Angi vs Thumbtack: an honest look from the contractor's side

Angi vs Thumbtack is a fair question, but it's usually asked at the wrong moment: after a slow month, with the credit card already out. Both platforms can put homeowners in front of you this week. Both can also eat a budget without a single signed job to show for it.

If you paid for 40 leads last month and can't say how many turned into signed contracts, it doesn't matter which app sent them. You bought a guess. This guide compares the two from the side that pays the bill: how each one charges, how many other contractors get the same homeowner, who owns the customer after the job, and when it makes more sense to build your own lead flow instead.

We run paid ads for construction and home services companies, so yes, we have an opinion. We'll still be fair. There are real situations where a lead platform is the right call.

How Thumbtack charges contractors

Thumbtack is a pay per lead marketplace. According to Thumbtack's own help center, when a homeowner reaches out to you directly from search results and the job matches your job preferences, you auto-pay for that lead. You set your lead prices with a slider in the Pro app, which decides how competitive you want to be.

There's a second kind of lead called Opportunities (also called open leads). Those show the price upfront, you reach out first, and you only pay if the homeowner responds. Thumbtack says prices change with the type and size of the job, how many pros are available, and your market.

So what is the real thumbtack cost per lead? Thumbtack doesn't publish one number for everyone, and we won't make one up. Your price depends on your trade, your city and the slider you set. The honest way to find out is to run it for a few weeks and read your payment history, which shows exactly what you paid for each lead.

How many other pros get the same homeowner on Thumbtack

This is the part that matters most for your close rate. Under its Quality Commitment, Thumbtack limits a homeowner to contacting five pros in the first four hours of their search, and they can contact more after that. Thumbtack says most customers reach out to fewer, and you can see on each lead how many pros that homeowner contacted.

Read that again from the money side: you may be one of up to five contractors pricing the same bathroom. That's not a scandal. It's how a marketplace works. But it shapes everything that comes after, starting with your margin.

How Angi charges contractors (and where HomeAdvisor fits)

Angi is harder to pin down, because it has run more than one model over the years. Angi is the former Angie's List, HomeAdvisor is part of the same family, and today Angi's pro signup page asks for your service before it talks money. We couldn't find a public price list for Angi leads on its official pro pages, so we won't quote one here.

What we can quote is the federal record. In its 2023 case, the FTC described HomeAdvisor (which also did business as Angi Leads) as charging service providers an annual membership fee of $287.99 plus a separate fee for each lead.

The FTC alleged that many pros received leads outside their services or area, and that the company claimed conversion rates it couldn't back up. The order required HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million and barred those claims going forward.

That was a few years ago, and pricing can change. The takeaway isn't "Angi is bad." It's this: before you sign, ask in writing what you pay per lead, whether there's a membership or contract, how many other pros receive the same request, and what the refund rules are for bad leads. If the answers are vague, so is your return.

So when people ask about homeadvisor vs thumbtack today, they're really asking about Angi vs Thumbtack. HomeAdvisor is part of the Angi family now.

Angi vs Thumbtack side by side

Here is the comparison from the contractor's side, with a third column most comparisons leave out: leads from your own ads.

	Thumbtack	Angi	Your own Google Ads and LSA
How you pay	Per lead, at a price you set with a slider. Opportunities only charge if the homeowner responds.	Has used membership plus per lead fees. Ask for current terms in writing.	Search ads: per click. Local Services Ads: per lead.
Public price list	No single number. Varies by job, pros available and market.	Not published on its official pro pages.	You set the budget and see every cost in your own account.
Who else gets the homeowner	Up to five pros in the first four hours, more after.	Ask before signing.	Search ads: the homeowner clicked you. LSA: the homeowner picked your profile.
Who owns the relationship	Starts on the platform. Reviews live there.	Starts on the platform. Reviews live there.	Yours from the first call. Reviews go to your Google profile.
Speed to first lead	Can be fast once the profile is live.	Can be fast once the profile is live.	Fast for ads. LSA needs verification first.
Best for	Filling gaps, testing a new service or area.	Filling gaps, trades with steady small jobs.	Building a lead source you control long term.

Shared leads vs exclusive leads: the money math

A shared lead can look cheap and still cost you more per signed job. Here's why, with made-up numbers just to show the math.

