one marketplace with a sourced effective cost-per-booked-job range ($300–$1,400+, from contractor-reported close-rate math). Everywhere else, we ranked by cost per lead, cheapest first, because that's the only number that exists. Treat "cost per lead" as the floor of what a channel costs you, never the ceiling, since close rate is what turns a cheap lead into an expensive one.
| Channel | Typical Cost | Exclusive or Shared | Time to First Lead | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Existing-customer reactivation | $0 new-lead cost (uses your own database) | N/A, your customers | Days | Highest ROI in this whole list. Almost nobody works their own list hard enough. |
| Referral programs | No reliable published CPL | N/A, personal | Ongoing | Directionally the cheapest, highest-converting source. No trustworthy dollar figure exists. |
| Contractor-to-contractor referrals | No cost data exists | N/A, relationship-based | Weeks to build | Zero industry benchmarks. Real, but you’re building it from scratch. |
| Google Business Profile / local SEO | $0 (your time, not your wallet) | N/A, organic | 15 days to 6 months | Free and compounding. The failure mode is quitting before month three. |
| Door-knocking / canvassing | ~$0/lead post-storm (roofing); $20–$50/lead + $1,500–$4,000+ CAC (solar) | Exclusive, you own the doorstep | Same day to 72 hrs | Excellent for storm-triggered roofing and solar. Irrelevant for HVAC or plumbing. |
| Nextdoor | ~$20 CPM / ~$2.50–$3.50 CPC (unverified rate card) | N/A, reputation-driven | Days (ads), ongoing (organic) | A trust amplifier, not a lead engine. Works on top of a good reputation. |
| Google Local Services Ads (LSA) | $53/lead blended; $233 per paying customer | Bid-based, not a shared-lead race | 2–4 wks to verify, then live | Best-documented paid channel. Google itself tells you why: don’t miss the call. |
| 33 Mile Radius (EverConnect) | Not publicly priced (quoted per market) | Exclusive, one contractor per call | Not documented | Genuine exclusive-lead alternative in restoration/HVAC/plumbing/roofing. Pilot small. |
| Service Direct | $15–$2,250/lead depending on trade | Exclusive, no shared leads | Not documented | The clearest "no race to call back" model. Priced accordingly. |
| Modernize (QuinStreet) | $35–$90/lead shared; $200–$500 exclusive (estimates) | Both, shared default + exclusive tier | Not documented | Fine for solar, HVAC, roofing. Pricing opacity is itself a red flag. |
| Networx | $10–$100+/lead shared; $15–$120+ exclusive | Shared up to 4, or pay more for exclusive | Real-time delivery | Cheap entry point, but 1.2/5 contractor sentiment is hard to ignore. |
| Bark.com | ~$15–$30/lead (credit-based) | Shared 5 ways by default | Real-time delivery | A documented ~44% dead-lead rate in one independent test. Buy the exclusive upgrade or skip it. |
| Porch.com | $10–$60/lead | Not guaranteed, sourced from multiple places | Real-time delivery | Middling. No exclusivity promise and refunds are credit-only, not cash. |
| eLocal | ~$110–$125/call (roofing, garage door estimates) | Not clearly documented | Not documented | Pay-per-call, not pay-per-form. Genuinely mixed sentiment, not uniformly bad. |
| Google Ads (paid search) | $90.92/lead average, up to $228 for roofing | N/A, you own the click | Live in hours, stable in 2–4 wks | Reliable and scalable, but the highest average CPL in this list. |
| Meta / Facebook Ads | $44.66 CPA (Home Improvement benchmark) | N/A, you own the audience | Hours to days | Cheaper CPC than Google, but trade-specific benchmarks are weakly sourced industry-wide. |
| Thumbtack | $20–$75/lead (contractor-reported) | Shared, typically 4–5 pros | Real-time delivery | Fine for solo operators who answer fast. Active class action over lead quality. |
| Angi Leads (HomeAdvisor) | $45–$120+/lead + ~$300/yr membership; $300–$1,400+ per booked job | Historically shared 3–8 ways; homeowner-choice model since Jan 2025 | Real-time delivery | Works only with fast, disciplined follow-up. The FTC already documented the core complaint. |
| CraftJack | $7–$50/lead (contractor-reported) | Shared, price depends on lead-share count | Real-time delivery | Among the worst-reviewed vendors researched. Possibly winding down. Skip it. |
| HomeGuide | $17–$160+/lead (contractor-reported) | "Limited competition" claimed, not documented | Real-time delivery | Fake/disconnected numbers is the dominant, specific complaint. Weak pick. |
| Direct mail / EDDM | $0.26/piece postage; ~$32–$130/lead implied at a 0.5–2% response rate | Exclusive to the mailer, not the market | Days to 2 wks after drop | Cheap per piece, low response rate. A seasonal-trigger tool, not a primary channel. |
| Home shows & trade events | No credible home-services-specific figure exists | Exclusive, booth conversation | Event day, days of follow-up after | The cost data available doesn’t match the local-show format this audience actually uses. |
| Yelp (ads + free listing) | No credible published figures found | N/A | Days to weeks | The weakest-sourced channel researched. Matters in dense urban markets, hard to price. |
One theme that holds across the whole table: the best leads for contractors are usually the ones sitting in your own CRM already, not the ones you're about to pay a marketplace for.
