$0per enquiry, ever
One flat monthly fee that doesn’t move with demand. Your busiest month costs what your quietest month costs, and a phone call that turns out to be nothing costs nothing.
WHAT THUMBTACK COSTS · how the charging works
The price isn’t hidden. It just isn’t fixed.
There’s no national price sheet to look up, and that’s not a conspiracy, it’s the model. What you pay moves with your trade, your city, the job the homeowner described and how many pros are chasing it that week. Which means every article confidently quoting “the average Thumbtack lead cost” is quoting somebody else’s market. Here’s how the charging actually works, and how to work out the only number that matters for you.
You’re charged around contact, not around winning.
This is the bit worth understanding properly, because it sounds more forgiving than it is. Thumbtack’s model bills when a customer makes contact with you, rather than selling a raw lead upfront. Better in principle. The catch is what “contact” actually means.
A contact isn’t a customer
Someone reaching out is not someone hiring. They can message several pros, read the replies, and go quiet on all of them. The charge has already landed by then, so you paid for a conversation, not a job.
Still shared with other pros
The homeowner is generally reaching several businesses at once. So you’re quoting against people you can’t see, on price, from a standing start, the same race as any other marketplace.
The price moves with demand
Widely described as flexing with how busy the market is. Which means the leads cost most in your best season, exactly when you’d be buying more of them. Worth planning for rather than discovering.
Refunds tend to be credit
There’s a request process with conditions and a time limit, and a successful one commonly returns account credit rather than cash. So the money stays on the platform and gets spent on more leads. Check the current policy in your own account.
Descriptions of charging mechanics above are general and based on publicly reported accounts of how the platform operates. Thumbtack sets and changes its own pricing, policies and terms; nothing here is a quote, a price or a statement of your agreement. Your own account is the only accurate source for your rates and current policy. ES Studios is an independent marketing company and is not affiliated with Thumbtack, Angi or HomeAdvisor. All company names are the property of their owners.
Four dials, and the platform holds three of them.
When a contractor in another state tells you what they pay, they’re not lying and it’s not useful either. These are the things that decide the number, and only the last one is yours.
Trade and ticket size
A big install and a small repair are not priced alike. Higher-value work carries higher-cost enquiries, because the platform prices to the value of the job rather than to what you clear on it.
Your metro
More pros competing in a dense city pushes the price up for the identical job. Rural markets are usually cheaper per enquiry and thinner on volume. Neither is better, they’re just different sums.
Season and demand
Same lead, same city, different month, different price. Anyone quoting you a flat annual average has averaged away the thing that hurts, the peak-season cost when you're buying hardest.
Your reply speed· the dial you hold
You can’t move the first three. This one is entirely yours, and on shared enquiries it does more for your close rate than switching platforms ever will. Answer in seconds and the same spend buys more jobs.
Work out your cost per booked job. Not per lead.
Cost per lead is the number the industry talks about because it’s the flattering one. Cost per booked job is the number that decides whether you’ve got a business or a very busy hobby. You need a bank statement and your job list.
1 · Total twelve months of charges
Every charge, including the ones you disputed and lost, and any credit you bought and burned. Credit spent is money spent, even though it doesn’t feel like it at the time.
2 · Count only completed, paid jobs
Not contacts. Not quotes. Not “they said they’d ring back”. Finished and paid. Be hard about it, because a soft count here makes the whole exercise pointless.
3 · Divide, then compare to profit
Spend over jobs won gives your true acquisition cost. Hold that against your average profit per job, profit, not revenue. If it’s eating most of the margin, you already know.
4 · Ask what you still own
A year of that spend, what does it leave behind? With bought enquiries the honest answer is nothing. That’s not a pricing complaint, it’s a different question about what you’re buying.
No surge pricing.
No per-lead bill.
We’re not going to put another company’s numbers on this page and let you read them as yours. What’s below is how we charge and what we measure. 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. It lifts your bought enquiries too, so it goes in first either way.
4numbers, every month
Calls by source, calls answered, jobs booked, revenue traced back. So you can run the cost-per-booked-job sum on us as strictly as on anyone else.
The figures above describe how ES Studios charges and what it 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.
What pros ask
about the charges.
With an honest “check your own account” where that’s the real answer.
200+
home service businesses run on the same proven system.
There’s no single published price. It varies by service, location, job size and demand. Your own account shows the range for the categories and areas you’ve selected, and that’s the only figure that applies to you.
From the pros, not the homeowners. The service is free for the customer, and the businesses answering pay for the contact. Which is worth remembering when you’re wondering whose experience the platform is designed around.
Generally the charge is tied to the contact happening, not to the job landing, so yes, you can be charged for someone who goes quiet. There’s a credit request process with conditions if you think a charge was wrong. Read the current terms in your account.
If you’ve no rankings and an empty diary, buying work beats sitting still. It stops being worth it when your cost per booked job eats the margin, or when you realise a year of it has built you nothing you own. Run the sum rather than go on feel.
Usually demand. Pricing that flexes with how busy the market is means peak season costs more, and more pros bidding in your area does the same thing. It’s not personal, it’s the mechanism.
Ranking in the Google map pack for the towns you cover, with reviews and fast answering behind it. Flat fee, no charge per enquiry, and the customer is yours to keep. It takes months to build, so start it while the paid work is still running.
Find out what a booked job actually costs you.
Fifteen minutes. Bring last year’s charges and we’ll do the sum together, then pull your market up live and show you where you sit on the map in the towns you cover. You’ll leave knowing your real number whatever you decide. If the platform is paying for you, we’ll tell you to keep going.
Book a call