The phone rings at seven in the morning and it is a rep offering you leads. Or your buddy at the supply house says he got three kitchens off Thumbtack last month and you should get on it. Or you signed up two years ago, spent eleven hundred dollars, won one job, and you still do not know whether you did it wrong or the whole thing is a con.
That last version is the most common, and it is the one worth sorting out. The marketplaces are not a scam and they are not free money. They are a way of buying leads at a price, and whether that price is good comes down to arithmetic you can do yourself in about ten minutes.
Are Angi and Thumbtack worth it for contractors?
For some contractors, in some months, yes. The honest answer is that they work best as a tap you turn on when you need volume and off when you do not, and worst as the foundation of a business.
The trouble is that most contractors sign up in a slow month, get billed like it is a subscription, and never work out their actual cost per job — which is the only number that matters. Cost per lead is what the platform shows you. Cost per job is what you pay.
What each one actually charges you for
They are not the same product, and confusing them is where a lot of the frustration starts.
Thumbtack charges you per lead. A homeowner searches, sees your profile, and messages you. If the job matches the preferences you set, you are charged automatically. Thumbtack lets you set the exact price you are willing to pay with a slider in the pro app — pay more to be more competitive, pay less and show up less. There is a second bucket called Opportunities, where the customer has not picked anyone yet, you reach out first, and you only pay if they reply.
Angi is messier because it is several businesses wearing one name: a pay-per-lead product, advertising and subscription contracts, and Angi Services, where the job is pre-priced, you just show up, and Angi keeps a cut of what the homeowner pays. If a rep quotes you a monthly figure, ask plainly which of those you are buying.
The practical difference: on Thumbtack you can see and control the per-lead price. On Angi, the price is quoted to you.
The one number Angi publishes
Angi is a public company, which means it has to report figures a sales rep would never volunteer.
In the first quarter of 2026, Angi reported $202.5 million in U.S. revenue against 4.42 million U.S. leads. Divide one by the other — which is exactly how Angi defines revenue per lead in its own filing — and you get roughly $46 a lead.
Treat that as a centre of gravity, not a quote. It is an average across every trade, every market and every product Angi sells, so a drain cleaning lead sits well below it and a full remodel sits well above. But it is a real published number rather than a figure somebody made up on a blog, and it is a sane place to start your math.
Two more from the same filing, because they say something about the experience. Angi's average monthly active pros fell 22% year over year, to about 105,000, and average monthly churn was 5%. Roughly one in twenty active pros stops being active every month. That is not proof the platform does not work. It is evidence that a lot of contractors try it and leave, which is worth knowing before you assume you are the problem.
Shared leads are where the math actually happens
Here is the part the cost-per-lead number hides.
Thumbtack publishes its rule: a customer can contact up to five pros in the first four hours of their search, and more after that. Angi's own definition of a lead says the quiet part directly — a single homeowner request can produce multiple leads. In the first quarter of 2026 Angi turned 3.52 million service requests into 4.42 million leads. On average, each homeowner got sold slightly more than once.
So take a lead price and work forward. Say a lead costs you $46 and you close one in every five. Your cost per job is $230. Close one in ten and it is $460. Close one in three and it is $138.
Now put that against your average job. On a $9,000 roof, $460 a job is fine. On a $220 service call, it is your entire margin and then some.
You can run that on the back of an invoice. The two inputs are your real lead price — the one in your account, not the one on a comparison site — and your honest close rate on marketplace leads, which is usually lower than your referral close rate, because the homeowner is talking to four other people.
One more thing before you budget. Thumbtack's refund policy covers duplicate leads, jobs that change significantly, invalid phone numbers and a few other cases, with requests accepted within 45 days. It does not cover a customer who simply never writes back. Thumbtack says so plainly: it verifies phone numbers, but it cannot guarantee anyone answers. Silence is a paid lead.
Where they genuinely help
There are situations where the marketplaces are the right call.
- You are brand new. No reviews, no history, nobody searching your name. Buying leads to get your first ten jobs and first ten reviews is a reasonable use of money.
- You have a gap next week. A crew standing around costs more than a lead does. Turning the tap on for a fortnight beats idle labour.
- You are testing a new service or a new town. Real inquiries tell you fast whether there is demand, without a year of building visibility first.
- Your jobs are large. The bigger the ticket, the more slack in the cost per job.
In all four the platform is doing something specific and temporary. That is when it earns its keep.
When you are renting customers you could have owned
The failure mode is not overspending. It is spending for years and having nothing left over when you stop.
Every dollar into a marketplace buys one lead once. A dollar into your own reviews, site or listing keeps paying after you stop spending. That is why contractors who use the marketplaces well treat them as a supplement to something they own, not a replacement for it.
The cheapest version of what you own is a properly filled-in Google Business Profile, which costs nothing and puts you in the map box those same homeowners scroll past on their way to Angi. After that it is a site you control, at a price you can check against what a contractor website should actually cost, and your own photos and video, priced out in what contractor video content costs.
When this does not apply
If you are booked solid for the season, do not buy leads. More calls you cannot service is not growth, it is a worse reputation.
If you are a subcontractor working for a handful of GCs, homeowners are not searching for you at all. None of this is your market.
And if you already have steady referral work and a decent review count, the marketplaces will probably cost you more per job than the free work you are not doing yet. Do that first.
Do this one thing this week
Open your account — Thumbtack or Angi — and pull two numbers: total spent over the last three months, and jobs actually won from it. Divide.
That figure is your true cost per job. Set it beside your average job value and your margin and you will know within a minute whether to keep going, turn the price down, or shut it off. Most contractors have never done that division, which is why the argument about these platforms never ends.
If the answer is that you would rather stop renting leads, our $1,500 flat website build is where that usually starts — designed, written, and live in seven days. If you want to talk it through before spending anything, get in touch.