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Somewhere right now a contractor is paying for the same homeowner’s phone number as three competitors, calling it, hearing “I already hired someone,” and getting billed for the privilege. Whether that’s a fair price depends on math most pros never run — so this guide runs it, with sources you can check, and then makes the honest comparison against generating your own leads.
Start With What the FTC Found
This isn’t forum grumbling. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final order requiring HomeAdvisor — an Angi company — to pay up to $7.2 million over what the FTC described as “a wide range of deceptive and misleading tactics in selling home improvement project leads.” Among the specific findings in the FTC’s complaint and order : false or unsubstantiated claims that leads matched the services and geographic area a pro signed up for, and misrepresentations about how often leads actually turn into paying customers. $3 million was returned to 110,372 businesses , and the final order prohibits claiming a lead comes from someone “ready to hire” when it doesn’t.
For readers who want the primary documents rather than press summaries: the FTC’s complaint and the consent order itself are public (FTC Docket 9407, Matter 1923106 — full case docket ).
None of that means buying leads never works. It means the burden of proof is on the math, not the marketing.
The Math That Actually Matters: Per Booked Job, Not Per Lead
The sticker price is per lead. You pay per lead whether it answers, whether it was ever real, and whether it hires you or the other pro who got the same lead. So the only number that matters is:
Cost per booked job = (cost per lead × leads bought) ÷ jobs actually won
Contractors across trades commonly report per-lead prices anywhere from roughly $15 for small handyman work into the $50–$100+ range for roofing, HVAC, and other big-ticket trades — prices vary by trade, area, and moment, which is why you should pull your own current numbers from your Angi Ads/Leads dashboard rather than trust anyone’s blog table, including this one. Now apply a realistic close rate on shared leads — if you win one job in five to ten paid leads, a “$60 lead” is really a $300–$600 booked job, before your time spent chasing the other four to nine.
Two structural facts drive that close rate, and neither is a secret:
- Shared leads are a race. The same homeowner request can be sold to multiple competing pros in your category and area. The job overwhelmingly goes to whoever makes contact first — and the response-time research shows contact odds collapsing within minutes, not hours. If you buy shared leads and can’t reliably call back inside a few minutes, you are subsidizing the pro who can.
- You pay for the request, not the intent. A homeowner “gathering quotes,” price-shopping, or mis-categorized into your trade still bills like a real prospect. That’s precisely the gap the FTC action was about.
The Alternative: Leads That Are Only Yours
The comparison isn’t Angi versus nothing — it’s Angi versus running your own lead generation, which for local home services usually means Facebook Lead Ads: a homeowner in your service area sees your ad, taps it, and submits their name, phone, and project details without leaving Facebook.
The structural differences, stated plainly:
| Bought (Angi/HomeAdvisor) | Your own (Facebook Lead Ads) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who else gets the lead | Commonly shared with competing pros | Nobody — it’s exclusively yours |
| Cost per lead | Set by the marketplace, per lead, win or lose | Set by your ad budget and targeting; you can tune or pause it |
| The race | Against other pros, decided in minutes | Against your own response time only |
| The asset you build | None — stop paying, leads stop | A Page, an audience, ad know-how, and a lead list you own |
| The catch | Lead quality outside your control | You have to run ads — a real skill with a real learning curve |
That last row is the honest catch, so let’s not minimize it: writing ads, picking audiences, and managing budget is work. Plenty of contractors pay a local marketer to do it; plenty learn it in a few evenings. Either way, the 90-day deletion clock and the delivery problem — Facebook does not reliably tell you a lead arrived — are solved problems: instant delivery to your email, the crew’s phones by SMS , and a spreadsheet runs $15/month flat. Your own lead, on your phone, seconds after the homeowner taps submit — the first-minute call that wins shared-lead races is trivially easy when nobody else was sold the lead at all.
The Sensible Setup (Most Pros Land Here)
- Your own Facebook leads as the primary pipeline. Exclusive, cost-tunable, and building an asset. Size the budget so it fills most of your schedule.
- Angi as overflow, if the math clears. When the schedule has holes, fill-in work at a known cost-per-booked-job can be rational — if you’ve measured your close rate there and if someone can answer marketplace leads inside minutes.
- One discipline across both: track cost per booked job per channel for a quarter. Contractors who run this comparison usually discover one channel is 2–4× cheaper than the other for their trade and area — and it isn’t always the same channel for everyone, which is exactly why you measure instead of trusting anyone’s blanket answer.
Your own leads, on your phone, in seconds
Facebook Lead Ads delivery to email, SMS, Google Sheets, and Pipedrive — $15/month flat, 14-day free trial. Win the race by not having one.
Before You Sign Anything
Questions worth asking an Angi rep directly, in writing: Is this lead type shared or exclusive, and with how many pros maximum? What exactly triggers a billable lead? What is the credit/dispute process for bogus leads and what percentage of disputes are granted? What’s the current per-lead price range for my trade and zips? Their answers — not national averages — are your inputs for the math above. And whatever channel wins your quarter: the pro who calls first, wins. Build for that.