Usually not as it was offered to you, and the reason has nothing to do with whether the leads are any good.
A 12 month lead contract is not really a decision about 12 months. It is a decision about the early termination fee, because that fee sets a floor on what you will pay no matter how fast you discover the channel is not working. Get that number first. Everything else in the negotiation is downstream of it.
The number that decides it: your contract's floor
Every article about lead contracts tells you to "read the fine print." None of them do the arithmetic that the fine print implies.
An early termination fee is normally a percentage of the unused value of the term. So your total cost is not the months you use. It is:
Total cost = monthly spend x [ N + f x (12 - N) ]
where N is the month you exit and f is the fee percentage. Angi's Service Provider Agreement clause that contractors have quoted for years sets f at 35%, and a contractor posting the actual document to r/Construction in May 2025 confirmed the same 35% figure on their own agreement.
Run that formula and something uncomfortable falls out. On a $1,000 per month, 12 month contract at 35%:
| You cancel at | Months of spend you owe | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Immediately (month 0) | 4.20 | $4,200 |
| Month 1 | 4.85 | $4,850 |
| Month 3 | 6.15 | $6,150 |
| Month 6 | 8.10 | $8,100 |
| Month 9 | 10.05 | $10,050 |
| Ride it out | 12.00 | $12,000 |
By the numbers
The floor is 4.2 months. There is no version of a 12 month, 35% contract that costs you less than 4.2 months of budget, regardless of how quickly you spot the problem. You are not deciding whether to spend a year's budget. You are deciding whether to spend at least four and a bit months of it, with the rest depending on how long you take to admit it.
That reframing matters because it turns a vague commitment into a single number you can compare against expected return. And it exposes the "short deal" pitch for what it usually is.
The worked example from an actual contract
The r/Construction post is worth walking through because the poster published the numbers. They were paying Angi $1,800 per month and told the rep they needed out. The rep offered a "3-month limited-time offer" at $300 per month. The agreement that arrived was for 12 months with a total of $3,599.96 and a 35% early termination fee.
Notice that $300 times 12 is $3,600. The "three month deal" was priced as a twelve month deal. Nothing about the offer was three months except the way it was described on the phone.
Now apply the floor. If that contractor signed and then left at month three, having been told the deal was three months anyway, they would owe three payments of $300 plus 35% of the remaining $2,699.97. That is $900 plus $945, or $1,845 against the $900 they thought they were agreeing to. The rep's follow up email said the fee "will be waived after 3 payments." That sentence is the whole trap, and the next section explains why it does not work.
Test 1: does the term actually buy you a discount?
Ask one question: what is the month to month price for the identical package?
This is not a rhetorical exercise. The early termination fee's own legal justification depends on the answer. Yelp's Master Advertising Terms spell out the rationale in capitals, saying the fee reflects "the discounted pricing offered by Yelp in exchange for the commitment period, as well as the up-front sales, setup, and opportunity costs" that Yelp bears.
That is a reasonable trade when it is real. A vendor gives up margin, you give up flexibility. But if the quoted 12 month price is the same as the month to month price, the stated consideration for the fee is simply absent. You are paying a penalty for a discount you never received.
To Yelp's credit, its terms also show the genuine flip side. Fees are fixed for the duration of a commitment period, whereas a client with no commitment period can have their fees modified on ten days' notice. Price certainty is a real benefit of committing. It is just one you should be paid for in the form of a lower number, not asked to buy.
Tip
Put it in an email: "Please confirm in writing the monthly price for this package with no commitment period, and the monthly price with a 12 month commitment period." A rep who answers immediately is selling you a discount. A rep who redirects to value and urgency is selling you a term.
Test 2: can you reach a verdict inside the floor?
The right contract length is derived, not negotiated. It is the time it takes you to know whether the channel works, and nothing more.
That number has two parts:
- Sample. You cannot read a close rate off ten leads. If you close one in five, ten leads produce two jobs, and the gap between one and three is noise rather than signal. Thirty to fifty leads is where the number starts meaning something.
- Sales cycle. A drain clearing call closes on the phone. A roof or a solar install takes weeks between first contact and signature. Leads that arrive in month three do not resolve in month three.
So: months to verdict = (leads needed / leads per month) + sales cycle in months.
A plumber getting 25 leads a month with a same week cycle reaches a verdict in about two months. A roofer getting 12 leads a month with a three week cycle needs three to four. Almost nobody in the trades needs twelve.
Compare your months to verdict against the 4.2 month floor. If the floor is longer than your verdict, the contract is charging you for months of information you already have. That gap is the actual product being sold.
