What contractor leads cost: Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Yelp, and Bark

Ask four lead platforms what a customer costs and you get four answers in four different units. Angi names a price per lead. Thumbtack asks you to name one. Yelp charges you per click and won't tell you the price in advance. Bark sells credits and lets you spend them.

That's the actual reason "which one is cheapest" never gets a straight answer in a contractor forum. People are comparing a lead fee to a click charge to a credit pack, which is comparing nothing to nothing. There's one number that survives the translation, and it's not on any of their marketing pages.

The four shapes

Before any figure means anything, know which deal you're in.

They price the lead. (Angi, HomeAdvisor) A homeowner submits a request, it reaches you, you're charged a fee Angi set. Since January 13, 2025 nearly every homeowner actively chooses which pros to contact, per Angi's Q4 2024 shareholder letter, which makes the lead better than the old auto-blast model without changing who names the price. There's also an annual membership on top.

You price the lead, and the price is also a bid. (Thumbtack) You set an exact lead price per service and that's exactly what you're charged when a customer reaches out. Thumbtack also says your prices "tell us which jobs are your top priority" and that a higher price "makes you more competitive for those leads." Lower it and the volume thins. No annual membership.

An auction prices a click, and you cap the month. (Yelp) Nothing charges per lead here. Request a Quote is free to set up, and the money goes to ads, billed per click at a price Yelp's automated auction sets from supply and demand. What you control is the monthly budget, which Yelp says it will never exceed.

You buy credits and spend them per reply. (Bark) Browsing costs nothing and you pay to respond. Bark says it calculates "the costs of contacting a customer based on the service, the value of the job, and the supply and demand in the area," charges a one-off fee per lead response with no commission, and expires credits three months after purchase. Bark does not publish what a credit costs on that page.

Angi versus HomeAdvisor is one company against itself

This one deserves its own answer, because contractors still shop the two against each other.

Angie's List and HomeAdvisor merged in 2017. The company rebranded around the Angi name in 2021 and HomeAdvisor's contractor-facing program became Angi Leads. When the FTC brought its case in March 2022, it named the defendant as HomeAdvisor, Inc., a company affiliated with Angi that also did business as Angi Leads. Angi has since completed its spin-off from IAC, on April 1, 2025, and trades on Nasdaq as ANGI.

So a quote from one and a quote from the other are two doors into the same building. Compare them on the terms you're offered, not on the assumption that you're playing two vendors against each other.

Nobody publishes a rate card, including the people who write about it

Not one of these four posts a full price list for contractors. What exists instead is a layer of third-party trackers, and they disagree with each other enough that you should distrust any single number, including the ones we've quoted.

Our own two earlier posts are the example. The Angi post cites a tracker putting membership at roughly $300 a year. The Thumbtack post cites a different one putting it at $300 to $500. Both are reputable enough to quote and they don't agree. On Yelp it's worse: one 2026 guide puts home-services clicks at $5 to $25, while another published the same month says there is no reliable average cost per click and tells you to stop looking for one.

They're not lying to you. They're averaging across trades, markets, and job values that have nothing to do with each other. Treat every figure below as a range for orientation, and treat your invoice as the fact.

The comparison table

	Angi / HomeAdvisor	Thumbtack	Yelp	Bark
What you buy	A lead	A lead	A click on an ad	Credits, spent per reply
Who sets the price	Angi	You, and it's your bid	An automated auction	Bark
Do you see the price first?	On the invoice	Yes, exactly	No	Yes, in credits
Recurring fee	Annual membership	None	Ads from $150/mo	None, credits expire in 90 days
Charged when	The lead reaches you	The customer first messages you	Someone taps your ad	You choose to respond
Free lead path	No	No	Request a Quote	Browsing the feed

The bottom row is the one worth staring at. Yelp is the only one of the four where a homeowner can contact you and nothing is charged, which is a genuine structural difference and the reason the Yelp comparison has to be run on ad spend rather than lead fees.

The one formula

Every platform above collapses into the same question. What does a booked job cost?

Cost per booked job = what you paid ÷ (the rate people engage × the rate you close)

Per platform, the units change and the shape doesn't:

• Angi: lead fee ÷ (contact rate × close rate). Ghosts still cost full price.
• Thumbtack: lead price ÷ (response rate × close rate). You paid when they messaged you, not when they answered your reply.
• Yelp: cost per click ÷ (click-to-conversation rate × close rate). The middle term is the leak, because a tap isn't a person with a project.
• Bark: credits spent ÷ (reply-to-conversation rate × close rate), converted to dollars at what you actually paid for the pack.

Then hold the output against the job, which is the step everyone skips. Around $300 to win a water heater install that bills a few thousand can be a perfectly good trade. The same $300 to win a $250 drain call is a donation with extra steps. This is why "is Angi worth it" has no general answer and never will. It has your answer, per trade, per job type, and it can flip inside the same business in the same week.

Two rules that make the measurement honest:

Use at least 20 to 30 leads per platform. Fewer than that and you're measuring luck. Pull them from your actual records, not memory.

Remeasure when the platform changes. If your close-rate figure comes from Angi's old shared-lead era, it's describing a product that no longer exists. Give a platform credit when its own changes earn it.

The three deep versions

Each of these takes one platform apart with its own mechanics, refund rules, and the traps specific to it:

• Angi math: the fee you can't see in advance, the FTC action worth knowing about, and what the homeowner-choice change did and didn't fix.
• Thumbtack math: why the slider is a bid, what the refund policy quietly excludes, and how to work the price backwards from what a booked job is worth to you.
• Yelp math: free quote requests, an auction you don't set the price in, and the extra leak between a click and a conversation.

The part none of them sell

Every platform on this page prices the same thing: an introduction to somebody who doesn't know you yet. That can be a rational purchase, especially with a schedule to fill. It's also the most expensive customer you will ever get, and the meter is following homeowners into AI assistants rather than going away, with Angi inside ChatGPT, Thumbtack inside ChatGPT and Claude, and Yelp powering recommendations across ChatGPT, Apple Maps, and Alexa+.

What no platform charges you for, because none of them can, is the customer who already has your number. The referral from a neighbor. The repeat call four years after you replaced their water heater. The homeowner comparing three quotes at 9pm who is already on your website.

That traffic is free and most of it leaves, because what greets it is a contact form that answers nothing and emails you a name hours later. ServiceFront puts an agent on your own site instead: it answers from facts you've verified (no invented prices, ever), flags the emergencies, captures the job details, and emails you the lead. To be clear about the boundary, it won't get you found on Angi, Yelp, or Google. Discovery stays your problem. This is about not paying rent twice on demand you already earned.

Paste your URL into servicefront.ai and ask it what your customers ask you.