4numbers, every month
Calls by source. Calls answered. Jobs booked. Revenue traced back to what produced it. One page, plain English, and we walk you through it on a call. If a channel isn’t paying, you’ll see it here first.
ANGI LEADS ALTERNATIVES · stop renting, start owning
You never bought a lead. You rented a place in the queue.
Same homeowner. Sold to you and to three, four, sometimes more contractors, all at once. You pay whether you win it or not. Then next month you pay again, because you never actually got to keep anything. That’s the part nobody says out loud... you’re not building a business asset, you’re paying rent on somebody else’s. Here’s what the federal record says about how those leads were sold, and what the alternative actually looks like.
Shared leads don’t cost what the invoice says.
Look at the line item and it seems fine. Forty dollars, sixty, more on a big job. The trouble is the invoice only counts the ones you paid for, and it never counts the ones you lost. Run the whole sum and the number changes shape.
You’re quoted against before you dial
The homeowner has your name and several others in the same minute. So the first call wins a lot of the time, and the cheapest number wins most of the rest. You’re in a price fight you didn’t choose.
You pay for the misses too
Wrong trade, wrong town, tyre-kicker, someone who filled a form nine days ago and forgot. It still lands on the bill. Divide what you spent by the jobs you actually booked and that’s your real cost per job.
Nothing compounds
Spend a year on rankings and you’re higher at the end of it. Spend a year buying leads and you’re exactly where you started, with an empty pipeline the day you pause. There’s no equity in it.
The customer isn’t yours
They found the platform, not you. Next job, they go back to the platform. You bought a transaction, not a relationship, and you’ll buy the same person again in two years without knowing it.
This isn’t contractor gossip. It’s a federal order.
You’ll find plenty of angry forum posts about lead platforms. Ignore all of it and read the government filing instead. In March 2022 the Federal Trade Commission brought an administrative complaint against HomeAdvisor, Inc., the company the FTC describes as doing business as Angi Leads and HomeAdvisor Powered by Angi, and as affiliated with Angi, formerly Angie’s List. Here is what the public record says.
$7.2 million, January 2023
The FTC issued an order requiring HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million and to stop what it called deceptive and misleading tactics in selling home-improvement leads. The money set up two redress funds for service providers. The Commission approved the final order in April 2023.
Leads that didn’t match, alleged since 2014
The complaint alleged that although providers were told they’d only get leads matching their trade and their chosen area, many did not, and that this had been going on since at least mid-2014. If you ever paid for a job in the wrong town, you weren’t imagining it.
Close rates it couldn’t back up
The FTC alleged the company often told providers its leads turned into jobs at rates much higher than it could substantiate. That’s the number people join on. It’s the number the Commission said wasn’t supported.
What the order now forbids
The order bars the company from claiming its leads concern people who are ready to hire a provider, or who submitted a request directly to HomeAdvisor, unless it’s true. Read that twice. Those two claims are why most contractors sign up in the first place.
Source: Federal Trade Commission, In the Matter of HomeAdvisor, Inc., FTC Matter No. 1923106, administrative complaint March 2022, proposed order announced 23 January 2023, final consent order approved April 2023. As is standard for FTC consent orders, settlement is not an admission of liability. We point you at the filings so you can read them yourself rather than take our word for it. ES Studios is an independent marketing company and is not affiliated with Angi, HomeAdvisor or Thumbtack. All company names are the property of their owners.
Every real option is just: whose asset is it?
People ask what to switch to and expect another marketplace. There are plenty, Thumbtack, Yelp, Networx, Porch, Nextdoor. They all work the same way underneath: shared leads, per-lead billing, their customer. Swapping one for another changes the logo on the invoice. The only switch that changes the arithmetic is moving from rented to owned.
Your own map position
Almost every “near me” search ends in the three-result Google box. Get in it and the calls arrive with no per-lead charge attached, not cheaper leads, no lead bill at all. That position is yours and it holds.
Reviews on your own profile
Reviews you collect on a platform prop up the platform. Reviews on your Google profile lift your ranking and sit under your name in the search result. Same effort, and this time you keep it.
