Are Angi Leads Worth It for Garage Door? $1,145

Angi sells a garage door lead for $35 to $75 and shares it with three to eight of your competitors. The question every guide asks is whether the leads are any good. That is the wrong question, and it is why the answer keeps coming out muddy.

The right question is arithmetic. Garage door has the lowest average ticket of any trade anyone benchmarks. Angi's lead prices are close to trade-flat. Put those two facts together and garage door pays a larger share of its revenue for a shared lead than plumbing, electrical or HVAC do, for a job worth less than any of them.

The short answer

No, for an established garage door shop with a Google Business Profile and any review volume. The acquisition cost lands between a quarter and a third of a job that already carries the thinnest ticket in the trades, and it does so under a 12 month contract with a 35% early termination penalty.

Yes, narrowly, for a solo operator with no web presence who needs cash flow this month, and only in the constrained setup at the end of this article.

The number that actually decides it

Here is Angi's 2026 cost per lead by trade, and the average ticket the same trades actually collect. The lead prices come from LeadTruffle's 2026 contractor guide. The tickets come from SearchLight's benchmark built on $123,399 of tracked spend across 12 garage door contractors and 2,494 leads, January to April 2026.

Cost per booked job applies the 13% to 20% close rate LeadTruffle reports for shared leads, against 27% to 30% for exclusive ones.

Read the last column, because it is the whole argument. Angi discounts your lead price by about 5% against electrical. It cannot discount your ticket, and your ticket is 20% smaller. Garage door is the worst row on a table it appears cheap on.

What that does to a garage door P&L

Lead cost does not sit alone on the invoice. It sits on top of the cost of putting a van in a driveway.

An operator posting in r/GarageDoorService in January 2026, who describes running several million in EBITDA and being "anal about my financials," laid out the structure from the franchise side of his market:

A manager at a local franchise once told me his advertising spend to get in someone's garage is $145, given they used leverage and have to return to investors and the cost of insurance etc I estimate their fixed overhead per open hour is about $280. That means they need to sell $425 to break even, that's profit after material cost and before labor.

Take that $425 break-even and swap the $145 acquisition line for Angi's $275 to $423. The break-even per visit moves to roughly $555 to $703, before parts and before you pay the technician. On a $1,145 ticket that is between 48% and 61% of the job consumed before anyone has been paid for the work.

This is the mechanism behind the trade's reputation problem. When the cost to arrive is that high, the visit has to be converted into a large sale, which is how a snapped spring becomes a $3,000 invoice. It is not only individual dishonesty. It is a business model that requires an upsell to survive the acquisition cost, and buying shared leads makes the requirement worse.

Angi Services is a different product, and it prices your trade for you

This distinction gets lost constantly, including by contractors who have used both. As one put it plainly in an r/handyman thread:

Sounds like a lot of people are talking about Angi Leads not Angi Services. Angi Leads is a standard lead service that sends the job to 5+ contractors and charges all of them. Angi Services is completely separate and doesn't cost us a penny. The pay is usually awful, Angi gets paid by the customer.

Angi Leads sells you an enquiry. Angi Services sells the homeowner a fixed price job and pays you a share of it. For garage door specifically, that share has been posted publicly. A June 2025 thread shows an Angi Services listing for a garage door opener installation at $82.50, and the poster notes it had been sitting unclaimed for months:

This job has been on here for months they want someone to put in a garage opener for 82 bucks. I did one for 450 last month and it took me 5 hours.

Commenters established the job also required supplying angle iron, installing a new keypad and hauling the old opener away. One did the arithmetic at roughly $32.50 in materials against a five hour job with travel. Others gave their own rates for the same work: $350 plus materials, $350 for a close-in job where the customer's lowest other quote was $500, and $500 to $800 from a national brand.

The operator response was not about the money on that one job. It was about the anchor:

$82.50 is such a joke. I'd be disappointed if anyone took that opportunity since it devalues the rest of us and shows consumers that we're willing to go that low.

That is a cost you cannot invoice for. A platform advertising opener installs at a fifth of the market rate teaches homeowners in your service area what the job should cost, and you meet that expectation on every estimate afterwards, whether or not you ever signed up.

What the FTC found, and what it valued the deception at

The contractor complaint about shared leads is not merely a matter of opinion. It has a federal finding attached.

