Cheapest Place to Buy Contractor Leads: 9 Ranked

The cheapest place to buy contractor leads, by published price, is Thumbtack or Bark. Thumbtack is commonly listed at $5 to $20 per lead and Bark sells credits at roughly $1.60 apiece with most leads costing 2 to 8 credits. Networx publishes $10 to $100. Google Local Services Ads averaged $53 across 888 contractors.

Now the part the comparison pages leave out: almost nobody actually pays those numbers. The gap between the advertised price and what operators report being charged is the single most useful thing to understand before you spend a dollar, and it reorders the entire list.

The sticker prices, ranked cheapest first

Here is every mainstream option with its published price, taken from the platforms' own documentation where it exists and from comparison research where it does not.

Networx is the only one of these that publishes real numbers in its own help documentation. Its pricing article states that pay-per-lead categories run "between $10 to $100+ dollars" and exclusive leads "between $15 and $120+ dollars," and a separate article gives a worked example: a concrete lead at $58, so ten leads a month requires a $580 prepaid budget. That transparency is genuinely unusual and worth crediting.

The Google Local Services Ads figure is the most rigorously sourced number on the list. A February 2026 analysis by Searchlight Digital of $6.72 million in observed LSA spend across 888 home service contractors put the average cost per lead at $53, with HVAC at $51 and plumbing at $57 across 230 accounts and $2.03 million in spend.

The published prices are not the prices pros report paying

This is where the ranking falls apart. Put the advertised range next to what operators say they were charged.

The Thumbtack gap is the widest. A consumer-facing comparison lists Thumbtack pros paying $5 to $20 per lead. In r/Thumbtack, a user answering exactly this question wrote: "the leads will cost you anywhere from $35 - $200. You pay for a lead randomly as soon as there is a match. For a single job, multiple pros will end up paying, which sounds like a terrible design to me." Another pro in the same thread said flatly that Thumbtack charges "what ever they feel like that day. 20-140."

A lawn care operator in that thread gave the clearest illustration of what the price means in practice: for a repeat mowing customer, Thumbtack wanted the price of the entire first mow. "If I were to charge $50 a week for a lawn, Thumbtack wants $50 to $60 for the chance to gain this customer."

The Angi gap is worse because of what sits underneath it. A tile contractor posting a warning in r/Contractor described paying $285 for an annual subscription, then being charged $100 to $130 for each lead delivered, and $235 in lead fees inside one week. The leads, he wrote, "turned out to be completely useless. Some people never responded at all. Some said they were interested by mistake." He drove to homes, gave estimates at roughly 40% below his normal rates, and got no traction. Refunds were refused.

None of this means the published ranges are lies. It means they describe the floor of a range whose ceiling is set by your trade, your postal code and how much competition your category has. If you budget from the floor, you will be wrong by a multiple.

Five mechanics that inflate the price after you sign

The sticker is the beginning of the cost, not the end of it. Five things move the real number, and each one is visible in operators' accounts of what happened to them.

Shared lead splits. The same lead is sold several times. ClicksGeek notes leads are "usually shared with 2-4 other contractors, and you pay whether you win the job or not." A contractor in r/Contractor put the volume higher: "those leads would also be sold to ten other contractors as well." Every extra recipient divides your odds while your price stays fixed.

Credit expiry. Prepaid credits that expire are a price increase disguised as a policy update. A contractor documenting his exit from Bark in r/Contractor wrote that credit packs "now expire after only 3 months which by the way is nowhere to be found in their FAQ," and described the change arriving without notice after an earlier move from no expiry to one year. Credits you bought and could not spend are pure cost with zero leads attached.

Prepaid minimums and setup fees. Networx runs on prepaid budget, so a $58 concrete lead category means committing $580 to see ten leads. A reviewer on reviews.io reported "$300.00 for initial cost to start." These are not per-lead costs, but they are cash out before a single homeowner picks up the phone.

Subscriptions stacked on top of per-lead fees. The $285 Angi annual subscription in the account above bought no leads. It bought the right to be charged for leads. Any honest cost per lead has to amortise that fee across the leads you actually received.

Bad leads you do not get refunded. A contractor in r/Contractor reported buying a Bark lead that turned out to be "someone looking for a job. NOT a lead," and being refused a $140 refund. Every unrefunded dud raises the effective price of the good ones.

Re-rank the list by cost per won job and it inverts

Divide by your close rate and the cheap column and the expensive column trade places. ClicksGeek states the arithmetic cleanly: "A $20 shared lead that converts at 5% costs you $400 per customer. A $100 exclusive lead that converts at 40% costs $250 per customer."

The five-times-cheaper lead produced a customer that cost 60% more.

Real numbers from operators land in the same place. A contractor in r/Contractor described running $4,000 a month in Google Ads, which produced 20 to 25 leads, of which he quoted about 15 and signed 5. That is roughly $180 per lead and roughly $800 per signed job on a channel nobody would call cheap. Against it, the Searchlight LSA data set showed HVAC booking 44% of leads at a $2,110 average ticket, which produced a 9.55x closed return on ad spend at $51 per lead.

