Angi, Thumbtack, or Your Own Content: What Leads Really Cost

Angi, Thumbtack, or Your Own Content: What Each Lead Actually Costs

Every home-services owner I talk to in Birmingham has the same complaint about lead marketplaces, and it's rarely about the sticker price. It's the feeling of paying rent on customers they thought were theirs.

So let's put real numbers on it, because this comparison usually gets made with feelings instead of math.

What a bought lead really costs

A shared lead in HVAC, plumbing or roofing generally runs somewhere between $75 and $150 depending on the trade and the job type. Emergency and replacement leads cost more than maintenance calls.

But the sticker price isn't the real cost, because the lead is shared. Three or four companies get the same homeowner's number at the same moment. If your close rate on a shared lead is 20 percent — and for a lot of companies it's lower — then five leads at $100 each is $500 spent to book one job.

Then add the part that never makes it into the spreadsheet. You have to answer within minutes or the lead is worthless, which means somebody is watching a phone all day, or you're paying for leads you never had a real shot at.

And when you stop paying, it stops that day. There is no residual value in a lead you bought in March.

What an article really costs

At $3,000 a month for eight articles, each piece costs roughly $375 to produce. More than one lead. Less than the five it takes to book one job.

The difference is what happens afterward. The article published in June 2026 is still sitting there in June 2029, still answering the same question, still putting your number in front of somebody searching at eleven at night. It cost $375 once.

It also isn't shared with three competitors. When a homeowner reads your piece on whether a compressor is worth replacing, you're the only company in the conversation.

The honest comparison

Bought leads win on speed. If your schedule is empty next week, content will not save you, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something. Buy the leads. Run the ads.

Owned content wins on cumulative cost. Year one it looks slow and expensive. Year three you have sixty or eighty articles working every day, your cost per booked job keeps falling, and the lead marketplace keeps raising its rates.

Most healthy companies run both. The mistake is running only the first one forever — which is how a company ends up ten years old with no owned audience and a marketing bill that goes up every January.

The arithmetic worth doing this week

Pull last year's numbers and find two figures: what you spent on bought leads, and how many jobs you actually booked from them.

Divide the first by the second. That's your true cost per job from purchased leads, and it's usually two to four times what people assume it is.

Then set that against a fixed monthly retainer that produces assets you keep. Not because content is automatically cheaper in month one — it isn't — but because you should know both numbers before deciding which one gets more of your money.

Most contractors have never run that division. It's the most useful hour of arithmetic in this business.

If you'd like help doing it, a Visibility Teardown includes a look at where your leads come from now and what they're costing you. Five business days, and the plan is yours whether or not we end up working together.