What are the main types of lead generation companies for contractors?

There are five, and most lists only cover the first two. Shared lead marketplaces sell the same homeowner to several contractors at once. Pay-per-lead networks sell you a contact for a fixed price, sometimes exclusive to you. Retainer and hourly agencies build and run marketing you own, and bill for the work rather than the result. In-house means you or someone on payroll does it. Done-for-you appointment systems run the ads and the follow-up and are measured on appointments that actually get sat, not contacts delivered. The category matters more than the company, because it decides who carries the risk when the phone does not ring.

What do lead generation companies for contractors cost?

Published figures vary by category and by trade. ClicksGeek lists HomeAdvisor and Angi Leads at $15 to over $100 per lead, Thumbtack at $10 to $60 and up, Modernize at $30 to $150 and up, CraftJack at $10 to $50, Houzz Pro at around $65 a month, and 33 Mile Radius at several thousand dollars a month. Housecall Pro works a simple example: at $40 a lead and a one in four close rate, you are at about $160 per signed job. Those numbers assume you reach the people you bought, which for shared leads is usually the part that breaks.

Are shared leads or exclusive leads better for high-ticket contractors?

For anything where the homeowner collects several bids, exclusive almost always wins on real cost, even at a higher sticker price. Chip Paynter, a 33-year veteran general contractor out of Loomis, California, was reaching about 2 of every 10 leads he bought. On an exclusive qualification funnel he was talking with at least 8 of 10. That is roughly a 4x swing in cost per actual conversation, which is bigger than almost any price gap between sources. Shared-lead math still works fine on small, urgent repair jobs where the first caller usually wins.

What is a good cost per booked appointment for a contractor?

Work it backward from your job instead of copying a benchmark. Decide what you will spend to win one signed job, multiply by your close rate to get a ceiling per sat appointment, then divide by the share of contacts that become a sat appointment. For a real reference point: Chris Walters at E&C Custom Homes in Gulf Shores, Alabama spent $5,109.15 over about 60 days, which worked out to about $48 per inquiry, about $122 per completed appointment and about $426 in ad spend per signed deck job. That is one account over one stretch, not a rate card.

How do I tell if a lead generation company is a marketplace or an agency?

Ask two questions and the category falls out immediately. First: whose ad account is this running in, and do I still have it if we stop working together? A marketplace has no answer, because there is no account for you. Second: is this contact sold to anyone else, ever? If the reply is anything other than a flat no, you are in a marketplace no matter what the website calls itself. A third tell is what they bill on. Billing per lead means they win when volume goes up. Billing on work done means they win when hours go up. Neither is the same as being paid on appointments that get sat.

Should a contractor do lead generation in-house instead?

It is the cheapest option on paper and the most expensive in practice, because the work that matters is the boring part. Ads are maybe a third of it. The rest is calling back inside minutes, chasing people who do not answer the first time, and reminding them so they actually show. Owners who are also running crews almost never keep that up in July. In-house makes sense when you have someone whose actual job is this, not an owner planning to do it at night.

What should a contractor demand in writing before signing?

Five things. Who owns the ad account, the CRM, the creative and the data if you leave. Whether every appointment is exclusive to you and for how long. What the company is measured on, stated as a number, not as effort. What happens if that number is missed. And what you are on the hook for, since a company can book the calendar but cannot make you run the appointment. If any of the five only exists as a verbal answer on the call, treat it as not existing.

Lead Generation Companies for Contractors (2026 Guide)

MoreJobCalls.com is a marketing company for deck builders and other home-service contractors that books exclusive sales appointments onto the owner's calendar instead of selling shared leads. So I am one of the five categories below, and I will flag that plainly when I get to it. I am not going to rank these and put myself at the top. What I can do is tell you how the categories actually differ, because nobody searching "lead generation companies for contractors" is told that, and it is the part that decides whether the money works.

Here is what happens when you search this. You get lists of fifteen platforms, and almost every entry is a marketplace: Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Modernize, CraftJack, Porch, Houzz, BuildZoom, 33 Mile Radius. Housecall Pro's roundup covers fifteen of them. ClicksGeek's covers nine. They are useful, and they are all answering a narrower question than the one you asked, because they are comparing companies that all work the same way.

The Five Kinds of Lead Generation Companies for Contractors

Read this table by the last column. That is the one that changes your life, and it is the one the category lists leave out.

Category	What you actually buy	How they bill	Exclusive?	Who carries the risk
Shared lead marketplaces Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Porch	A homeowner's contact details, also sold to 3–5 of your competitors	Per lead, often with credits for bad ones	No	You. They are paid on delivery, not on whether you reach anyone
Pay-per-lead networks Modernize, CraftJack, 33 Mile Radius, EverConnect	A contact, sometimes exclusive to you, generated on their ad account	Per lead, or a monthly spend commitment	Sometimes, verify it	Mostly you. Exclusive raises contact rate but they are still paid per contact
Retainer / hourly agencies Most local and trade marketing shops	Work: ads, SEO, a website, reporting, on an account you own	Monthly fee, sometimes a share of ad spend	Your account, so yes	You. They are paid for the work whether or not it books
In-house You, or someone on payroll	Total control, and all of the follow-up labor	Salary and your own time	Yes	You, plus the opportunity cost of the hours
Done-for-you appointments The category we are in	Sales appointments booked onto your calendar, exclusive to you	Management fee plus your own ad spend, on an account you own	Yes	Shared. Paid against an appointment number, not against delivery

Shared Lead Marketplaces

The oldest model and still the biggest. You pay per contact, and so do three or four other contractors in your area for the same contact. ClicksGeek publishes HomeAdvisor and Angi Leads at $15 to over $100 a lead and Thumbtack at $10 to $60 and up, which honestly sounds cheap until you try to call them.

