Garage door is the one trade where the standard advice on lead exclusivity is wrong. Everywhere else, exclusive leads win on cost per booked job even at three or four times the price. Here they lose, and the reason sits in the job itself.
The short answer
Exclusivity in garage door is priced for a decision the customer never makes.
In HVAC, exclusive leads close at 40% to 60% against 9% to 15% shared, a multiplier near 3.75x, which justifies a large premium. In garage door, LeadTruffle's 2026 benchmark puts shared home service leads at 13% to 20% and exclusive at 27% to 30%. Divide the midpoints and you get 1.73x. You are being asked to pay a 3x to 5x price premium to buy a 1.7x improvement, and the arithmetic does not survive that.
What each product actually costs
Every price below came off a published page or an operator reporting real spend.
| Product | Price per lead | Exclusivity | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| ProMatcher shared marketplace | $10 to $25 | Shared | ProMatcher |
| Angi | $35 to $75 | Shared, 3 to 8 pros | LeadTruffle 2026 |
| ABCLeads real-time | $20 | Claimed exclusive | ABCLeads |
| Google Local Services Ads | $25 to $49 | Exclusive by construction | SearchLight, GarageDoorMarketers |
| Inquirly form lead | $50 to $300 | Exclusive | Inquirly |
| Google Ads, operator reported | $125 to $260 | Exclusive by construction | r/PPC operators |
| Inquirly average winning CPL | $350 | Exclusive | Inquirly |
| Inquirly inbound call | $100 to $900 | Exclusive | Inquirly |
Read the fourth row again. The cheapest exclusive garage door lead in the entire market is not sold by an exclusivity vendor. It is Local Services Ads, and at $49 it sits below the top of Angi's shared range.
The cost per booked job board
Price per lead is not the number that decides anything. Divide by close rate and the ranking changes.
| Product | Price | Close rate | Cost per booked job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google LSA | $49 | 37.8% | $198 |
| Angi shared | $55 | 16.5% | $333 |
| Google Ads, Atlanta metro | $260 | 60% | $433 |
| Exclusive vendor, mid range | $175 | 28.5% | $614 |
| Inquirly average winning | $350 | 28.5% | $1,228 |
The $198 is not modelled. SearchLight tracked $123,399 of garage door LSA spend across 12 contractors and 2,494 leads from January to April 2026 and measured a $49 cost per lead, a 37.8% book rate and $198 per paying customer against a $1,145 average ticket.
The $433 line comes from an agency running a garage door client north of Atlanta who posted their trailing 90 day numbers to r/PPC: roughly $80 cost per click, $260 cost per lead, and a client closing about 60% of leads. Note that a 60% close rate, the best figure anyone in this research reported, still could not rescue a $260 lead into a better position than a $49 one.
By the numbers
An exclusive garage door lead has to cost less than $95 to beat a $55 Angi shared lead on cost per booked job. The market price for exclusive garage door leads starts at $50 and runs to $900.
Why exclusivity buys less in this trade
Exclusivity is protection against comparison shopping. Garage door repair barely has any.
Roughly 42% of garage door service revenue is repair work, and a repair customer is not deliberating. The door is stuck halfway, the car is trapped, and they are late. As one commenter put it on the r/PPC thread about garage door ad budgets, they are "calling three companies in a row and hiring whoever picks up."
That single behaviour explains both halves of the 1.7x. It is why shared leads close better in garage door than in considered trades: the customer is not weighing five quotes over two weeks, they are booking in four minutes. And it is why exclusive leads close worse here than the 40% to 60% seen in HVAC: the vendor sold that enquiry to one company, but the homeowner still dialled four. Exclusivity of the lead was never exclusivity of the opportunity, and in an emergency trade that gap is at its widest.
Google prices this honestly inside its own product. The dominant LSA ranking factor is responsiveness, with the practical standard being to answer within 30 seconds. Missed calls drop your ranking. Google is not asking whether your lead was exclusive. It is asking whether you picked up.
The gate both products fail
Here is the part no vendor page will run for you. Take the cost per booked job and hold it against the gross profit of the job you booked.
A garage door repair ticket runs $150 to $400. At the 55% to 65% gross margin benchmark for a healthy garage door business, a $300 repair leaves you roughly $180 of gross profit before overhead and before you pay the technician.
