You are looking at an invoice for leads. Some of them never answered the phone. At least one wanted a job you do not do, and one was forty minutes outside the area you set. You paid for all of them.
That is not a billing error. It is how the product works, and the question is whether it still makes sense once you understand the arithmetic behind it.
Angi Leads and HomeAdvisor are the same product
A lot of contractors compare the two as though they are alternatives. They are not. HomeAdvisor and Angi merged, and the lead product now operates under names including Angi Leads and HomeAdvisor Powered by Angi. If you are weighing one against the other, you are weighing a product against itself.
That matters for a practical reason. Signing up with both does not diversify anything. It is the same lead pool, sold to you twice.
What the FTC actually found
In March 2022 the Federal Trade Commission brought an administrative complaint against HomeAdvisor, alleging conduct dating back to at least mid 2014. In January 2023 the FTC announced a proposed order requiring the company to pay up to 7.2 million dollars and to stop marketing its leads deceptively. The final order was approved in April 2023.
Two of the allegations are worth reading closely if you are a contractor deciding whether to buy leads.
The first is that HomeAdvisor told service providers they would receive leads matching the services they provide and the geographic area they selected, when many leads did not match either. If you have ever paid for a lead outside your service area, or for work you do not perform, the complaint describes exactly that pattern.
The second is that the company made claims about how often leads turn into jobs at rates it could not substantiate. That is the more important one, because conversion rate is the number the entire decision rests on.
The FTC later returned more than 3 million dollars to affected businesses, with redress of up to 30 dollars per provider for the lead quality misrepresentations.
None of that means the product cannot work for you. It means the conversion figures quoted at signup are not a safe basis for the decision, and that you need to run your own arithmetic instead.
The arithmetic almost nobody runs
Leads on this kind of platform are typically sold to more than one contractor. That single fact changes the economics completely, and it is the part most contractors never calculate. The trade off between a cheap shared contact and a dearer exclusive one is worked through in shared leads versus exclusive leads.
Here is the mistake. You look at the price of a lead and treat it as your customer acquisition cost. It is not. Your acquisition cost is the price of a lead divided by your close rate, because you are paying for every lead you lose as well as every one you win.
| Your close rate | Leads per job won | At $30 a lead | At $60 a lead | At $100 a lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 in 2 | 2 | $60 | $120 | $200 |
| 1 in 3 | 3 | $90 | $180 | $300 |
| 1 in 4 | 4 | $120 | $240 | $400 |
| 1 in 6 | 6 | $180 | $360 | $600 |
| 1 in 10 | 10 | $300 | $600 | $1,000 |
Put your own numbers in. Most contractors who track it honestly find their close rate on shared leads is well below what they assumed, because they are frequently the third or fourth call the homeowner receives and the first responder has a large advantage. If you want a ceiling to buy against rather than a gut feel, work out how much a lead should cost from your own job value and margin.
Run that calculation before you look at another invoice. If your effective cost per job is a meaningful fraction of the job value, the platform is not a marketing channel. It is a commission.
When buying leads is genuinely the right call
It would be easy to stop here and tell you to quit. That would be dishonest, because there are situations where buying leads is the correct decision, and we say the same thing to clients.
Buy leads when you are new and have no other source of work. Search takes months to build and a new company has nothing. Paying at a poor effective rate beats an empty schedule.
Buy leads when you have genuine idle capacity right now. A crew standing still costs more than an expensive lead does. Arithmetic that looks bad at full capacity looks fine when the alternative is paying people to wait.
Buy leads when you are testing a new service line or a new town and want a demand signal quickly, before committing to build anything. Angi is not the only place to run that test either, and the same question is worth asking about Thumbtack and Google Local Services Ads before you pick one.
What those three have in common is that they are temporary. Lead buying is a reasonable bridge and a poor destination, because the cost never falls, you never own the customer relationship, and the day you stop paying the work stops the same afternoon. Advertising behaves the same way, including Yelp Ads, which rent clicks rather than contacts but stop just as abruptly.
What actually replaces it
Nothing replaces it quickly, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
The honest sequence is to keep buying leads while you build something that does not require them. Finish the Google Business Profile. Build a review habit into the end of every job. Publish straight answers about what your work costs and how it works. Those compound, they cost nothing but attention, and they are the only assets in this business that keep producing after you stop paying. That is the same argument we make about pay per lead versus a monthly retainer, and it applies to platforms as much as to agencies.
For a comparison point, since almost nobody in this industry publishes one: our own performance model is $195 a month plus $10 to $65 per qualified lead, depending on the trade and the market. A qualified lead means a tracked call or form submission that meets a definition agreed in writing before we start. Spam and sales solicitations are not leads and are not charged. Whatever you are paying, on any platform, ask for that definition in writing and ask what happens when a lead does not meet it.
The test of whether it is working is not traffic. It is whether the share of your work arriving without a lead fee is rising month over month. If you are already paying someone to build that and cannot tell whether it is happening, there is a way to check without asking them. If you would rather see how the work is structured by trade, our industry pages set it out, and the method behind all of it is on the local SEO service page.
Angi leads FAQs
Are Angi leads worth it?
It depends entirely on your close rate and your capacity, and the arithmetic is easy to run. Divide the price of a lead by the share of leads you actually convert. That figure, not the lead price, is what a job costs you. If it is a meaningful fraction of the job value, the platform is functioning as a commission rather than as a marketing channel. If you have idle crews or no other source of work, that same figure can still be worth paying.
Is Angi Leads the same as HomeAdvisor?
Yes. HomeAdvisor and Angi merged, and the lead product operates under names including Angi Leads and HomeAdvisor Powered by Angi. The FTC order in the HomeAdvisor case names it that way directly. Signing up with both does not diversify your lead sources, because it is the same pool sold to you twice.
What did the FTC find about HomeAdvisor?
The FTC alleged that HomeAdvisor misrepresented that service providers would only receive leads matching the services they offer and the geographic area they selected, when many leads matched neither, and that it made claims about how often leads convert into jobs at rates it could not substantiate. The conduct was alleged to date back to at least mid 2014. In January 2023 the FTC announced a proposed order requiring payment of up to 7.2 million dollars, and the final order was approved in April 2023.
How much do Angi leads cost?
Prices vary by trade, by market and over time, so any single figure published on a blog will be wrong for somebody. Ask for current pricing for your specific trade and your specific service area before signing, and ask how many other contractors each lead is sold to, because that number changes your true cost per job far more than the headline price does.
Are shared leads worse than exclusive leads?
They are cheaper per lead and more expensive per job, which is the trade nobody makes explicit. With a shared lead you are frequently the third or fourth contractor to call, and the first responder has a large advantage. That does not make shared leads useless, it means you cannot compare their price against an exclusive lead price without adjusting for your close rate on each.
Should we stop buying leads and do SEO instead?
Not as a switch, as an overlap. Search takes months to produce work and lead platforms produce it this week, so cutting one before the other exists just creates a gap in your schedule. The honest sequence is to keep buying while you build a Google Business Profile, a review habit and answers to the questions your customers actually search. The number to watch is whether the share of work arriving without a lead fee is rising.