Watch out
Watch for the ramp excuse. Vendors often argue that months one and two do not count because of setup and optimisation. Sometimes that is true, particularly for SEO or a rebuilt site. Then say so in the contract: define the ramp period, define what happens if the benchmark is missed at the end of it, and put a number on the exit. A ramp that only exists in conversation is not a ramp, it is a delay.
We do not sell 12 month lock-ins. Tell us your trade, your service area and the job value you want more of, and we will come back with the channel mix, the honest payback period, and what you own at the end of it.
Test 3: what does the vendor actually promise in writing?
This is where most contractors get hurt, and it is entirely predictable once you know the mechanism.
Standard advertising agreements contain a merger clause. Yelp's version states that the agreement "embodies the entire and exclusive agreement between the parties," that "no statements or promises by either party have been relied upon in entering into the Advertising Agreement, except as expressly set forth herein," and that "any conflicting or additional terms contained in any other documents or oral discussions are void."
Read that against the Angi rep's email promising the termination fee "will be waived after 3 payments." Under boilerplate of that kind, an email sitting outside the signed document is exactly the category of promise the clause is written to neutralise. The rep may fully intend to honour it. But the rep will move roles, and the document will not.
Yelp's terms are cited here as a public example of how these agreements are commonly drafted, not as a claim about Angi's wording. Your own agreement governs, which is the point: get it and read it.
Then look at what the vendor is on the hook for. Yelp's terms provide the ad programs "on an as is, with all faults and as available basis" and specifically disclaim "all warranties and guarantees regarding the performance, quality and results of the ad programs, including ad click rates, conversions." Set the two commitments side by side.
| Your obligation | Their obligation |
|---|---|
| Fixed 12 month term | No performance guarantee of any kind |
| Early termination fee to exit | Right to terminate at any time for any or no reason without liability |
| Payment in advance of the period | Remedy for invalid activity capped at replacement advertising, not cash |
| Change requests require signed docs, effective next billing cycle | Sole discretion over ad delivery, placement and volume |
Every line of that table comes from Yelp's own published terms. It is not unusual and it is not hidden. It is simply asymmetric, and the asymmetry is the thing the 12 month term locks in.
Test 4: what currency do you get refunded in?
When leads go bad, the question is whether you get money back or credit back. Yelp's terms state that for invalid impressions or clicks, "Yelp's maximum liability and client's exclusive remedy is a refund in the form of replacement advertising services." Credits, not cash.
Contractors report the same pattern in practice. One in the r/Contractor thread on Angi's earnings described being charged $3,300 for leads they never saw, and said that when Angi agreed to refund, it was "only in the form of ad credits which would mean staying with them." They left and ate the money.
Credit-only remedies do something specific to a 12 month contract: they convert every dispute you win into more time on the platform. You cannot credit your way out. Before signing, ask whether bad lead credits expire, whether they survive termination, and whether any circumstance produces cash. Then read the dispute rules, because the deadlines are shorter than most people assume and vary by platform. We broke those down in how to dispute a bad lead credit.
Test 5: what do you own in month 13?
Run the same 12 months and $12,000 through two different structures and the difference is not lead quality, it is residue.
A marketplace commitment. Month 13 arrives and you own nothing. No domain authority, no ads account history, no list, no reviews that travel with you. The leads were rented and the tenancy ended. A landscaper with 20 years in the trade put it bluntly in a widely upvoted r/smallbusiness post in December 2025: if you rely on those platforms to keep your calendar full, "you don't own a business; you're renting one."
An owned channel commitment. Month 13 arrives and the site, the service pages, the Google Business Profile, the ads account, the tracking numbers and the lead database are still yours and still producing. The spend bought an asset with a book value.
So add a clause test to the redline list: at termination, who holds the domain, the hosting, the ads account, the call tracking numbers, the review profile and the lead data, and in what format is the data returned. Agencies that build on their own platform and hand you nothing at the end have sold you a marketplace contract with better branding. For the arithmetic on running a channel yourself, Google Local Services Ads for contractors covers the one big platform that charges per lead with no term at all.
Note
Marketplaces are not automatically the wrong answer. Shared leads at $15 to $85 can work for high volume trades with a fast phone process. The argument here is narrower: that model does not justify a 12 month lock-in, because the thing being sold is inventory you can buy by the unit.