One more honest note before the breakdowns: these 23 names collapse into far fewer companies. Angi owns CraftJack. QuinStreet owns Modernize and, as of a November 2025 deal worth up to $190 million18, HomeBuddy. EverCommerce owns 33 Mile Radius through its EverConnect marketing platform. Porch.com sits under the publicly traded Porch Group. What looks like 12 competing pay-per-lead vendors is really 4–5 corporate parents wearing different names.
↑ Back to topThese are the lead services for contractors that work like a marketplace: you pay per lead or per call, and someone else owns the ad spend and the traffic. Here's the detail behind each one's ranking above, in order: real pricing where it's published, contractor sentiment where it's documented, and the honest verdict either way for anyone shopping pay per lead home services options.
Angi is the largest player by volume, and its own contractor guidance explicitly tells pros to respond in minutes, with industry estimates that 35–50% of jobs go to whoever calls first. Contractor-reported pricing runs an annual membership around $300–$350/year (the FTC's own complaint cites HomeAdvisor charging $287.99/year plus per-lead fees) on top of per-lead costs from $35–$120+ depending on trade, with effective cost per booked job often landing at $300–$1,400+. Leads were historically shared with 3–8 contractors at once, though Angi rolled out a "homeowner choice" model in January 2025 where the homeowner picks who can contact them, which the company says raised pro win rates about 10%. Trustpilot sentiment sits around 2.1/5 across 37,000+ reviews. In 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million15 for misrepresenting lead quality and conversion rates. That finding is specific to HomeAdvisor's pre-2023 conduct, not the category. Verdict: works only if you can answer in minutes, every time.
Thumbtack runs a dynamic-auction model with no published rate card. Contractor-reported ranges run roughly $5–$150+ depending on trade, with an average closer to $20–$75/lead, shared with 4–5 pros. Reported close rates run 8–25%, and below about 10% the unit economics reportedly stop working. Trustpilot shows 3.9/5 across ~6,170 reviews, though that pool mixes homeowner and pro reviews. A 2025 federal class action, Turbin et al. v. Thumbtack16, alleges the platform charges pros for unverified leads and distributes identical leads to multiple contractors without adequate disclosure. It's active litigation, not a settled finding, and it applies to Thumbtack specifically. Verdict: workable for newer shops with healthy margins who respond in under 5 minutes.
Networx publishes its own pricing: $10–$100+ for shared leads, $15–$120+ for exclusive ones, no setup fees or long-term contract. Shared leads go to up to 4 contractors in real time. Contractor sentiment is rough: 1.2/5 across 42 reviews on PissedConsumer27, with widespread complaints about fake or outdated leads. Verdict: cheaper entry point than Angi, but the exclusive tier is the only version worth testing, and even then, small.
Modernize focuses on higher-ticket categories (windows, siding, roofing, HVAC, solar, kitchens/baths) and doesn't publish a rate card, describing a "Right Pricing" model quoted per market by an account manager. Third-party estimates put solar leads around $40–$80/lead, general shared leads $35–$90/lead, exclusive leads $200–$500/lead, none of it vendor-confirmed. Its parent, QuinStreet, closed a deal to acquire HomeBuddy for up to $190 million in late 2025, adding an exclusive auction-format lead product. Verdict: reasonable supplement for solar and HVAC. The account-manager-only pricing is itself a red flag worth noting.
