Manual 4 · The Lead Machines · 4.2
Angi and HomeAdvisor don't sell you a customer. They sell you a footrace.
The verdict first, then the receipts. You didn't buy a lead. You bought a contact the platform sold to other pros at the same second. That's not the platform being evil — that's the product. And it only pencils if you close enough of them to cover the fees on the ones you don't.
Some shops do close work off it. We'll show you what two of them said. But the number that settles it for your shop is one you can run at the kitchen table tonight, and the paper behind it is public. This is that number and that paper.
One thing up front: this page is about the paid lead machine. What a website and a Google listing cost, and how the whole lead-selling pond is shrinking, live on what web work actually costs. Here we stay on the one question — what a shared lead really costs you once other trucks are racing for it.
What a "shared lead" actually is
A shared lead means this: one homeowner fills out one form. The platform then sells that one form to several pros at once. You are not buying a customer. You are buying a footrace. Angi has said it is moving homeowners toward picking one pro themselves, but do not assume the request you are paying for is exclusive to you — ask the rep, in writing, whether this lead went to anyone else.
Picture it. One homeowner clicks "get quotes" one time. Somewhere, several trucks lunge for the phone like it's the last biscuit on the table. Same lead, same second, a bill on each one.
Here is one we can't nail to a filing. Owners in the trade forums say the platform has taken a call they earned themselves, wrapped it in a tracking number, and sold it back to them and the shop across town. One plumber put it this way — the platform was "sending my organic lead back to HA for them to turn it around and sell it back to ME and my COMPETITORS." That is owner testimony, not a court finding. Go check it on your own line: note the number a customer says they called, set it against the number on your listing and your truck, and screenshot both if they don't match.
The footrace is the mechanic. Hold onto that one, because it explains every number that follows.
The number the rep doesn't lead with
Angi is a public company, which means it has to file its real numbers with the SEC — the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that public companies report their money to. So we don't have to guess how the lead machine makes money. It's written down.
In its annual report for 2025, Angi's U.S. lead revenue — the fees pros pay for customer matches — was $587.1 million. That's 57 percent of everything the company brought in. The filing describes it in its own words: "a significant volume of low-dollar transactions."
Read that last line slowly. Small charges, in huge numbers. That is the whole model in six words. Each charge feels little on your card. It stacks to more than half a billion dollars a year.
The menu is right there in the filing too: full-price leads inside a monthly budget, discounted leads in a subscription, one-off leads a-la-carte, and pre-priced jobs — with extra fees layered on top of the membership. Every rung is a way to bill you per contact, not per closed job.
The tell in their own filing
Here's the part the sales call skips. Angi is tearing out the shared-lead machine itself.
In January 2025 the company rolled out what it calls "homeowner choice" — the customer now picks which pros can contact them, instead of the form getting blasted to a pack. In the first year under it, the old shared-lead business (Angi calls it the "Network") saw revenue fall 72 percent. Total U.S. revenue dropped 14 percent. The count of shared requests fell 58 percent, from about 3.87 million to about 1.64 million.
So set the two stories side by side.
| What the sales rep says | What the company's own filing says |
|---|---|
| A lead is a customer. Buy leads, get jobs. | A lead is a "low-dollar transaction," and one homeowner funds several of them. |
| Our shared-lead network fills your pipeline. | Network revenue fell 72 percent as a result of moving customers to pick one pro. |
When a company spends a year gutting the exact product a stranger is cold-calling to sell you, that's not an opinion about the shared-lead model. That's the seller's own paperwork.
(Quick note, since it comes up: Angi and HomeAdvisor are the same house — HomeAdvisor is Angi's brand. And Angi became its own company when IAC spun it off on March 31, 2025. If anyone tells you that happened back in 2024, they're working from old notes.)
The math that actually decides it
Forget the price per lead for a second. The number that matters is the loaded cost of a closed job — the fee, divided by how often these contacts turn into paid work, measured against what the job grosses. One countertop owner ran it out loud — owner testimony, not a filing:
"How are you sending a $30.00-an-hour guy in a truck burning $4.00-a-gallon fuel… for the opportunity to gross $536.00? Do the guys who sign up for Angi not do math?"