The clauses to redline before you sign
Nine items. This takes about ten minutes with the actual document in front of you, and it is the highest paid ten minutes in the negotiation.
| # | Clause | What to demand |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Commitment period | The exact term length, and what it renews into: month to month or another full term |
| 2 | Early termination fee | The percentage and a worked dollar figure at month 3, in writing |
| 3 | Notice window | The number of days, the method, and the named address it must go to |
| 4 | Merger clause | Every verbal promise moved into the document or an executed addendum |
| 5 | Performance terms | Any benchmark at all, even a soft one, plus what happens if it is missed |
| 6 | Refund currency | Whether bad lead remedies are cash or credit, and whether credits expire |
| 7 | Vendor termination | Whether they can exit at will while you cannot, and whether that voids your fee |
| 8 | Spend changes | Whether you can reduce budget mid term, and when the change takes effect |
| 9 | Asset ownership | Who keeps the site, ads account, numbers, reviews and lead data at the end |
Item 3 catches people who did everything else right. Yelp's terms require written notice to a specific email address, and for profile programs, notice given on or before the 15th of the month ends the order at the end of that month, while notice on the 16th pushes the end to the close of the following month. For cost per click programs it is thirty days' written notice. One day of slippage costs a full month.
The auto renewal laws almost certainly do not cover you
If you are relying on a statute to unwind a rollover, check whether it reaches business buyers, because most do not.
Three states reach commercial buyers: New York General Obligations Law 5-903, Wisconsin Statute 134.49, and Colorado Revised Statute 6-1-732 as amended effective 16 February 2026. California, Florida and Illinois are consumer only, and Florida and Illinois expressly exclude business to business contracts.
Two details matter even in the states that do apply. New York's 5-903 measures its notice window as 15 to 30 days before your deadline to serve non-renewal notice, not before the term expires, a distinction commonly misstated. Wisconsin's reminder duty only bites when both the initial term and the renewal term exceed twelve months, which a standard one year contract does not.
And there is no federal backstop. The FTC's negative option rule, the click to cancel rule, was vacated in its entirety by the Eighth Circuit on 8 July 2025 in Custom Communications, Inc. v. FTC, days before its compliance date, on procedural grounds. The FTC restarted with an advance notice of proposed rulemaking in January 2026 and a comment period that closed that April. Advance stage means no rule, so your contract rather than a statute is doing the work.
Does the vendor's own data support the pitch?
One check that costs nothing. If the vendor is public, read the last earnings call before you sign, because the sales script and the shareholder disclosure are written for different audiences.
A contractor did exactly that in January 2026 and posted the result to r/Contractor. Pitched a "high demand" lead package with a 12 month lock-in, they pulled the earnings transcript and found the company describing declining lead volume and discontinued auto-matching instead.
The pattern held into Angi's most recent quarter. On its Q2 2026 results the company reported revenue of $248 million, down 11% year over year, with US service requests down 6% and leads down 13%. When a marketplace is shrinking, "high demand in your area" is a claim you can check rather than one you have to trust. It is also leverage, since a platform losing pros treats the termination fee as retention currency.
By the numbers
Regulators have already made findings here. In January 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor, an Angi affiliate, to pay up to $7.2 million and stop deceptively marketing its home improvement leads. The complaint alleged that since at least mid-2014 it made false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about lead quality and source, and told service providers its leads converted at rates it could not substantiate. The FTC has since returned more than $3 million to 110,372 businesses.
When 12 months genuinely is the right call
The honest version of this argument is not "never commit." There are two cases where a term earns its keep.
Build time. Some channels legitimately take months to produce. A rebuilt site with a page per service, a Google Business Profile worked properly, content that ranks: none of that pays back in 60 days. Signing a short term on that work means paying for the build and leaving before the return, which is the worst of both.
Price certainty. If the commitment locks a rate that would otherwise move on short notice, and rates in your market are rising, the term is insurance you are being paid to hold.
In both cases the term is defensible. The fee still is not, at least not at a level that makes exit unthinkable. The reasonable shape is a 12 month term with a defined 90 day checkpoint, a written benchmark, and a termination fee small enough that missing the benchmark actually means something. If the vendor believes the work will perform, that structure costs them nothing.
If you already signed
The floor formula still runs, just backwards: compare your monthly gross profit from the channel against the cost of the remaining term. We worked that calculation through, with the negotiation script and where your leverage sits, in how to get out of an Angi contract.
Two things to do today regardless. Put the non-renewal notice deadline in your calendar with a 90 day warning, counted from the notice deadline rather than the expiry date. And start building one channel you own in parallel, so that when the term ends you are choosing rather than re-signing.
The ten minute routine before you sign anything
- Ask for the month to month price for the same package, in writing.
- Get the early termination fee as a percentage and as a dollar figure at month 3.
- Multiply:
spend x [ 3 + f x 9 ]. That is your realistic cost, not the headline. - Work out your months to verdict. If it is shorter than the floor, ask for a pilot.
- Search the document for every promise the rep made. Anything missing goes in writing or comes out of the deal.
- Find the notice clause. Calendar the deadline before you sign, not after.
- Ask what you keep at the end. If the answer is nothing, price the contract as a rental, because that is what it is.
None of this requires a lawyer, and none of it is adversarial. A vendor confident in the work will answer all seven in one email. The ones who cannot are telling you the term is the product.