CraftJack is historically part of the Angi/HomeAdvisor family. Contractor-reported pricing runs $7–$50/lead, with a documented discount for responding within 30 minutes, which is one of the clearest vendor-side confirmations anywhere in this research that speed is priced into the lead itself. Sentiment is among the worst researched: numerous BBB complaints24, a PissedConsumer pattern of bogus leads and blocked cancellations, and a trade-forum thread literally titled "CraftJack DO NOT SIGN UP!!!!" BBB now lists CraftJack as out of business, though the site was still live at research time. Verdict: skip it.
eLocal is a pay-per-call model, majority-owned by HomeServe PLC20 since 2019, charging against a deposit rather than a flat rate. Contractor-reported figures put garage-door-repair calls around $110/lead and roof-replacement calls around $125/lead. eLocal's own marketing states no contract, you only pay for the calls you get. Sentiment is genuinely mixed, not uniformly negative: some long-term users prefer it to click-based competitors, others report disputes over low-quality calls. Verdict: worth testing as a structurally different pay-per-call option, not a like-for-like swap with a form-lead marketplace.
Bark runs a credit system, roughly $2.20–$2.35 per credit, with most leads costing 6–12 credits (about $15–$30/lead). By Bark's own published terms, every lead is shared with up to 5 professionals by default, with an exclusive option at about 20% more credits, which makes Bark one of the more transparent vendors about exactly how its shared-lead economics are priced. Sentiment runs 1.2/5 on PissedConsumer, and one independently cited test found only a 44% contact-response rate on the first 50 leads dialed. Verdict: weak unit economics unless you consistently pay for the exclusive upgrade.
Porch, part of the publicly traded Porch Group, prices leads around $10–$60 depending on project size28, with a "Vetted Pro" annual fee around $360/year. Porch's own terms allow leads sourced from partner channels, so exclusivity isn't guaranteed. An independent review site documents refund complaints and a credit-only (not cash) refund policy, alongside a lower BBB complaint volume than Angi or Thumbtack. Verdict: middling. Better sentiment than the worst players here, but no exclusivity promise.
33 Mile Radius is concentrated in restoration, plumbing, HVAC, and roofing, and it's structurally different from most of this list: it sells exclusive phone calls, one contractor per lead, which removes the first-to-respond race entirely. Its own site states no fees and no long-term commitment, though a specific per-lead dollar figure isn't publicly disclosed. Vendor testimonials show strong ratings, but an independent Trustpilot complaint describes a bad batch of post-storm leads23. Verdict: the most credible exclusive-lead alternative researched in its concentrated categories. Pilot it small given the pricing opacity.
Service Direct publishes real pricing by trade on its own pay-per-lead costs page: air conditioning $65–$325, plumbing $60–$255, electrician $55–$175, roofing $85–$550, water damage restoration $500–$2,250. Every lead is exclusive, and Service Direct's own marketing explicitly argues this removes the race to call back first that defines the shared-lead marketplaces above. Sentiment runs more positive than average, though one reported market average found 45% of callers were price-shoppers who never moved past the phone call. Verdict: along with 33 Mile Radius, the strongest "no shared-lead race" alternative here, at a real price premium.
HomeGuide charges per accepted lead, contractor-reported at roughly $17–$160+/lead, with no membership fee. It markets "limited competition to win more jobs" without publishing a specific shared-contractor count. The dominant, specific complaint on PissedConsumer26 is fake or disconnected phone numbers, which is a sharper problem than pricing. Verdict: one of the weaker options on lead validity specifically, and a possible platform transition adds uncertainty worth checking before you commit budget.
↑ Back to topThese are the channels a contractor builds and runs directly, rather than renting from a marketplace. Some cost real money (Google Ads, Meta Ads, direct mail), some cost only time (Google Business Profile, referrals), but all of them are yours to keep, unlike a marketplace relationship you can lose overnight. A few of these are also the closest thing to free leads for contractors that actually exists, not a form-fill giveaway, just channels where the price is your time instead of your budget.