In January 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor, an Angi affiliate, to pay up to $7.2 million. The specific findings matter more than the headline number:

• HomeAdvisor falsely claimed that service providers "only will receive leads matching the types of services they provide and their preferred geographic area."
• The company "often tells service providers that its leads result in jobs at rates much higher than it can substantiate."
• The order bars claiming that leads concern people "ready to hire a service provider" or who submitted a request directly to HomeAdvisor.
• An optional $59.99 mHelpDesk subscription was pitched by sales agents as complimentary.
• Providers were paying an annual membership of $287.99 on top of per-lead fees.

Note the redress structure: $30 per affected provider for the lead quality misrepresentations, and $59.99 per provider for the mHelpDesk claims. The regulator valued the lead quality deception at roughly the price of a single garage door lead.

A former HomeAdvisor employee commenting in r/Contractor added context worth weighing honestly: "I gave a deposition for the FTC in 2021 as part of their investigation... Their lawyers are very good and I don't think the FTC was ever able to put together a solid case." The order was a settlement, not a trial verdict. Read it as a description of practices the company agreed to stop, not as a criminal finding.

Which half of your demand Angi is actually selling you

Garage door demand splits cleanly, and the split is the reason marketplace leads underperform here.

A residential torsion spring is rated for about 10,000 cycles, roughly seven years at typical use. When it goes, the homeowner has a car trapped behind a door that will not lift. That customer does not fill in a matching form and wait. They search, they call, and the first shop that answers usually wins. Homeowners buy garage door work once every eight to ten years, so there is no brand recall to fall back on, which is covered in more depth in how to get more garage door leads.

Angi's product is a form. Forms are completed by the other half of the market: people pricing a new door, comparing quotes, planning a project for next spring. That half is real, but it is the deliberating, price-comparing half. As one contractor summarised the pattern across platforms, "leads from these services tended to be cheap people who were price shopping."

So the channel systematically sells you the slower, more price-sensitive slice of garage door demand, at a price set as if it were selling you the emergency slice. Neither of those halves is bad business. Paying emergency prices for deliberator leads is.

Audit the billing before you decide

Three billing behaviours show up often enough in operator reports to be worth checking against your own account.

Rate class. One contractor discovered after years of complaints that he had been billed at metro lead pricing while operating in a non-metro area. When a rep finally sent him the fee schedule, he reconciled his history and found $817 in overcharges. Ask for the fee schedule for your specific market and job categories, in writing, then check it against what you have actually been charged.

Auto-reactivation. Paused lead flow does not necessarily stay paused. As one contractor described it: "You can turn off the leads, but they turn themselves back on automatically after two weeks and God forbid you forget."

Charges during events you cannot work. The same contractor was billed for four leads while Hurricane Milton was making landfall, and recovered two of them after what he described as hours of arguing. A more balanced account from an operator who used the platform for a stretch: they "are pretty cool with refunding total garbage leads," but the channel still "cost us about 25% of our margin overall."

The one configuration where operators report it working

The honest part of this article. Angi is not universally negative, and the positive accounts share a specific and unusual shape. Three operators, in three different trades, independently described the same setup.

A painting contractor in r/Contractor: "Turn the exact match on instead of the other market match thing... the lead cost $120 and it ended up being a full scale $90k flip. We ended up doing 3 ($50k+) more houses for him in the last 3 years, all because of a $120 lead. I only turn my leads on Wednesday evenings and it's only for paint jobs."

Another contractor in the same thread: "My business hours were changed to 11am-2pm on Wednesday only so I wouldn't get bullshit 'exact match' leads."

A landscaper in r/handyman: "I limit my services to just yard clean ups, which are like $32 per lead. Then when I give my flyer to the homeowners which says I also do handyman and carpentry work. Some of those customers call me for that type of work."

The pattern is identical in all three, and it is the opposite of how the platform is sold to you:

1. Exact match only. Never the broader market match setting.
2. One narrow job category, deliberately the cheapest one that puts you on site.
3. A tiny availability window, hours per week rather than always on.
4. The lead is not the sale. The visit is. The margin comes from what you sell once you are in the driveway.

Translated to garage door, that means buying only repair leads, never installation leads, in a window you can genuinely answer within seconds, and treating every visit as the start of a relationship rather than a transaction. It caps your volume hard on purpose. That cap is the point: it is what keeps the acquisition cost from eating a $1,145 ticket.

