How shared lead marketplaces make money
Angi, Thumbtack and HomeAdvisor are auction businesses. A homeowner submits one form, and the platform sells that submission to multiple contractors in the area. Each contractor pays full price for the same lead.
That model is profitable for the platform and structurally hostile to the contractor. You are charged whether or not the homeowner answers, whether or not they were serious, and whether or not three competitors called them before you did.
What that does to your close rate
The first contractor to call a shared lead wins a large share of the time. Everyone else is quoting into a decision that is already forming. Contractors who track it carefully often find their shared-lead close rate sits somewhere between one in five and one in ten, and the winners are usually decided on price because the homeowner now has three comparable numbers.
An exclusive inbound call from a ranked site behaves differently. The homeowner chose you from the search results, they have not been contacted by anyone else, and they are frequently calling because they need the work done today rather than shopping for quotes.
Comparing the real cost
The sticker price of a shared lead looks small next to a monthly lease, until you count the leads you pay for and lose.
- Shared marketplace: pay per lead, every time, regardless of outcome. Costs scale with volume but never with revenue.
- Shared marketplace: the same lead is sold to competitors, so a meaningful share of your spend funds jobs you had no realistic chance of winning.
- Leased ranked site: one predictable cost, whether the site produces ten calls or thirty.
- Leased ranked site: no competitor receives the same call, so wasted spend on contested leads disappears.
- Leased ranked site: call recordings make quality verifiable rather than disputed.
Where marketplaces still make sense
They are not useless. A brand-new business with no reputation, no website and no capacity constraints can use a marketplace to fill a calendar quickly while building something better. They are also reasonable as an overflow channel during slow months.
What they are bad at is being a permanent foundation. A business whose only lead source resells the same customers to competitors has no durable advantage and no pricing power.
Reviews, disputes and control
Marketplace reviews live on the platform, not on your business. If you leave, the reputation you built largely stays behind. Lead disputes are handled by the platform's own process, which decides whether your complaint about a bad lead is valid.
With a leased site, disputes are simpler because volume is tracked and recorded, and reviews go where they belong: on your own Google Business Profile, where they also help your map pack placement.
A practical way to test the difference
Run both for a month and measure four numbers per channel: calls received, calls that were genuinely qualified, jobs booked, and revenue produced. Divide spend by booked revenue. Most contractors who do this honestly find exclusivity wins by a wide margin — not because marketplace leads are fake, but because competing for them is expensive.
That comparison is also exactly why I offer a 30-day free trial. You can measure it against what you already spend before paying anything.