LSA is the best-documented paid channel in this research. A February 2026 analysis of $6.72M in observed spend across 888 contractors put the blended cost per lead at ~$5334, with a booking rate of 43.9% and cost per paying customer at $233. By trade: electrical $39, HVAC $51, plumbing $57, drain/sewer $59. Most important, Google's own LSA ranking documentation12 states plainly that ranking depends on responsiveness, that "missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness," and that enabling message or booking leads "increase[s] the likelihood of receiving a lead, especially during nights and weekends." New accounts need 2–4 weeks to pass Google's screening (license, insurance, background checks) before leads flow. Verdict: the strongest single data point for why answering the phone matters, because Google says so in its own help docs, not a marketing claim.
Google's own local ranking explanation names relevance, distance, and prominence (driven by reviews and inbound links) as the three ranking factors, and it costs nothing to maintain. BrightLocal's 2025 Local Consumer Review Survey2 found 97% of consumers read reviews before choosing a local business, 31% will only use a business with 4.5+ stars (up from 17% the year before), and Google's own share of "review platform used" fell from 83% to 71% as AI-tool usage for recommendations jumped from 6% to 45%. New profiles typically take 3–6 months to gain map-pack traction. Verdict: free but not fast. The failure mode is under-investing time and quitting before it compounds.
LocaliQ's 2025 benchmark1, drawn from 3,211 US search campaigns over a year, put average CPL at $90.92 across trades: air conditioning $127.74, electricians $93.69, plumbing $129.02, roofing & gutters $228.15. Unlike LSA, standard Google Ads has no built-in responsiveness penalty for a missed call, the cost of missing one here is purely wasted spend, not compounding algorithmic damage. Verdict: reliable and scalable, but the highest average CPL researched, and it punishes a missed call economically even without punishing it algorithmically.
WordStream's 2025 benchmark3, based on over 1,000 campaigns, puts the Home Improvement category CPA at $44.66 with a 0.70% CTR and a 5.22% lead-form conversion rate. Trade-specific numbers circulating elsewhere (HVAC $45–116, roofing ~$77) come from agency sites with no disclosed methodology and vary 2–3x for the same trade, a sign they don't trace to one real study, so we're not repeating them as fact. Verdict: cheaper CPC than Google, but home-services-specific benchmarks for Meta are genuinely weak industry-wide. Works best retargeting your own customer lists, not blind cold-audience prospecting.
This is the weakest-sourced channel in this whole guide, and we're saying so rather than repeating unsourced numbers. Every cost figure circulating for Yelp Ads (CPC $5–25, CPL $30–150) comes from agency content with no disclosed sample size or methodology, wide enough to be nearly unfalsifiable. No Yelp-published rate card and no rigorous independent study exists the way LocaliQ and WordStream exist for Google and Meta. What's verifiable: Yelp Ads contracts commonly run 12-month terms, and Yelp itself is currently suing Google over local search dominance, which is unrelated to advertiser cost complaints. Verdict: skip the specific dollar figures you'll see elsewhere. The free listing still matters in dense urban markets.
Reported ad pricing runs around $20 CPM and $2.50–$3.50 CPC, though no primary Nextdoor rate card confirms it directly. Nextdoor's core value is the organic neighbor-recommendation thread, which is a trust mechanism, not a call-routing one, there's no documented algorithmic penalty for a missed call the way LSA has one. Verdict: cheap relative to Google or Meta, but this works best layered on top of an already-good reputation, not as a standalone acquisition channel.
Every source on referral cost-per-lead disagrees with every other source: $52 from one, $25 and $14 from others in the same search cluster, a spread with no shared methodology and no traceable origin. We're not publishing a referral CPL because none of the numbers survive scrutiny. What's consistent across every source, however weakly sourced individually, is the direction: referral close rates are described as meaningfully higher than paid channels. Verdict: directionally the best economics in this category. Build the ask into your process (a text after every completed job), and don't trust a specific dollar-per-lead claim anywhere online, including this page.
USPS EDDM Retail postage sits at $0.260/piece as of July 2026, with all-in production cost (printing + postage) running $0.50–$0.80/piece. EDDM-specific response rates run 0.5–2%, which, doing the simple math ourselves rather than citing an agency's number, implies a cost per lead somewhere around $32–$130, our calculation, not a published figure. A missed call on a direct-mail-driven lead is a pure loss: no algorithmic recovery like LSA, no retargeting like Meta. Verdict: cheap per piece, low response rate. Works as a seasonal-trigger tool (tune-ups, storm-zone targeting), not a primary channel.
