Lead Marketplace Platforms: Are Angi, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor Worth It?

How lead marketplaces actually work

Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor (now consolidated under Angi), Networx, Bark, and Houzz Pro all run variants of the same model: aggregate homeowner demand through SEO and paid search, capture a service request through a form, then sell that request to contractors as a lead.

The key word is sell, and the clearest statement of what is being sold comes from a securities filing rather than a marketing page. Angi Inc.'s Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025 describes its revenue as including 'lead revenue for consumer matches, which comprises fees paid by Pros for consumer matches (regardless of whether the Pro ultimately provides the requested service)'. That is the whole architecture in one clause: you are buying the introduction, and you buy it whether or not you get the job.

The second structural fact is that the introduction is usually not exclusive. Networx states plainly that 'a single Pay Per Lead will go to up to 4 contractors in total'. Thumbtack does not publish a per-lead share count but does publish a cap: under its Quality Commitment, 'we limit the number of pros a customer can contact to five in the first four hours of their search', after which the customer can contact more. Angi's filing does not state how many pros receive one lead, and we will not guess a number on its behalf.

You will see figures like 'every lead is sold three to five times' quoted widely online. We removed those from this page. They trace to marketing-agency posts rather than to any platform disclosure, and the two share counts that are published (Networx's four, Thumbtack's five-in-four-hours cap) do not support a general rule.

What each platform actually publishes about price

Almost none of them publish prices. Networx is the exception, and its numbers are dated 2023, which we say every time we use them. Angi, HomeAdvisor, and Thumbtack all describe their pricing qualitatively and decline to name a figure. Bark and Houzz Pro publish no per-lead price we can verify at our sourcing bar, so this page shows none for either.

Thumbtack's help center states 'on Thumbtack, you pay for leads: new customers who reach out to you directly' and that 'prices will vary since a job's value can change based on things like the type and size of the job, how many pros are available, and your market'. Pros set their own lead prices and there is no membership fee. Angi's pro FAQ says only that you pay 'a nominal fee for each lead you match to' and that 'different sized jobs have different Lead Fees'.

The practical consequence: any specific dollar range you have been quoted for Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, or Bark came from an agency or a forum, not from the platform. Treat it accordingly.

Networx, Pay Per Lead

$10 to $100+

Published range; one Pay Per Lead goes to up to 4 contractors in total (2023)

Networx help center: How much do leads cost

Networx, Exclusive Leads

$15 to $120+

Published range; varies by coverage area and service category (2023)

Networx help center: How much do leads cost

Thumbtack lead price

Not published

Pros set their own price; Thumbtack says price varies by job type, size, market, and pro supply

Thumbtack help center: Pay for leads

Angi and HomeAdvisor lead price

Not published

Pros pay for the consumer match whether or not they end up doing the job (FY2025 10-K)

Angi Inc. Form 10-K, fiscal year 2025

How many contractors get the same lead

This is the number that decides whether marketplace spend works, and only two platforms publish anything about it.

Networx: 'a single Pay Per Lead will go to up to 4 contractors in total and are delivered in real-time via text message and email.' Its Exclusive Leads product is the paid alternative to that sharing, at $15 to $120+ per lead. Both figures were last updated on the Networx help center in June 2023.

Thumbtack: the Quality Commitment states 'we limit the number of pros a customer can contact to five in the first four hours of their search'. Read it carefully. It is a cap on a four-hour window, not a constant, and after four hours the customer can contact more pros. Thumbtack does show a pro how many pros the customer contacted on a given lead, which is more transparency than most of the category offers.

Angi and HomeAdvisor: no published share count. What Angi does publish, in a document filed with the SEC, is that the fee is owed for the match itself. Whether one pro or six received the same homeowner is not disclosed, and this page does not fill that gap with a guess.

We also do not publish a close rate for shared leads. Numbers in the 5% to 10% band circulate widely; every trail we followed ended at a marketing agency, so there is no figure here. The structural point stands without one: you are paying full price for a fractional shot, and you can measure your own close rate on your own invoices in a week.

Networx, contractors per lead

Up to 4

Networx's own wording for a single Pay Per Lead (help center, 2023)

Networx help center: How much do leads cost

Thumbtack, pros a customer can contact

5 in 4 hours

Quality Commitment cap on the first four hours of a search; more after that

Thumbtack help center: Quality Commitment

Shared-lead close rate

Not published

No source at our sourcing bar publishes one, so we quote none

Our sourcing bar

What the FTC alleged about HomeAdvisor leads

The most serious public material on lead quality in this category is a government action, and it needs stating precisely.

