Home Lead Supply vs Thumbtack: Who You Are Bidding Against

Thumbtack works differently from the other lead networks, and the difference is in your favour in one important way: you decide what a lead costs you. What you do not decide is how many other pros are talking to the same homeowner, and Thumbtack's own terms are clearer about that than most.

Who else is calling the same customer?

From Thumbtack's Quality Commitment Terms, under the heading Limited competition:

Both halves of that sentence matter, and contractors tend to read only the first. The number is five, and the limit runs for four hours from the customer's first contact. It is a limit on a window, not a limit on the project. A homeowner planning a roof replacement is very likely to still be looking the next day, and at that point Thumbtack's terms place no cap at all.

Compare that with a straightforwardly exclusive lead, where the number is one and there is no clock. Neither model promises the homeowner is speaking only to you, because homeowners shop and always will. The difference is whether the supplier has organised other companies to call them.

How does Thumbtack lead pricing actually work?

Thumbtack lead prices work in a way worth understanding even if you never use Thumbtack, because it is the most honest pricing mechanism in this market. From Thumbtack's help centre on setting lead prices:

And on what the price buys: "Your lead prices tell us which jobs are your top priority. Setting a higher price for a specific service makes you more competitive for those leads."

A separate weekly budget caps the total. Thumbtack's own worked example: a $10 lead price against a $90 weekly budget means nine leads, then you stop until the next week.

So Thumbtack hands you the pricing lever, and then tells you plainly what you are doing with it. Paying more makes you more competitive against the other pros bidding for the same work. That is an auction, described as one. It is a reasonable model, and contractors who are good at managing it do well. What it is not is a way to avoid competing on price, because the lever is the price.

Worth noting in fairness, because most of this market publishes nothing comparable: Thumbtack's Quality Commitment includes a term it calls Fair Shot, which it says applies automatically when a customer does not reply to any pro they contacted in the first 72 hours. A commitment covering silence, not just bad data, is more than Angi or Networx publish. It does not cover a customer who replies to you and then hires somebody else, which is the more common outcome.

Thumbtack and Home Lead Supply side by side

The honest summary of that table is that these are two different products for two different companies. Thumbtack is a bidding system with a very large category list and real spend control. What we sell is a specific homeowner, once, to one contractor.

When Thumbtack is the better choice

• You want to control price per lead directly and you are comfortable treating it as a bid.
• You answer fast. The four hour window is the whole game, and a pro who replies in minutes beats one who replies in an hour.
• You work in a category we do not cover. Thumbtack's category list is far wider than ours.
• You want a hard weekly ceiling on spending that you can change yourself without talking to anybody.

When exclusivity is worth more than price control

• Your sales team is small and the constraint is hours, not leads. Four conversations where you are one of five callers can cost more staff time than one where you are not.
• You sell on the consultation. If your advantage is how you survey, measure and explain the job, you need the homeowner's attention before price becomes the comparison.
• Your average job is large. On a whole-home window replacement or a roof replacement, one extra sold job is worth more than a long run of cheaper leads.
• You want to define the lead. A minimum project size, replacement rather than repair, a tight service area. Being able to set those is worth more than a lower price per lead, because it removes the drives you were never going to sell.

How Home Lead Supply works

We run our own homeowner advertising, so we know how every lead was generated. Each qualified lead goes to one contractor and is not resold. There is no auction and no bidding: a price per lead is agreed for your order, and it does not move during the order.

Our base standard applies to every lead: the person is the homeowner or an authorized decision-maker, a name and phone number are provided in a valid format with consent to be contacted, and the lead is not a duplicate within 60 days. Everything beyond that is yours to set. If a lead misses the criteria in your order, it does not count toward your order, and another qualified lead takes its place.

What Home Lead Supply does not do

• We do not confirm a phone number is live or that anyone is who they say they are. We check the format of the contact details and that consent was given, and we will not describe that as more than it is.
• We do not book appointments, and we do not call the homeowner for you.
• We do not publish a price list, and we do not let you set the price yourself. Our pricing page explains how a price is reached.
• We do not promise a reply time, a close rate or revenue. We publish no conversion figures of our own.
• We do not offer a weekly budget dial. An order is a set number of leads, agreed in advance.
• We do not cover most of Thumbtack's categories.

What to do next

If you are already on Thumbtack, the single most useful thing you can do before switching anything is to separate your sources in your CRM and look at cost per sold job rather than price per lead. A $20 lead you win one time in thirty is more expensive than a $150 lead you win one time in five. The arithmetic, with your own numbers in it, is in exclusive leads versus shared leads and how much contractors should pay for qualified leads.

If you want to see what a lead nobody else has looks like in your service area, tell us your trade, your service area and the jobs you want in the contractor application, or read how it works.