Storm-triggered roofing canvassing, deployed within 48–72 hours of a hail or wind event, reportedly converts 1–3% per 100 doors knocked per crew per day at near-zero cost per lead, since the visit itself generates the lead rather than an ad. Solar door-to-door runs closer to $20–$50 per lead with roughly a 10% appointment-set rate, yielding an effective acquisition cost of $1,500–$4,000+. Wood Mackenzie, a credible energy-research firm, projects residential solar acquisition cost will rise ~40% in 2026 to about $0.84/W38 after the federal residential solar tax credit expired. Solar door-to-door also carries real reputational risk: Grist's investigative reporting39 documents deceptive door-to-door solar sales tactics industry-wide. Verdict: excellent, fast, and cheap for storm-triggered roofing. Effective but pricier and riskier for solar. Not relevant to HVAC, plumbing, or electrical as a primary channel.
ServiceTitan's own research4 (vendor-published, so read with that lens, but at least attributed to a named survey) reports plan members stay 3–5x longer than one-time customers, and a member retained 5 years at a $200/year plan fee is worth an estimated $3,000–$5,000 in additional revenue over that period. 63% of surveyed contractors said more than half their customers were on a maintenance agreement. There's no new-lead cost here at all, the acquisition cost is already sunk. Verdict: the highest-leverage channel in this whole guide, and it's only as good as your CRM and your ability to actually answer the reactivation and renewal calls it generates.
Here's an honest gap: the trade-show cost data we could find (10x10 booths running $12,000–$25,000 all-in) comes from large national B2B convention pricing, not the local county-fair-style home & garden shows most $5M–$50M contractors actually attend. We couldn't find a credible home-services-specific cost study for the local format, so we're not printing a number that doesn't match the real use case. Verdict: a high fixed-cost, event-driven channel where post-show follow-up speed (within 48 hours, before a stack of scanned leads goes cold) determines whether it pays off. Get real numbers from a specific show organizer before you commit budget.
This channel is almost entirely qualitative in the available research: no cost-per-lead, close-rate, or volume study exists for cross-trade referral networks (a plumber referring an electrician, since they don't compete for the same job). What exists is descriptive, the "power partner" concept of non-competing trades referring to each other, and manufacturer-run loyalty programs pairing trades. No dollar figures exist anywhere in this category, and that's worth telling you plainly rather than inventing one. Verdict: real and durable, but build it as a relationship system, not a channel you can benchmark against a CPL number.
↑ Back to topEvery ranking of lead services for contractors, including ours, treats the moment of purchase as the finish line: you bought a lead, here's what it cost. Almost none of them look at what happens next, which is the part that actually decides whether any of this money was well spent.
Google is the one source in this entire research pass that documents the mechanism directly, in its own words, not an agency's interpretation of it. Its Local Services Ads help documentation12 states that ranking depends on responsiveness, that "missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness," and that enabling message or booking leads "increase[s] the likelihood of receiving a lead, especially during nights and weekends." That's not a growth-hacker's claim about an "8x conversion lift," it's Google telling contractors, in a support article, that a missed call doesn't just cost you that one lead, it degrades the algorithm's opinion of you going forward.
The same pattern shows up everywhere else in this research, just less officially. Angi's own contractor guidance pushes pros to respond in minutes. CraftJack prices a 30-minute response discount directly into its leads. Thumbtack's close rate is widely tied to answering fast. A referral, a Google Business Profile inquiry, a mailer response, a canvassing follow-up, none of that spend cares which channel it came from once the phone is ringing and nobody picks up. If your team can't answer at 9pm or on a Sunday, that's exactly where an after-hours AI agent earns its cost back, not by generating a lead, but by not wasting the ones you already paid for.
And when your team does pick up, or calls the lead back, what they say decides whether it books. We published the outbound call scripts we use for exactly those calls: the first callback, the quote that went quiet, and the confirmation the night before.
For the flip side of this same math, see how much calling a lead back in under 60 seconds changes the close rate, or read the full answering service cost breakdown on the blog.
Every number on this page traces to one of these. Where a source is weak, thin, or a vendor describing itself, it says so.
Mecha answers every call, day or night, and books straight into ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber. Live in about two weeks, and you'll love it or it's free.