Run his math the way he means it. Here's the method — you'll plug your own numbers in a minute.
| Step | The math |
|---|---|
| Start with the fee | You pay per contact — say the fee is what it is on your last bill. That charge fires whether the job closes or not. |
| Divide by your close rate | These contacts are shared, so you close a slice of them. Say, for the math only, one in four — swap in your own honest number. Now the real cost is four fees for one job. |
| Weigh it against the gross | Set that cost against what the job actually grosses — like the countertop owner's $536 — then take out your labor, your fuel, your parts. |
| Read the answer | If what's left doesn't cover the truck-hours it took to chase four contacts, the machine isn't selling you jobs. It's selling you the chance to lose money efficiently. |
That's the whole reason to know your close rate before you ever hand over a card: the per-contact price is small, so the real cost sits one step down, in how many contacts you burn per closed job.
The part that's in writing at the FTC
You don't have to take the forums' word for the lead quality. The federal government put it on the record.
In 2023 the Federal Trade Commission — the agency that polices deceptive business practices — ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million for deceptive and misleading tactics in selling home-improvement leads to service providers, including small businesses.
The FTC record spells out what "junk lead" actually meant. HomeAdvisor sold pros leads that were bought from outside affiliates — not people who came to HomeAdvisor at all. It sold leads for the wrong type of work, or in entirely the wrong location. And it sold leads from people who had already said they weren't ready to hire. During the case period, providers were paying a $287.99 annual membership on top of a separate fee for every one of those leads.
That $287.99 is the historical membership from the case, not a quote for what you'd pay today. The point isn't the exact figure. The point is that when a burned owner in a forum said the leads were garbage, a federal order later said the same thing, in writing.
How the bill and the exit are built
One owner walked us through it: he gave his card, and only then did the rep read off the terms — including a fee to cancel early.
The exit is where the money gets real:
- One owner paid $980 up front, got seven junk leads, cancelled in three days — and the moment he hung up, his card was charged $3,773, a cut of the rest of the contract.
- Another new owner was billed around $600 for a lead he never took, then sent to collections.
- A third did everything the platform asked — called every lead back fast — and still landed zero, and was refused the refund.
Notice what that last one proves. He did everything right. Fast is good; we'll cover missed-call text-back and speed in the phone chapter. But speed can't rescue a lead from someone who was never going to hire. That's the ceiling, and no amount of hustle raises it.
That's the shape to name out loud: sign-up easy, leave hard — the door swings open and locks a fee onto the way out.
The other side
One owner put both feelings in one line: "I hate giving HA my money but it does work." Another worked a stretch of it straight and landed at plain break-even — covered his cost, but not worth the effort once his own hours were priced in. His full tally, laid next to a real fee-versus-ads split test, lives in fee versus ads.
So who does it pencil for? We have no number for how often it pencils for anyone — which is why this page hands you the math instead. The fork turns on shop size, season, and trade. We map it in when ads make sense, so you can tell which side of the line you're on.
What the math can't tell you
We can't promise you'll close a lead — the customer picks, and on a shared lead they're picking among a pack. What the math can do is show you the real cost per closed job before you spend. That's the whole product here: the number, not a promise.
Run it on your own number
Do this once, tonight, with your own last Angi or HomeAdvisor charge in front of you. It ends in a yes-or-no you can say out loud.
01Pull one real charge
Find one lead charge on your statement or in the app. No paper? The line on your card is the invoice. Checkable result: the number is in front of you, written down.
02Turn the fee into a cost per closed job
Say this
The fee was $ per lead. Out of these shared contacts, I honestly close about 1 in ___. So one real job costs me fee × that number in lead fees.
Checkable result: a real cost-per-closed-job dollar figure, written on the page — not the sticker price per lead.
Don't know your close rate? You'd have to have counted, and counting was never the job. So run it twice: once at 1 in 3, once at 1 in 6. If it pencils at 1 in 3 and drowns at 1 in 6, you know what to go count. Start the tally tonight: one mark per lead, one circle per job that closed.
03Weigh it against the job
Set that cost next to what one such job grosses, then take out labor, fuel, and parts. Checkable result: you can say "pencils" or "doesn't pencil," out loud, and point to why.
If you want the one line to make a vendor show you the number they're fogging, say this and judge what comes back:
"Before we talk price — how many pros does one of these leads go to, and what's my fee per lead when the job doesn't close?"
A rep who pivots to "value" and "getting you in front of homeowners" just told you the answer. But a plain, confident answer proves he can answer, not that the number is real. So don't stop at asking — say "put both of those in the email."
Print this: the shared-lead math on one page
The machine sells you a contact and calls it a customer. The only number that ends the argument is what a closed job actually costs you — run it the same way you price any job, on paper, before a card moves. To judge Angi against every other paid source on the same math, start at the one math that judges every machine and the lead-machines hub.