Why We're Killing Lead Fees

If you're a contractor who's used HomeAdvisor, Angi, or Thumbtack in the last five years, you already know the drill. A homeowner submits a request. The platform sells that same lead to three, four, sometimes eight contractors. You pay $15 to $100 just for the phone number. Then you call, and half the time nobody picks up. The other half, they've already hired somebody from the first wave.

That's the lead-fee model. It was built to make platforms money, not to help contractors build businesses. We think it's fundamentally broken, and we built FairTradeWorker to prove there's a better way.

The Real Cost of Lead Fees

Let's do the math that the big platforms don't want you to think about. Say you're a general contractor doing residential remodels. A decent kitchen lead on Angi runs about $60. You need to buy 5 to 8 leads to land one job, because the same lead is going to multiple contractors and the homeowner only hires one.

That's $300 to $480 in lead costs for a single job. If you're closing one job a week from these platforms, you're spending $1,200 to $1,920 a month. That's $14,400 to $23,000 a year, and that's before you account for the time you spent chasing leads that went nowhere.

For specialty trades, it's even worse. Plumbing and electrical leads are cheaper per unit but convert at lower rates because homeowners are more likely to get multiple quotes for smaller jobs. A plumber buying $20 leads might need 10 to close one service call. The economics don't work for anyone except the platform.

Why It Creates a Race to the Bottom

The lead-fee model doesn't just cost money. It warps behavior. When you're paying $60 for a lead, you feel pressure to underbid just to win the job and recover that cost. Contractors start cutting margins, rushing estimates, and promising timelines they can't keep. The homeowner ends up with a lower-quality experience, and the contractor ends up working for less than the job is worth.

It also punishes smaller operations. A solo contractor can't absorb $1,500 a month in lead costs the way a company with 20 trucks can. The platforms end up favoring volume players who can afford to lose money on lead acquisition, which pushes out the skilled tradespeople who do better work but can't outspend the competition.

How FairTradeWorker Works Instead

We charge a flat monthly subscription. That's it. No per-lead fees, no per-bid charges, no surprise costs when a homeowner looks at your profile. You pay one price and you get unlimited access to every job posted in your service area and trade categories.

• Free tier: Limited to 3 active bids per month. Enough to try the platform and see if it works for you.
• Solo ($29/mo): Unlimited bids, AI-powered estimation with Hunter, and your verified contractor profile.
• Team ($79/mo): Everything in Solo plus team management, advanced analytics, and priority placement.
• Enterprise ($149/mo): Full platform access with dedicated support, custom branding, and API integrations.

The Math That Actually Works

At $29 a month, a Solo contractor spends $348 a year on FairTradeWorker. Compare that to the $14,000+ they'd spend on lead fees doing the same volume of work. That's a savings of $3,000 to $6,000 per year at minimum, and closer to $15,000 for contractors who were heavily reliant on paid leads.

More importantly, every bid you submit goes directly to one homeowner who posted a real job. There's no shared lead. The homeowner reviews bids, checks your verified profile and FairRecord, and picks the contractor they want. You compete on the quality of your work and the fairness of your price, not on who got the notification first.

Built by People Who Get It

We didn't build FairTradeWorker because we saw a market opportunity in “disrupting home services.” We built it because the current system is unfair to the people who do the actual work. Contractors deserve a platform that charges them honestly, connects them with real customers, and stays out of the way while they run their business.

That's what killing lead fees means. Not a marketing gimmick. A different business model, built on the idea that if the platform only makes money when contractors succeed, then the platform will be designed to help contractors succeed.