- LSA at $198 per booked job: 110% of gross profit
- Angi shared at $333: 185%
- Exclusive vendor at $614: 341%
Every purchased lead product in this trade loses money on a pure repair job. The cheapest one loses least. Exclusivity is not the variable that fixes this, because the variable is the ticket.
Now run the same $198 against a door replacement. The 2025 Cost vs Value report puts the average garage door replacement at $4,672, recouping $12,507 at resale for a 267.7% return, the highest ROI project in the report for the second year running. At 60% gross margin that job carries about $2,800 of gross profit.
Same lead cost. Fourteen times the gross profit. That ratio, not the exclusivity checkbox, is the entire economics of buying garage door leads.
Watch out
If your blended average ticket looks acceptable, check what is holding it up. SearchLight's $1,145 average ticket on LSA jobs is a blend. The replacements are carrying the repairs. Buying more exclusivity on repair leads makes the blend worse, not better.
The third category nobody prices
Garage door has a lead type that HVAC and roofing do not have at anything like the same scale, and it breaks the exclusive-versus-shared frame entirely.
Google removed over 13 million fake Business Profiles in 2025, blocked 79 million inaccurate or unverified edits, and placed posting restrictions on more than 782,000 accounts. In March 2025 it sued a Maryland man and up to 20 unnamed associates over a network of more than 10,000 fraudulent listings. Garage door repair sits alongside locksmiths and towing at the centre of that problem.
The mechanics matter to your lead buying. From a r/GarageDoorService thread on the uptick in scams:
About a week or so ago I found 7 companies, on google, spam companies. The phone numbers are different but everyone goes to the same switchboard.
A commenter on a widely upvoted r/Cleveland warning from a local garage door owner put the money flow plainly:
This is almost every service industry, how do you think those "$25 dollar a lead" people get their leads to resell?
That is the question the exclusivity debate skips. A lead sold to you as exclusive is exclusive relative to the buyer list. It says nothing about how the enquiry was generated. If it came off a listing wearing a local company's face, you are renting access to demand that was taken from a real business upstream, possibly yours, and the exclusivity clause is describing the resale terms of stolen inventory.
We build lead generation systems that put the demand in your name: your page, your form, your phone number, your tracking. No resale list, no lead you have to share, and no dependence on a marketplace that prices your trade for you.
How to tell which one you are actually buying
Four checks, none of which require the vendor's cooperation.
- Call the number on the ad yourself, from a number they do not know. Ask what the company is called. A real shop answers with a name. An aggregator answers with a category, "garage door services", and deflects when pressed.
- Check the address on the listing against a map. Operators report fields, residential addresses and unrelated storefronts. One asked the obvious question: "these places don't even have a building, just an open field at the location. How they passing these video verifications."
- Ask for the manufacturer dealer listing. A Clopay or LiftMaster dealer locator entry matching a current address is expensive to fake because faking it means becoming a real business.
- Ask, in writing, whether the same address can be resold to you under a different job category. This is the loophole that turns an exclusive repair lead into a second exclusive install lead for the same house.
"Exclusive" means at least four things
Before you pay the premium, get the definition in writing. Vendors use the word to mean:
- Permanently exclusive to you. The enquiry is never sold again to anyone.
- Exclusive within a territory. Exclusive inside your postal codes, sold freely outside them, with the boundary set by the vendor.
- Exclusive for a window. Yours for 15 or 30 minutes, then released to the shared pool if you do not respond. This one is common and is functionally a shared lead with a head start.
- Exclusive by job category. The same homeowner can be sold to you as a repair lead and to a competitor as an install lead.
Only the first is what the word implies. The third is the one most often sold at first-tier pricing.
Exclusivity you manufacture instead of buying
The 1.7x tells you exclusivity is worth something. It just is not worth $350. Three ways to get most of that lift without buying it:
Answer the phone. In a trade where the buyer books whoever picks up, contact rate is the whole game. A missed call on a $49 lead is a $49 loss with no information attached. An answering service that captures job details and texts them to you costs a couple of hundred a month at low volume and pays for itself on the first call it catches. Fix this before raising any budget, because doubling spend while missing half the calls buys a bigger invoice for the same jobs.