Answering first, without the race
Speed still wins the job. The difference is you’re racing to answer your own caller, not four rivals holding the same phone number. A missed call goes out as a text in seconds so nothing rings out.
A list you can market to again
Every customer lands in your own CRM with their history. So next spring you can text three hundred past customers about gutter cleaning for nothing, instead of buying three hundred strangers.
No vanity charts.
Four numbers.
We’re not going to put another company’s numbers on this page and let you read them as yours. What’s below is what we measure and hand you every month. Any client result we quote, we quote as that one client’s outcome, and we’ll open the live account on the call so you can check it yourself.
60sour reply-time bar
That’s what we hold ourselves to, not a result we’re claiming for you. Your real reply time sits on the report each month.
$0per lead, ever
A flat monthly fee for the work. No per-lead charge on top, no bidding against other contractors for the same homeowner, no surprise line items.
The figures above describe what ES Studios tracks and reports, not results achieved by any particular business. Where we share client outcomes elsewhere, they reflect that client’s individual situation and are examples of what’s possible, not a guarantee of the same results for every business.
Don’t cancel on Monday. You’ll starve by Friday.
This is where people get hurt. They read a page like this, get angry, cancel everything, and then have no phone calls for two months while the rankings build. Rankings take a while. Do it in the right order and there’s no gap at all.
1 · Find out what you’re really paying
Pull the last twelve months. Total spend, and the jobs you can honestly trace to it. That’s your cost per booked job. Most people have never worked it out, and it’s usually a surprise.
2 · Build the owned side while it still runs
Profile, reviews, rankings, call capture. Keep buying leads through this bit. It’s a few months of paying for both, and it’s the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy.
3 · Turn the spend down, not off
When your own calls start landing, cut the lead budget in steps and watch the total. If booked jobs hold, cut again. You’re following the numbers rather than a hunch.
4 · Then read your contract properly
Check the renewal date and the notice period before you cancel anything, terms vary and some carry an early-termination charge. There’s a whole page on cancelling without going quiet.
What contractors ask
before they switch.
The same answers we give on the phone every week.
200+
home service businesses run on the same proven system.
Nothing that works the same way. Every other marketplace shares leads and bills per lead, so switching between them changes very little. The thing that’s genuinely different is ranking on Google yourself, where the calls come straight to you and there’s no charge per enquiry.
Shared leads are the core of the model, the same homeowner request goes out to several businesses, and the ones who receive it are charged for it. Exact numbers vary by trade, market and product, so check your own account rather than trust a figure off a blog. Including this one.
No, and we’re not going to call a real company that. It’s a legitimate business with a model that suits some contractors and suits others badly. What we’ll do instead is point you at the FTC record, an order announced January 2023 requiring up to $7.2m over how those leads were marketed, and let you read it yourself.
Local rankings usually move over months, not weeks, and it depends on your town, your trade and how much competition sits above you. Anyone promising a fixed date is guessing. Keep the lead spend running while it builds, that’s the whole point of doing it in order.
Plenty do, and for a while you probably should. Once your own calls cover the diary, most people wind the lead spend down because it’s the expensive half. Some keep a small budget for quiet months. That’s a fine way to run it.
Usually not. Most of the early gain is in the Google Business Profile, reviews and answering fast, none of which needs a rebuild. If the site is genuinely holding you back we’ll say so, and we’ll say why.
One flat monthly fee and no contract, month to month, cancel any time. No charge per lead, no bidding, no minimum ad spend. You’ll get the exact number on the call once we’ve looked at your service area.
Everything. Google profile, reviews, phone numbers, website, customer list. Yours to walk out with, because it was yours from day one. That’s the whole difference between owning and renting, and it’d be a bit rich of us to write this page and then not do it.
Work out what you’re really paying per booked job.
Book a 15-minute call. Bring last year’s lead spend and we’ll do the sum with you, total spend against jobs you can actually trace, then pull your market up live and show you where you sit on the map today. If buying leads is genuinely working for you, we’ll tell you to carry on. No pitch deck, nothing you have to do afterwards.
Book a call