A dry stone wall contractor in the same subreddit reported running "a 15-20% close rate" on estimates. Run a $15 lead through a 15% close rate and you are at $100 per won job before you count the fuel to go quote it. Run a $58 exclusive Networx lead through a 40% close rate and you are at $145. Those are much closer than the sticker prices suggest, and which one wins depends entirely on your close rate rather than on the price tag.

If you want the full method for setting your own ceiling rather than borrowing someone else's, we worked it through in what a good cost per lead actually is for contractors. The short version: your maximum is job value times gross margin times close rate times the share of profit you will spend.

The cheapest sources are not marketplaces at all

Every option above charges you before you know whether the work is real. The sources operators actually rate highest invert that, and they barely appear in any "buy contractor leads" listicle because nobody sells them.

Referral fees to complementary trades, paid on completion. A plumber with more than 30 years in the trade and 10 years running his own company gave the most specific version of this in r/Contractor. After going "all in" on lead companies his first year and calling it a bust, his recommendation was to go to every plumbing company within a 50 mile radius and introduce yourself, then compete on referral fee: "$500 - $1,200 is the average I've come across with most restoration companies. They only get that if the job goes through."

Read the cost structure there. A $1,200 referral fee on a completed restoration job is far more than any lead on this page. It is also the cheapest option on this page, because the number of times you pay it for a job you did not win is zero. Compare that to $235 of Angi fees in a week for leads that never responded.

Lead-sharing partnerships with your own competitors. A contractor in r/Contractor described offering competing company owners a commission on any lead they pitched but did not sell, reciprocated both ways. His reasoning was that "marketing costs were eating them alive with minimal returns and this was a great way for them to recover some of their sunk costs." The quality was high because "none of us share poor quality leads because there's no benefit unless they sell."

He also reported something counterintuitive: his close rate on those second-position bids was double his rate when he was first to the door, because he already knew what price and product the homeowner had seen.

Direct mail and door hangers. One contractor reported doing 500 door hangers in his target neighbourhoods and getting so much referral work from it that "we haven't advertised at all for 3 years." That is a single data point and not a plan, but the cost structure is worth noting: the spend is fixed, small and one-time, and nothing about it recurs monthly.

The pattern across all three is the same. You pay after revenue exists, or you pay once. Neither is true of a lead marketplace.

If you are in Canada, the shortlist is shorter

Angi Leads is a US system. The Canadian equivalent is HomeStars, and the operator sentiment on it has deteriorated sharply. A contractor who signed up seven years ago wrote in r/Contractor that "price, number of leads and quality of leads were all great, it would pay for itself times 10 easily," then said that after a platform redesign "they destroyed something great," and that he cancelled within the last year.

Google Local Services Ads operates in Canada and is the closest thing to a benchmarked, disputable channel available here. That matters more than it sounds, because LSAs let you dispute calls that were out of area, for services you do not offer, or plain spam. Marketplace lead fees rarely come back.

The 20-minute test before you buy from anyone

Run this before you enter a card, not after. It is short on purpose.

1. Ask for the price in your category and your postal code, in writing. Not the range on the website. Networx publishes per-category prices in the dashboard; ask any platform that does not.
2. Ask how many contractors receive the same lead. If the answer is vague, assume 4 or more and price accordingly.
3. Ask what a refund requires and how long you have to file. Then check that against how the platform's own users describe refunds going.
4. Ask whether credits expire. If they do, the expiry date is part of the price.
5. Ask what you pay before any lead arrives. Subscription, prepaid budget, setup fee, minimum spend.
6. Divide by your real close rate. Use last year's numbers, not the ones you hope for. If you do not know it, that is the actual first problem.
7. Set a kill number and a date. Decide in advance what cost per won job makes you stop, and put the review in the calendar.

Steps 1 through 5 all produce numbers most sales reps will not volunteer. That is the point of asking them out loud.

The honest summary

If you want the cheapest sticker price, it is Bark or Thumbtack, and you should expect to pay several times the advertised figure. If you want the most predictable price, it is Google Local Services Ads at a benchmarked $53 average with a real dispute process attached. If you want the cheapest cost per job you actually win, it is a referral relationship with a trade that meets your customer before you do, paid only on completion.

The reason the marketplace listicles never reach that conclusion is structural. They rank by the number on the pricing page, because that number is easy to put in a table. The operators quoted throughout this article rank by what left their bank account against what came back, and they arrive somewhere else entirely.

One contractor summarised the whole category in a single line about shared platforms: "Unless you structure your business to call the lead in 5 minutes and set the hook with some pressure those sites will eat you alive." If you can genuinely do that, cheap shared leads can work. If you cannot, the cheapest lead on the market is still too expensive, and the honest move is to stop renting demand and start owning it. We covered the exit sequence in how to stop paying for shared leads.