Are Angi Leads Worth It for Security Alarm?

The honest answer is that Angi leads are rarely worth it for residential monitored accounts, occasionally worth it for commercial, and almost never worth it for the reason most alarm dealers think.

The usual argument is about lead quality. That argument misses the point. Angi is a poor fit for the alarm trade because of what the alarm trade sells, not because of who fills in the form.

Every other home service on the platform makes its money on the job. A plumber quotes a job, does the job, banks the margin, done. An alarm company does the job at close to break even and makes its money over the next 36 to 60 months. That single difference changes every number in the decision, and no generic "is Angi worth it" article accounts for it.

Start with the number your business actually runs on

Alarm companies are valued and financed on recurring monthly revenue, so that is the number your marketing has to be measured against.

The industry metric is the creation multiple: everything you spend to create a new account, divided by the new RMR that account produces. Base case assumptions for a typical residential security alarm company use a creation cost multiple of 30.0 against an average RMR of $40 per customer. MONI, a large operator, reported a creation multiple of 35.6 alongside 13.4% annual RMR attrition. ADT's reported subscriber acquisition cost has been put at $1,484 per new customer.

So a $40 per month residential account gives you roughly $1,200 of total budget to create it. Not $1,200 of marketing budget. $1,200 covering the panel, the sensors, the communicator, the technician's day, the sales time and every dollar of advertising that produced the enquiry.

That is the test. Not "did the lead answer the phone." Does this channel fit inside $1,200 while leaving room for the hardware?

Running Angi through the test

Angi does not publish a cost per lead for security or alarm. That absence is itself informative: it is not a first-class trade on the platform. The published ranges sit at $15 to $85 per lead generally, with high value trades pushing past $100. For reference, electrical runs $35 to $80 and HVAC $45 to $100. Call security $60, which is generous given how close alarm work sits to electrical.

Now the shared-lead problem. Most Angi leads go to 3 to 8 contractors simultaneously. At a five way share your statistical ceiling is 20% before response time, reviews or pricing come into it. Real close rates on shared home services leads land closer to 10%.

Ten leads at $60 is $600 to close one job.

Against a $1,200 creation budget, and Angi's own figures of $200 to $400 for basic equipment plus $20 to $300 per additional sensor plus $120 to $600 for installation, the arithmetic is already finished. Hardware and labour at cost eat $600 to $900. Lead acquisition wants $600. You are over budget on a monitored account before anyone has picked up a screwdriver.

The attach rate is the entire question

Here is the number nobody writing about Angi has ever calculated, because it only exists in trades that sell recurring revenue.

Your real cost is not per lead or per job. It is per created RMR account:

lead cost per account = (cost per lead / close rate) / attach rate

Attach rate is the share of your closed Angi jobs that actually sign a monitoring agreement. Run it at $60 per lead and a 10% close rate, so $600 per closed job:

To make Angi work on residential monitored accounts you need a near perfect attach rate on a channel whose buyers are actively collecting four competing quotes. Nobody achieves that.

And the jobs that do not attach are not free. They are one off camera and doorbell installs where you spent $600 in lead cost to earn a few hundred dollars of labour margin. That is the transaction Angi is built to produce, and it is the one transaction an alarm business cannot survive on at volume.

Angi negotiates against you before you ever get the lead

This is the part that turns a bad channel into a hostile one, and it is entirely specific to security.

Angi runs one of the largest home services cost-guide libraries on the internet, and the homeowner filling in your lead form has very likely read it. Here is what Angi's own security system cost guide tells them:

• A home security system costs $300 to $1,237, with most homeowners paying $746 on average
• Basic equipment runs $200 to $400, plus $20 to $300 per additional sensor
• Monitoring should cost $10 to $65 per month
• Standalone cameras and sensors can be bought for under $100 to $200
• And, in Angi's own words, many national security companies do not charge for installation at all because they make the bulk of their money through monthly monitoring

Read that last one again. Angi has published, to your prospect, the argument that installation should be free and that the monitoring fee is where the money is. Then it sells you that prospect's phone number.

Compare that to a homeowner who found you through a local search after a break-in on their street. That person has a trigger, no price anchor and no competing tabs open. Same trade, completely different conversation. We ranked the channels that produce those buyers in best lead sources for security alarm companies.

Angi's own numbers say the pool is shrinking

You would want the platform to at least be growing. It is not, and the direction of travel matters more than the current price.

In its Q2 2026 results Angi Inc reported:

• US service requests down 6% year over year
• US leads down 13% year over year
• Revenue down 11% year over year
• A $235 million non cash impairment charge on the US reporting unit, tied to a sustained decline in market capitalisation
• Revenue per lead up 1%

Management also attributed part of the decline to a demand mix shift away from larger job categories, alongside a move away from lower quality paid marketing channels.

