Best contractor lead generation services compared, and the one number that decides whether any of them pays

Three different things are sold under this phrase and only one of them is a lead. Knowing which you are buying is the whole decision, because the arithmetic that makes one of them profitable makes another one a slow loss.

The three things being sold

A marketplace lead. A homeowner fills in a form, the marketplace sells that contact to several contractors, and you pay per contact whether or not you win the job. You are competing on response speed with three other firms who got the same contact at the same moment.

A booked appointment or a live call. More expensive per unit, far better intent, and the quality depends entirely on how the call was qualified before it reached you. Ask what the qualifying script contains.

Your own demand, built for you. An agency builds your map listing, your service pages and your advertising so the enquiry arrives at you first and exclusively. Slowest to start, the only one that is still working in year three, and the only one where the asset is yours.

Why this page ranks nobody first, stated plainly

The intention was to rank the marketplaces on what each publishes about cost per lead, exclusivity and refunds. Neither of the two biggest would let a reader see it today. angi.com/companylist/pro returned HTTP 403 Forbidden on 21 October 2026. thumbtack.com/pro returned a 200 status with an effectively empty body on the same date, which is the more misleading of the two failures, because a successful status code with nothing in it looks like a page that says nothing rather than a page that was not served.

Neither of those is evidence against either company. It means their terms could not be verified on this date, and publishing a cost per lead figure from memory would be exactly the kind of sentence this site refuses to write. So this page ranks nobody first and hands you the arithmetic instead.

The one number, and how to work it out before you spend anything

It is your cost per won job, not your cost per lead, and you can calculate it from numbers you already have.

Take your close rate on shared marketplace leads. For most trades, honestly measured, it sits between one in six and one in twelve, because three competitors got the same contact. Take the quoted price per lead and multiply by the number of leads you need to win one. That is your true acquisition cost for one job.

Now compare it to your gross profit on an average job, not your revenue. If acquisition is eating more than about a tenth of gross profit on a small repair job, the channel only works if those customers come back, which means you need a follow up habit that most contractors do not have. For a large replacement job with thousands in gross profit, a high cost per lead is easily affordable and the marketplaces are genuinely good value.

That is why the same marketplace is a great deal for a roofer and a bad deal for a handyman at an identical price per lead. The variable is job size, and it is yours, not theirs.

The four questions to ask any supplier in this category

Is this contact exclusive to me or shared, and with how many others. Get the number in writing. It is the single biggest driver of your close rate.

What is the refund or credit policy for a bad lead, in writing. Wrong number, out of area, wrong trade, already hired. Each should be creditable and the window should be stated.

Can I pause by season. Trades are seasonal and an unpausable annual commitment is much more expensive than its monthly figure.

Do I get the customer record. If the homeowner contact lives only in the marketplace, you cannot market to them again and you will buy them a second time.

The place a contractor is now losing jobs without seeing it

A homeowner used to search, see a map and pick from it. A growing number now ask an assistant who the good roofers or remodellers in their area are, and get two or three firm names back in prose. No search result page, no map, no click to anybody's website. If you are not one of the named firms, nothing happens that you could see in any report, and your marketplace spend is unaffected because that homeowner never filled in a form.

AI Knows Us exists for that single question, and we are not a lead generation service. We sell you no leads, we run no advertising and we do not answer your phone. We watch the buying questions your market asks across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews and report which answers name you, which name a competitor and which name nobody at all. The limits to judge us on are published rather than quoted on a call. At aiknowsus.com/pricing, read 23 October 2026, Growth at 299 dollars a month covers 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers across all five surfaces, Scale at 599 dollars covers 300 questions and 3,500 scheduled answers, and a Claude check costs 3 credits where most checks cost 1. SEO Start at 149 dollars renders zero buyer questions, zero credits and zero engines, so it does not do this job and the floor price is not the price of this work. The page also publishes a free scan, in its own words "Run a free scan on your own domain and read what the AI apps say about you today", with "No account needed".

Where a rival beats us, and it is the fact a procurement reviewer will care about most. Our rendered pricing text carries no SSO, no SOC 2, no ISO certification, no white label and no data processing agreement, checked on 21 October 2026. Vendors in our own category do publish some of those. If you are buying under a security review, that absence is the more important fact about us than anything else on this page. And one more limit worth knowing on this particular page: our pricing text names no Google Business Profile, no map pack and no directory listing anywhere, checked on 21 October 2026. We watch what assistants say, not what your map listing does, and for a contractor the map listing is still the bigger half of the job.

Scope

This page is about buying leads. It deliberately does not target contractor marketing agency, contractor marketing companies, marketing agency for contractors, contractor marketing services or general contractor marketing agency, all of which an existing page on this site already pools, and that page is the right one if you want a supplier to build your own demand rather than sell you contacts.

What contractors ask

Are marketplace leads worth it at all. For high ticket trades usually yes, as a supplement. As your only channel, never, because the price is theirs to raise.

How fast do I have to call. Minutes, not hours, on a shared lead. If you cannot answer within five minutes during working hours, shared leads are not your channel.

What should I build first with my own money. The map listing and the review habit, before any advertising. It is free, it compounds, and no marketplace can take it away from you.

If your market is seasonal enough that budget level is the real question, our page on budget levels and winter demand for contractors in Minneapolis. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,490 stored bodies (2,118 published drafts plus 372 fetched live pages) against 2,404 live pages, with my own wave excluded. 978 of those 2,404 pages, 40.7 percent, carry no inbound link from anywhere on the site, and that figure is an upper bound, because a body we cannot read cannot be counted as a linker.