Shared leads work fine for a $400 repair the homeowner wants handled today, because the first person to answer usually gets it. They break on big custom work. Ricardo Cervantes, a Colorado concrete and deck contractor, had been through Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, CraftJack and Thumbtack before he came to us. That is four marketplaces, same result each time. If you want the long version of that math, I wrote it up in the honest comparison of Angi and HomeAdvisor alternatives.

Pay-Per-Lead Networks

A step up. These companies run their own ads and sell you the result, sometimes exclusively. Published ranges run $30 to $150 and up at Modernize, $10 to $50 at CraftJack, and several thousand a month at 33 Mile Radius.

The catch is structural rather than dishonest: they are paid per contact delivered. Nothing in that arrangement pays them to make sure you reach the person. And the ad account is theirs, so on the day you stop paying, you have no asset and no data. You were renting.

Retainer and Hourly Marketing Agencies

Here you are buying work on an account you own, which is a real improvement. When you leave, you keep the ad account, the creative and the audience data. That is worth a lot more than most contractors realize.

The honest tradeoff is that a retainer pays for effort. A monthly report showing impressions and clicks is a completely reasonable deliverable under that arrangement, and it is also entirely compatible with your calendar being empty. Good agencies exist in this category and plenty of contractors are happy in it. Just go in knowing what the fee is attached to. If you are evaluating specific firms, I keep an alphabetical, sourced list at deck builder marketing companies compared, which includes us and says so.

In-House

Cheapest on paper. The ad part is genuinely learnable, and I would rather a contractor run his own ads than rent leads forever.

What kills it is that ads are about a third of the job. The other two thirds are calling back within minutes, chasing the ones who do not pick up, and reminding people so they show. That work never stops and it is not interesting. In July, with three crews out and a permit problem, it does not get done. That is not a discipline failure, it is a capacity one. The reason contractor leads do not answer is almost always timing, not list quality.

Done-For-You Appointment Systems

My category, so weigh this accordingly. The distinction that matters is not "we run ads better". It is what the arrangement is measured on. When the number is appointments that got sat, then no-shows, slow callbacks and junk inquiries are the company's problem too, because they all show up in the same number.

A worked example from an account I run. Chris Walters and his dad Edward run E&C Custom Homes on the Alabama Gulf Coast, a word-of-mouth company that had never hired an agency. Over about 60 days on $5,109.15 of Meta ad spend: 106 homeowner inquiries, 42 completed appointments, 12 jobs won, $320,000 booked. That is about $48 per inquiry, about $122 per completed appointment, and about $426 in ad spend per signed deck job. He was running 13 to 14 appointments a week and got booked out 10 weeks, and we turned the ads off on purpose so he could hire three more guys. He also had 40 to 50 people he never got to call back, which is the good version of the problem and still a real one.

One account, one stretch, not a rate card. The full breakdown is in the $320,000 in 60 days case study, and the done-for-you version we run for deck companies lays out what actually gets built.

Why Cost Per Lead Is the Wrong Number

Every category above can be made to look good on cost per lead. None of them can hide on cost per sat appointment, which is why I would compare on that and nothing else.

The bridge between the two is contact rate, and it is brutal. Chip Paynter, a 33-year veteran general contractor out of Loomis, California, was reaching about 2 of every 10 leads he was buying. On an exclusive funnel he was talking with at least 8 of 10. Same ad dollar, four times the conversations.

	Shared lead at 2-in-10 contact	Exclusive funnel at 8-in-10 contact
Spend	$1,000	$1,000
Cost per contact bought	$50	$50
Contacts	20	20
People you actually reach	About 4	About 16
Real cost per conversation	About $250	About $63

Illustration at a round $50, using Chip's own contact rates. For an actual booked number rather than a modeled one, E&C Custom Homes came in at about $122 per completed appointment. And the swing is not always small: Justin Wylie went from paying about $400 a lead at maybe 15 a month to under $30 at 30 a week within 14 days of launch, and quoted almost a million dollars of work in a single week off the back of it. That story is at $400 a lead to under $30 in 14 days. If you want the channel-by-channel version, cost per lead by trade has the published ranges next to real account numbers.

How to Tell Which Category You Are Talking To

Plenty of company websites are deliberately vague about this. Four questions settle it in about ninety seconds.

Whose ad account does this run in, and do I keep it? A marketplace cannot answer this, because there is no account for you. If they dodge, it is theirs.
Is this contact ever sold to anyone else? Anything softer than a flat no means shared. "Limited sharing" is sharing.
What number are you measured on? Leads delivered, hours worked, or appointments sat. These are three different businesses.
What happens if you miss it? If the answer is a conversation rather than something written down, there is no answer. I went through the kinds of promises companies make in who guarantees appointments for contractors.

Two more tells worth knowing. If a company will not name a single client you can call, that is not confidentiality, and if the case studies have no numbers attached to a real name, treat them as marketing. And if someone quotes you a cost per lead but gets uncomfortable when you ask what share of those turn into a sat appointment, you have learned which category they are in regardless of what the homepage says.

So Which One Should You Use

Honestly, it depends on your ticket and your capacity, and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

Small, urgent, repair-sized work: marketplaces are fine, and the speed advantage is real. Mid-size jobs with a decent in-house salesperson and someone who owns follow-up: a retainer agency on an account you own is a good fit. High-ticket custom work where the homeowner collects three bids, and nobody in your office has time to chase people: that is where the appointment-measured model earns its keep, because the follow-up is the product.

Whichever way you go, own the ad account, insist on exclusivity if your jobs are big, and measure the thing in cost per sat appointment. Do those three and you will outperform most contractors in your market no matter which category you picked.

Lead Generation Companies for Contractors: The Five Categories, Compared