Why is cost per lead the wrong number?

Because you do not sell leads. You sell jobs.

A $25 lead sounds cheap next to a $53 one. But if the $25 lead goes to four other contractors and you win one in five, you have paid $125 for a customer. If the $53 lead is exclusive and you close two in five, you paid $132.50. Those are almost the same number, and the platform selling the cheap one will never put it that way.

The formula is short enough to do in your head at a red light: cost per booked job = cost per lead ÷ close rate. That is it. Total spend divided by jobs booked gives the identical answer, because the lead count cancels out of both sides. Which leads to the thing most people get wrong about the channel: buying more leads does not make customers cheaper. It buys more of them at exactly the same price.

Once you have that number, hold it up against three things. Revenue, to see what share of the invoice you handed over. Gross profit, to see whether anything survives. And your other channels, because cost per booked job is the only figure that compares fairly across Thumbtack, Angi, Google, a referral, a van wrap and your own website.

What do the lead platforms actually charge in 2026?

Reported ranges as of August 2026. None of these platforms publish a rate card for the trades, which is itself worth noticing.

Sources, compiled August 2026: LeadTruffle Angi pricing report 2026 · Pipeline On and Auto-Respond Thumbtack analyses 2026 · SearchLight Digital Local Services Ads benchmark of 888 contractors, February 2026 · Contractor Bear Yelp analysis · Jobber and ServiceTitan published pricing. These are reported ranges, not official rate cards, and your market will differ. Prices in this category move — check before you commit.

Two honest notes on that table. Google LSA usually produces the best cost per booked job of the paid options in the trades, because exclusivity does more for your close rate than a cheap lead does for your spend. And none of these are scams. They are a rental market for attention, priced at what the market bears, and for a new shop with no reviews and no ranking they are often the only thing that puts work on the calendar next week. The mistake is not using them. The mistake is not knowing the number.

Why does the first responder win, and what does that mean for shared leads?

Every shared-lead platform sells the same customer to three to eight contractors at once, and then does not tell you who else got it. Whoever calls back first almost always books the job. A contractor on r/smallbusiness put it in one line: "People aren't shopping for the best guy, they're shopping for the first response."

Which quietly changes who those platforms are good for. If you are on a roof, under a sink, or driving with your phone in the cup holder, you are not answering inside two minutes. A shop with somebody at a desk is. You are both paying the same price per lead and getting very different close rates, and the close rate is the whole denominator of your cost per booked job. A 25% closer pays $180 a customer on $45 leads. A 10% closer pays $450 for the same lead. Same platform, same invoice line, two and a half times the cost.

The same thread put a number on the other half of the problem: "the average missed emergency trade call in our market is easily worth $200 to $500 in immediate ticket value. One of my HVAC buddies tracked his for a month and realized he lost over $8,000 in potential jobs just from rings that went to voicemail while his crews were busy. Almost nobody leaves a voicemail anymore; they just hang up and call the next contractor on Google."

Read those two together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but useful. On a shared-lead platform you are not buying a job. You are buying the right to enter a race, and you are paying whether or not you enter it. Every lead you take four hours to return is a lead you paid for and gave away.

Three things move the needle without spending another dollar. Answer inside five minutes during work hours, even if the answer is "I'm on a roof, can I call you back at four" — that alone books work, because you are the one who called. Have somebody or something answer when you cannot. And dispute the junk: Google LSA lets you flag leads that were wrong-number, out-of-area or spam, and a lot of contractors never bother, which quietly inflates their real cost per lead.

There is a related trap on the sending side. A Jobber user reported that "Over 60% of my estimates aren't even viewed by clients. The emails are sent from a generic Jobber domain (jobbermail.com), which most clients ignore." Winning the race to answer and then losing the quote in a spam folder is the same money, wasted twice. Sending the PDF yourself, from your own address, is free and it gets opened.

What is a good cost per booked job?

There is no universal number, because it depends entirely on your ticket and your margin. But there are two tests, and the second one is the one that matters.

The revenue test, as a rough screen. Under 15% of the invoice is healthy. 15% to 30% is workable but worth watching. Over 30% is usually unsustainable in the trades once labor and materials come out of the same invoice.

The gross profit test, which is the real one. Take what is left of the job after materials, subcontractors and the labor to actually do it. That is the money the job produces. If your lead cost is eating more than about a third of it, the channel is renting you customers at a price you cannot afford, and if it is over 100% you are paying to work.