What to run first at garage door prices

The comparison that settles it, using the same SearchLight dataset:

Local Services Ads book at 37.8% and return 5.78x closed ROAS on garage door, and Google credits calls that fall outside your categories or service area. The ceiling is volume rather than price, so most shops run LSA until it stops delivering, then add the map pack, which costs nothing per call, then non-branded search once book rate is fixed.

The lower-cost channels operators keep naming are unglamorous and they compound. A shop in a BNI chapter reported "$180k in business and passed about 200k in referrals" through the group. Another suggested stapling a card to the jamb or putting a sticker on the opener, on the reasoning that repeat spring service starts arriving in years three to five. A 56 year old store owner with 30 years in the trade put the ranking bluntly: "do NOT do Angie's list or Home Advisor they are horrible... Word of mouth is your best shot."

A 60 day test, if you are going to run one

If you want evidence rather than opinion, run it properly.

1. Set the baseline first. Record your current cost per collected job across every source for the prior 90 days. Without this, the test cannot conclude anything.
2. Constrain the aperture. Exact match only, repair categories only, no installation, a service radius you will genuinely drive.
3. Cap the window. A few hours on two days a week, in slots where a human answers on the first ring.
4. Log every charge against an outcome. Lead fee, whether contact was made, whether it booked, whether it collected, and the ticket.
5. Dispute in the same week. Credits get harder to obtain the longer you leave them.
6. Judge on cost per collected job, compared with your LSA number. If it exceeds $198, you have your answer.
7. Diarise the cancellation date 60 days before renewal, on the day you sign.

The verdict

Angi is not uniquely dishonest, and the shared lead model is not a scam by itself. It is a product priced for trades with bigger tickets or a recurring tail, sold to a trade that has neither.

Garage door collects $1,145 a job, the lowest of any trade benchmarked, sees the customer again in eight to ten years, and would pay $275 to $423 to acquire that job through Angi against $198 through Local Services Ads. Layered on top of the roughly $425 a visit already needed to break even, the channel does not leave enough room to do good work at a fair price. It leaves room to upsell, which is the trade's existing reputation problem, not a solution to it.

Run Local Services Ads to its ceiling, build the map pack, answer the phone faster than the franchise down the road, and keep the customer record so the spring you replace in 2026 is a call you own in 2034. If you still want to test Angi after that, test it narrow, test it measured, and diarise the exit before you sign.

For a trade with a long ticket and the same one-shot economics, the roofing version of this question reaches a different balance for instructive reasons.

Sources

• LeadTruffle, Complete Guide to Angi Leads for Home Service Contractors 2026. Cost per lead by trade including garage door at $35 to $75, the roughly $300 annual membership, the 12 month term and 35% early termination penalty, 60 day auto-renewal, 3 to 8 contractors per shared lead, and the 13% to 20% shared versus 27% to 30% exclusive close rates.
• SearchLight, Garage Door Google Local Service Ads Cost Per Lead (2026). Benchmark on $123,399 of spend, 12 contractors and 2,494 leads, January to April 2026. Source of the $49 cost per lead, 37.8% book rate, $198 cost per paying customer, $1,145 average ticket, 5.78x closed ROAS and the cross-trade average ticket comparison.
• Federal Trade Commission, FTC Order Requires HomeAdvisor to Pay Up to $7.2 Million, January 2023. Lead matching and conversion rate misrepresentations, the $287.99 membership, the $59.99 mHelpDesk claim, and the $30 per provider redress figure.
• r/GarageDoorService, business owners, how long did it take for your business to really get busy?, January 2026. The $145 to get in a garage, $280 fixed overhead per open hour and $425 break-even figures, the BNI referral numbers, the service sticker and repeat spring service timing, and the word of mouth ranking.
• r/handyman, Is Angie's services real?, June 2025. The $82.50 Angi Services garage door opener listing, the angle iron and haul away requirements, the $350 to $800 comparison rates, the Angi Leads versus Angi Services distinction, the price anchoring objection, the auto-reactivation and hurricane billing accounts, and the narrow-category landscaping model.
• r/Contractor, Angi Scam, January 2024. The exact match plus restricted hours configuration, the $120 lead that became a $90k flip, and the former HomeAdvisor employee's account of the FTC deposition.
• r/sweatystartup, Dont use Angi leads (review), January 2023. The metro versus non-metro rate misclassification and $817 overcharge, and the 25% of margin figure.
• Precision Garage Door, How Long Do Garage Door Springs Last?, March 2025. The 10,000 cycle and seven to ten year spring lifespan.