For an alarm dealer, that combination is about as bad as a signal can get. There are 13% fewer leads, each one costs marginally more, and the mix is shifting toward the smaller jobs, which in security means doorbell swaps and single camera installs rather than whole-home monitored systems. The company has not reinstated guidance and expects only modest sequential improvement.

The DIY defection problem is worse in your trade than anywhere else

Every trade complains that platform leads are price shoppers. In security the price shopper has an option no other trade's customer has: they can genuinely do it themselves, this weekend, for $200.

The 2026 survey data shows the crossover has already happened. For the first time on record, more home alarm users installed their own systems than hired a professional, at 49%. When asked how they would prefer to have a system installed, 51% said they would rather do it themselves. Only about 26% actively prefer professional installation, and even inside that group, 74% said they have at least considered switching to a self-installed setup. Camera adoption has climbed roughly 19 percentage points in two years, with 74.9 million American households now owning indoor or outdoor cameras.

Contractors describe exactly this failure mode on the platform. One posted about paying $53 for a lead that ended with "my husband is going to fix it" once the homeowner saw the price. Another described the leads arriving as requests "to install a light switch or troubleshoot a fixture" at $75 each, adding that "Angi has wedged itself between you and your customer and you're paying them to do it."

In low voltage specifically, one operator who tried the whole category wrote that they used "Angie's list, home advisor, blue book, yelp, houzz" and that "all were over promised and no fulfillment, just felt like plain scams." Another said Thumbtack was "a waste of money with about $200 thrown at the platform without a single reply."

It is not unanimous. In the same threads, one operator reported getting "a decent amount of customers from home advisor now Angi," and another said Thumbtack was "by far worth the cost" for filling schedule gaps. That split is the real finding: the platform works as schedule filler and fails as pipeline.

What the contract actually commits you to

Before you test it, know what you are signing. Reported terms across contractor sources are consistent:

The 60 day notice window on an auto-renewing annual term is the trap. Deciding in month eleven that it did not work is deciding too late.

When Angi genuinely is worth it for an alarm company

Four cases, and they are narrow but real.

1. Commercial and small business enquiries. This is the one that flips entirely. A small commercial account at $150 per month of RMR carries a creation budget of roughly $4,500 at a 30x multiple. Suddenly a $600 lead cost is 13% of budget instead of 50%, and the attach rate is near certain because a business installing access control or a monitored system is not doing it themselves. If your Angi territory settings can bias toward commercial, the arithmetic works.

2. Takeover and service calls. A homeowner with a dead panel or an inherited system has no hardware for you to absorb. You are selling labour and a monitoring agreement, so the entire creation budget is available for acquisition. This is the highest RMR-per-dollar work in the trade and it is worth paying for.

3. Genuinely empty install days. If your technician is paid and idle, the marginal cost of a camera install is close to zero. Filling that day at thin margin beats not filling it. This is schedule filling, not growth, and you should call it that in your own reporting.

4. Review harvesting with a hard exit date. Platform work generates review volume, and review volume feeds the local search channel that actually compounds. Run it for a defined period, harvest the reviews onto your Google Business Profile, and leave. Treat the reviews as the deliverable and the jobs as the cost of getting them.

If you are going to test it, test it properly

A real test, not a vibe:

1. Set your creation budget first. Your target RMR times your target multiple. Write the number down before you speak to a rep.
2. Cap the lead line at 30% of that budget. On a $40 account that is $360. If projected lead spend per closed job exceeds it, do not start.
3. Tag every Angi lead separately in your CRM and track two fields most alarm companies never track: jobs closed, and RMR attached. Cost per job is a vanity number in this trade.
4. Measure attach rate at 60 days, not close rate. If fewer than half of closed Angi jobs signed monitoring, the channel has failed regardless of how busy it made you feel.
5. Diary the cancellation notice date immediately. 60 days before renewal, in the calendar, on day one.
6. Answer inside five minutes. On a five way shared lead, speed is the only variable you control, and it decides most of the outcome. The response time math is unforgiving.
7. Kill it at 90 days on the attach number alone. Not on gut feel, and not on how many trucks were moving.

The bottom line

Angi leads are not worth it for residential monitored alarm accounts, because the model produces the one transaction your business model cannot absorb: a price-anchored, one off hardware install with no recurring revenue attached, bought at a cost that consumes your entire creation budget on its own.

They are defensible for commercial enquiries, for takeover and service work, for filling paid but idle days, and as a time-boxed review generation exercise.

The deeper issue is that if you are asking whether to buy shared leads, the answer usually lies somewhere else entirely. Only a small share of alarm owners ever switch providers, so the channels that work are the ones intercepting a trigger rather than interrupting a shopper. Start with the ones covered in how to get more security alarm leads, and if you want the trade-by-trade version of this same arithmetic, the HVAC breakdown shows how differently it lands when there is no RMR to protect.