Say a platform lead costs you $60 and five contractors get the same homeowner. If you close one in ten of those leads, your cost per signed job is $600 in lead fees alone. Not bad.

But think about what happens on the estimate: with four other bids on the table, the homeowner has every reason to push on price. If you drop your price by 10% on a $15,000 bathroom to win it, you just gave away $1,500. That discount is a marketing cost too. It just never shows up on the platform invoice.

Now compare that to our averages across residential construction campaigns, where we run the client's own ads: about $166 per lead and about $1,714 per signed contract, with an average return of about 7x per ad dollar. Results vary by trade, region, price and sales process.

On paper, $166 a lead looks expensive next to a cheaper platform lead. What matters is what happens after: the homeowner found you, not a list of five, so you're selling your work instead of defending your price.

The fair version of the math is this: track both sources down to the signed job and the margin on that job. Whichever one leaves more money in your pocket per dollar spent wins. For many contractors, that's a mix.

Is Thumbtack worth it? Is Angi?

Sometimes, yes. Here's when a lead platform makes sense:

• You're new or entering a new area. No reviews, no website traffic, no ad history. A marketplace can put first jobs on the calendar while you build everything else.
• Your jobs are small and frequent. Handyman work, small repairs, cleaning. When the ticket is small, a quick marketplace lead can pay fine.
• You need to fill a gap. A crew with three open days next month is expensive. A platform can plug that hole.
• You're testing a new service. Before you build pages and campaigns for a service, a platform tells you cheaply if there's demand.

And here's when they usually stop paying:

• Your average job is big. On a $40,000 kitchen, the homeowner is going to collect several bids anyway. Being one of five from an app puts you in the weakest seat at the table.
• Your close rate is falling and you can't see why. If you're paying for leads that don't pick up, don't match your services or are outside your area, you're paying for noise.
• It's your only source. Referrals are great until the month they stop. A platform is great until the price goes up or the algorithm moves you down. Either way, you don't control it.

Angi alternatives: building your own lead flow

The real alternative to both isn't a third app. It's owning the source. When a homeowner finds you through your own ads or your own website, the customer, the phone number, the reviews and the data are yours. Here are the main pieces.

Google search ads

Someone typing "roof replacement near me" has a project and a budget. Search ads put you in front of that person, in the zip codes you want, for the services with the best margins. You pay per click, so the setup matters: tight keywords, a landing page per service, and blocking the searches that waste money. Our page on Google Ads for contractors shows how we keep that budget clean.

One deck builder we work with put about $8,000 into ads and closed more than $200,000 in signed contracts.

Local Services Ads

Local Services Ads sit at the top of Google and charge per lead, not per click. Per Google's own guide, you pay only for leads related to your business and the services you offer, and you only hear from customers who picked your profile out of the others. In select trades you get the Google Verified badge (the older name was Google Guaranteed). It's the closest thing to a lead platform that you actually own.

SEO and your Google Business Profile

Slower, but it compounds. A page that ranks for your service in your town keeps bringing calls long after you stop paying for clicks, and reviews on your own profile keep working for you instead of for a marketplace. We cover the approach in SEO for contractors.

One place to track every lead

None of this works if leads live in five different apps, a notebook and your text messages. Put every lead from every source in one CRM, with the source attached, and mark each stage: estimate, proposal, signed, lost.

That's how you finally answer "is Thumbtack worth it for me?" with a number instead of a feeling. We set that up in CRM for contractors, with a live dashboard that shows cost per signed job by source.

How to decide this month

1. Pull the last 90 days. For every platform you pay, count leads, estimates, signed jobs and total spend.
2. Divide spend by signed jobs. That's your real cost per signed contract. Compare it to the margin on an average job.
3. Keep what pays, cap what doesn't. A platform that signs jobs at a healthy margin can stay. One that doesn't gets a lower budget, not more hope.
4. Start one owned source. Search ads or LSA on your best service in your best area. Track it the same way, side by side.

If you do remodeling, our guide on how to get remodeling leads ranks every channel by cost per signed project, platforms included.

Angi and Thumbtack aren't villains. They're rented lead flow, and rent is fine as long as you know what it costs you per signed job. Run the 90 day math above this week. If the answer tells you it's time to own your leads, start with Google Ads built around signed jobs, not clicks.