In March 2022 the Federal Trade Commission filed an administrative complaint alleging that HomeAdvisor had, since at least mid-2014, made false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold to service providers. The allegations included leads that did not match a pro's stated services or service area, and leads from people who had said they were not ready to hire. The FTC described a membership of $287.99 a year plus a fee per lead.

Those allegations were resolved by consent order in April 2023. They were not adjudicated and are not findings of fact. The order required up to $7.2 million, and in November 2023 the FTC sent 110,372 refund checks to service providers. We phrase it this way every time it appears on this site, because the difference between 'a court found' and 'the FTC alleged and the company settled' is a real one.

What a contractor should take from it is narrow but useful: the regulator considered lead-quality claims in this category serious enough to act on, and more than a hundred thousand service providers were in the refund pool.

FTC v. HomeAdvisor consent order

Up to $7.2M

Allegations resolved by consent order, April 2023; 110,372 refund checks sent November 2023

U.S. Federal Trade Commission

Where lead marketplaces actually make sense

There are real, narrow use cases where Angi, Thumbtack, Networx, or Bark make sense for a service business. We see them work in these situations:

• Cold start with no marketing engine. If you just opened a shop, have no website ranking, no Google Ads account, no reviews, and no referral pipeline, marketplaces give you a metered tap of demand to pay your way through month one. The unit economics are poor but the alternative is zero leads.
• Geographic gap-fills. A roofer who runs Google Local Services Ads in their core ZIPs but takes occasional jobs across the river can buy targeted leads for the secondary territory rather than building a separate ad account.
• Slow-season fill-in jobs. When your crew has open capacity in a soft month, the marginal cost of an idle truck is higher than the marketplace fee. That is a real reason to buy leads, and it is a budget line, not a strategy.
• Buying exclusivity deliberately. Networx is the one platform that lets you see the trade explicitly: $10 to $100+ for a lead going to up to four contractors, or $15 to $120+ for an exclusive one. Whatever you conclude, at least the choice is priced in front of you.
• Vertical-specific play. Houzz still drives intent for high-end remodel and design, which is a different buyer than an emergency-trade call. It publishes no lead price we can verify, so evaluate it on your own booked jobs rather than on a quoted range.

Where lead marketplaces stop making sense

Once you have a measurable customer-acquisition cost from any other channel (Google Local Services Ads, organic referrals, a wrapped service truck running a tracked phone number), the comparison usually gets uncomfortable.

The arithmetic that matters is not cost per lead, it is cost per booked job, and only one of the two inputs is published. The platforms publish (or decline to publish) the lead price. Nobody publishes the close rate. That makes this a calculation you have to run on your own invoices: take what you actually paid a marketplace last quarter, divide by the jobs you actually booked from it, and compare that to the same figure for your other channels. It takes an afternoon and it beats any benchmark anyone can sell you.

The structural problem is that you cannot compete your way out of lead sharing. Where a platform publishes a share count, it is a share count by design: Networx's four contractors, or Thumbtack's five-in-four-hours window. Speed to lead helps at the margin but does not change the architecture, and Angi's own filing confirms the fee is owed for the match rather than the job.

Mature shops with a tracked acquisition cost usually do not cut marketplace spend to zero. They cap it at a slow-season fill-in budget and run channels they control for primary acquisition.

Side-by-side: what each platform discloses

Compared on what the platforms themselves state, with an empty cell wherever nothing is published. We would rather show a gap than fill it with an agency estimate.

Our honest take

Lead marketplaces are a tool, not a strategy. Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, Networx, Bark, and Houzz all run real businesses connecting real homeowners to real contractors. They are not scams. The honest gripe is the architecture, and it is the platforms themselves who describe it: you pay for the match regardless of the outcome, and where sharing is disclosed at all, the lead is shared.

If you have no other channel running, start there. Get cash flowing while you build something durable. The goal should be to make marketplace leads a shrinking share of your booked jobs over six months, not a growing one, and the way to know is your own invoice math rather than anyone's benchmark.

WilDi Maps' Cost Per Verified Delivery sits in a different architecture entirely: from $0.25 per GPS-verified delivery to a real person driving through a tunnel that is yours to claim, charged only when that person claims the offer. No auction, no shared lead, no Middleman Tax. A delivery is not a lead, and this site never treats the two as the same unit.

For the underlying breakdown of where ad-tech revenue gets siphoned before it reaches a customer, see What is the Middleman Tax?