Own the LSA slot. It is exclusive by construction, it is the cheapest exclusive lead in the trade, and it is ranked on responsiveness and review recency rather than on how much you are willing to pay a broker. One to two new reviews a week beats a stagnant profile with a higher total.
Buy leads for the job worth buying. LSA cannot be keyword targeted, which is exactly why paid search still earns its place: not for "garage door repair near me", where you are bidding against private equity backed roll-ups at $25 to $35 a click, but for the replacement and install terms nobody else is fighting over. Our breakdown of what garage door leads actually cost by channel has the per-job-type pricing.
A 30-day test that settles it in your market
Run both, and instrument the thing that actually varies.
- Split a fixed budget: half into LSA, half into whichever exclusive vendor is pitching you. Do not add shared marketplace leads to the test unless you already buy them.
- Tag every lead by job type on arrival, not by outcome. Repair, opener, replacement.
- Record contact rate separately from close rate. If you did not speak to them, it is not a lost sale, it is a missed call.
- At day 30, compute cost per booked job within each job type, not blended.
- Compare each figure against gross profit for that job type. Anything above 30% of gross profit is a channel you are running for the practice.
Most operators who run this find the same shape: the exclusive product wins on close rate, loses on cost per booked job, and both products lose on repair leads while looking fine in the blend.
The decision rule
On repair leads, buy the cheapest exclusive lead available, which is LSA, and do not pay a broker premium on top of it. The exclusivity multiplier of 1.7x cannot carry a 3x to 5x price premium against $180 of gross profit.
On replacement and install leads, exclusivity is worth paying for, because the consideration window is real, the customer is comparing, and $2,800 of gross profit absorbs almost any lead price you will be quoted.
If a vendor will not put the definition of exclusive in writing, or cannot tell you how the enquiry was generated, the premium is not buying exclusivity. In this trade specifically, that is the likeliest place for the impersonation layer to be sitting.
The exclusive-versus-shared question is the wrong argument to be having about garage door leads. It is a job mix question wearing a lead vendor's clothes. If you want the demand in your own name instead of rented by the enquiry, that is the system we build.
Sources
- LeadTruffle, Complete Guide to Angi Leads for Home Service Contractors 2026: garage door at $35 to $75 per lead, 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): $123,399 of spend, 12 contractors, 2,494 leads, January to April 2026. The $49 cost per lead, 37.8% book rate, $198 cost per paying customer and $1,145 average ticket.
- Inquirly, Exclusive Garage Door Leads: $50 to $300 per form lead, $100 to $900 per call, $350 average winning cost per lead.
- ProMatcher, How Much Do Garage Door Leads Cost?: $10 to $25 per lead.
- ABCLeads, Garage Door Sales Leads: $20 per real-time lead.
- Garage Door Marketers, 2025 Garage Door Industry Market Report: LSA cost per lead of $25 to $45, the 30 second answer standard and review recency as LSA ranking factors, 55% to 65% gross margin and 15% to 20% net margin benchmarks, and repair tickets of $150 to $400 against replacements of $1,200 to $4,500.
- Zonda, 2025 Cost vs Value Report, as reported by Clopay: $4,672 average garage door replacement cost, $12,507 resale value, 267.7% cost recouped.
- Dataintelo, Garage Door Repair Services Market Research Report: repair held 42.3% of service type share in 2025, with repair service call tickets of $150 to $350.
- Google, New ways we're protecting businesses on Maps: over 13 million fake Business Profiles removed in 2025, 79 million inaccurate edits blocked, 782,000 accounts restricted.
- CBS News, Google finds 10,000 fake listings on Google Maps, sues alleged scam network, 19 March 2025.
- r/GarageDoorService, Uptick in garage door scams: the seven companies sharing one switchboard, the 15 fake profiles found locally, and the video verification question.
- r/Cleveland, Warning: Something shady going on with "garage door companies" in Northeast Ohio, posted by a local garage door owner: the $25 per lead resale question and the private equity ad-cost account.
- r/PPC, Is $50/day enough for Google Ads for a one-man garage door business?: Atlanta and Houston clicks at $25 to $35, the Cumming client at $80 per click, $260 per lead and a 60% close rate, LSA at $70 to $120 and paid search at $125 to $175 per lead, and the emergency call behaviour.
- r/SanJose, I got absolutely hosed on a garage door repair: the offshore call centre account and the Instagram tune-up offer.