Worked longhand on the defaults in the calculator above. A $450 job at a 45% gross margin produces $202.50. A $45 lead at a 20% close rate costs $225 per booked job. That is 50% of revenue, which the revenue test would call bad but survivable. Against gross profit it is 111%, so every job you book on that channel makes you $22.50 poorer, and the busier you get the faster you go backwards. Same channel, same invoice, and only one of the two tests tells you to stop.

This is why big-ticket trades tolerate lead costs that would destroy a small-ticket one. A $220 lead cost on an $8,000 roof at a 35% margin is 8% of the gross profit and an obviously good trade. The identical $220 on a $450 drain clear is a catastrophe. When somebody tells you what they pay per lead, the number is meaningless until you know their ticket.

Where is this calculator enough, and where is it not?

It is enough to answer the question that actually gets asked: is this channel worth keeping, and which of my channels is cheapest per customer. That is arithmetic, you already have the inputs on your invoices, and the answer is usually stark enough that you do not need three decimal places.

It is enough to walk into a renewal conversation with a number instead of a feeling, and it is enough to stop the most common mistake in the category, which is judging a channel on the price of a lead.

It is not enough for four things.

• Attribution. If a customer sees your van, googles you, clicks an ad and then calls, this page cannot tell you which one to credit. Nothing free can. Ask every caller how they found you and write it down — that beats most software.
• Lifetime value. A $225 customer cost is dreadful on one drain clear and fine if that customer calls you three times a year for a decade. Maintenance trades should be running this against lifetime value, not one job.
• Tracking the leads themselves. This is a calculator, not a pipeline. Use the free CRM to log who called, what you quoted, and who needs chasing.
• Seasonality. One month is not a close rate. Run three months, ideally covering a busy stretch and a quiet one, before you fire a channel on the strength of this.

How do you use it?

1. Pull last month's invoice from the platform. Divide the total by the number of leads it charged you for. That is your cost per lead, and it is usually higher than the number in your head because of membership fees and the leads you forgot you were billed for.
2. Count charged leads, not conversations. If they billed you, it counts, including the wrong numbers you did not dispute.
3. Be honest about the close rate. Jobs booked divided by leads charged, across at least three months. If you have never measured it, guess low. Everybody's guess is high.
4. Put in your average ticket and gross margin for this channel specifically. Platform work often carries a smaller ticket than a referral, which is exactly the sort of thing an average hides.
5. Read the gross profit line, not the revenue line. That is where the decision lives.
6. Fill in Step 2 with the rest of your channels and let the cheapest cost per booked job win. Then look at Step 3 and decide whether a year of it is what you would have chosen to spend the money on.

How much does close rate change the answer?

Here is the same $45 lead at four different close rates, on a $450 ticket at a 45% gross margin, so you can see how fast the answer moves on the one input everybody guesses at.

Between 20% and 25% the channel flips from losing money to making money, on a five-point change in a number most contractors have never measured. Nothing else on this page pays back like it. Five points of close rate is worth more than any discount you will ever talk a platform into on lead price.

And the same table explains why the ticket matters as much as the rate. Hold the 20% close rate and change nothing else except the job size: on a $450 job the $225 cost is 50% of revenue, on a $1,500 job it is 15%, and on a $6,000 job it is 3.75%. Contractors who say a platform "works great" and contractors who say it "destroyed my business" are frequently paying the identical price per lead.

What a year of it adds up to

Twenty leads a month at $45 is $900 a month and $10,800 a year. At $202.50 of gross profit per job you need to book about 54 jobs a year purely to get back to zero on the channel — a job a week, all year, before the business earns anything from it. That is roughly eighteen years of Jobber Core at $49 a month, or eleven years of Housecall Pro Basic at $79 a month, at their August 2026 list prices. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on what the channel brings back, which is what the calculator at the top of this page is for.

Software prices are list prices as of August 2026 taken from vendor pricing pages: Jobber Core $49/mo monthly (raised from $39 in July 2026), Housecall Pro Basic $79/mo monthly, QuickBooks Online Simple Start $38/mo after the 1 August 2026 increase, QuickBooks Time Premium $20/mo base plus $10 per user after the 1 July 2026 increase, MileIQ $13.99/mo after two increases in twelve months, Levelset $59 per recipient for a demand letter or notice. Estimates for planning, not tax or legal advice.

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