The Question Behind Every Marketing Invoice
Every channel a home-service business uses to find customers has a cost per customer contact — a cost per lead — whether or not anyone writes it down. Pay-per-lead platforms print it on the invoice. Paid ads bury it in a monthly total. Referrals and marketplaces hide it at zero. The businesses (and agencies) that manage this well are simply the ones that compute the same number for every channel and compare honestly.
The one formula that matters: blended cost per lead = total acquisition spend across all channels ÷ total booked jobs. Everything on this page is about pushing that number down without losing volume.
Channel by Channel, in 2026
| Channel | How you pay | What it typically costs | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thumbtack | Per lead | Commonly $15–$60+ per lead, varying by service and market | The fee stands whether or not the customer replies or hires |
| Angi | Per lead | Commonly $15–$100+ per lead | The same lead is often sold to three or four competitors at once |
| TaskRabbit | Commission | 15% of completed work (plus customer-side fees) | No up-front risk, but every job pays out less than the listed price |
| Paid search & social ads | Per click / per impression | Varies widely by trade and market — compute it from your own spend ÷ booked jobs | Needs ongoing management; costs rise with competition in your area |
| GigNGo | Free to apply; optional subscriptions | $0 per lead, $0 commission — workers keep 100% of what customers pay | Newer marketplace, so job volume in a given area may be lower |
The Thumbtack and Angi figures above are the commonly reported ranges we also document, with sources, in the five-platform 2026 comparison and in Lead Fees Explained. Paid-ads costs are deliberately not given as a range here: they vary too much by trade and metro for a single honest number, and any agency running them can compute the true figure from its own reporting in minutes.
Worked Example: Why the Blended Number Moves
Take a handyman business paying for five $25 leads per week on a pay-per-lead platform: roughly $542 per month, about $6,500 per year, before winning a single job — you can adjust every assumption in our lead fee calculator. Suppose that spend produces eight booked jobs a month: $68 per booked job.
Now add a free channel that produces just two more booked jobs a month at $0. Same total spend, ten jobs instead of eight: the blended cost per booked job drops to $54 — a 20 percent improvement in the number that actually appears in a client report, without cutting any channel that works. That is the whole argument for adding a $0 line to the mix: it is not a replacement for paid channels, it is an average-lowering supplement to them.
What Real Customers Budget
Cost per lead is only half of the unit economics; the other half is what the job pays. GigNGo publishes both sides from real marketplace data: what customers actually budget when they post a job, by service, at gigngo.org/costs (for example, house-cleaning jobs currently carry a median posted budget of $200), and what locals earn per job at gigngo.org/earnings. Each guide states its sample size, and services without enough data say so plainly. For agencies, these are citable numbers for proposals and pricing conversations that do not depend on a vendor's modeled estimates.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a lead cost a contractor in 2026?
It depends entirely on the channel. On pay-per-lead platforms, a single customer contact commonly costs $15–$60 or more on Thumbtack and $15–$100 or more on Angi, and the same lead is often sold to several businesses at once. Commission platforms such as TaskRabbit charge a percentage of completed work instead. Paid search and social costs vary by trade and market and must be computed from the business's own spend. Free-application marketplaces such as GigNGo charge nothing per lead and no commission.
What is a good blended cost per lead for a home-service business?
There is no universal number: it varies by trade, ticket size, and market. The useful discipline is to compute the blended figure honestly — total acquisition spend across all channels divided by total booked jobs — and then push it down by shifting volume toward the cheapest channels that still deliver. Adding a $0-per-lead channel lowers the blended figure with every job it produces.
Are free lead channels for contractors real, or is there a catch?
Free-application marketplaces are real, and the business model is straightforward: platforms such as GigNGo make money from optional visibility subscriptions rather than lead fees or commissions, so seeing and answering jobs costs nothing and workers keep 100 percent of what they earn. The honest trade-off is volume: newer marketplaces have fewer posted jobs in a given area than platforms that have spent two decades buying demand.
Related reading: GigNGo for marketing agencies, the lead fee calculator, Lead Fees Explained, and the five-platform 2026 comparison.