Skip to content
Up To Code

Manual 5 · Vendor Defense

The whole con, mapped

Passed final You — from the truck This takesOne coffee

The sales calls, the free website audit, the lead invoice, and the monthly report nobody reads are not separate problems. They are one business model with seven moves. This page maps all seven and hands each one to the page that takes it apart.

This is a reading page. There is nothing to log into and nothing to buy. Read it once. The map sticks, because you have already lived most of it.

You already know this con

One roofing owner was asked what hurts most about running his company. He did not say codes or crews. He said the calls: the daily stream of people selling him office software, sales leads, and help ranking on Google. Another roofer sat down and counted a week's haul — the tally, and the routine that shrinks it, is on Making the calls stop.

You have met this con before, in your own trade. Picture the outfit every real plumber hates: a cheap dispatch fee to get in the door, problems "found" on a camera scope nobody else can verify, then a red tag on the equipment so the customer is afraid to say no.

The marketing version has the same organs. The cheap dispatch fee is the low signup charge. The fake scope finding is the unsolicited "your website has serious issues" report. The red tag is your own website held on their platform.

One place the comparison breaks: the scam plumber has to drive to your town. This machine works by phone from anywhere, and it runs the same play on every trade that files a license. That scale is why the calls keep coming.

One more thing before the map. After enough of these calls, it is easy to decide that everyone who builds websites runs these moves. We are not going to argue with that, and you should not take anyone's word for it either way. Learn the machine's parts instead. Once you can see the moves, you can check any vendor against them yourself, including us.

The seven moves, in the order they hit you

The con is a sequence, not a grab bag. It starts before you have ever heard of the company.

  1. Move 1: They harvest your number. The day your LLC or license filing goes public, your number lands on sales lists and the calls start. Where the lists come from, and the routine that cuts them down, is one page over.

    Why your phone started ringing Making the calls stop

  2. Move 2: The pitch and the paper don't match. Check the term the rep said against the term printed in the contract, before the card goes in.

    Reading a proposal

  3. Move 3: The leads are recycled. Some platforms sell one homeowner's form to more than one shop. Nobody publishes how many trucks bought the lead you just paid for, so do not argue the count — argue the terms. Angi's lead-credit guidelines, as published in July 2026, list "Consumer is not calling you back" as not eligible for a credit. The FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million over deceptive lead-selling practices. Log every paid lead for thirty days and price it per booked job.

    The scam playbook

  4. Move 4: The report replaces the work. You pay every month and receive a chart. Nothing in the chart proves the work happened.

    Reading the monthly report

  5. Move 5: Leaving costs money. Try to cancel and the contract fires an early-termination charge sized off whatever is left on the term. How big it is depends on the paper you signed. Pull your own agreement and read the termination clause before you give notice — that is Step 0 of leaving clean.

    Leaving clean Fighting the bill

  6. Move 6: Your own stuff is the hostage. The site sits on their platform, not yours. Some vendors hold the domain, the phone number, or the Google listing too.

    When your web guy vanishes

  7. Move 7: The fake peer. Not every "owner" recommending a vendor in a forum is an owner. The place you would go to check gets staged too.

    Spotting the planted peer

What makes all seven work

Two missing pieces of information power the whole machine.

First, you have no reference prices. Any number a rep quotes floats free until you have something to set it against. The map of what real owners actually pay, band by band, lives on its own page:

What things actually cost

Second, there is no filter at your front door. Every one of the seven moves needs a first conversation to get started. Five questions, asked before anything else, put the moves on the record. Here is the limit: a rep who is willing to sell you a recycled lead is willing to answer five questions wrong. The questions do not stop a liar. What they do is move the fight off the phone and onto paper, where you can hold someone to it. Ask the five, then say: put those answers in the proposal.

The five questions

If you're in the middle of it right now

Before you go: pick the move on the map that sounds most like a call you have taken, and say the number out loud. Some reps are obvious. Some are not, and you cannot tell which one is on the line while you are on it. So do not try to win it live. Keep the seven numbers where you take calls, name the move after you hang up, and run the five questions before anything gets signed.

One owner got within a step of signing with an outfit other tradesmen had already flagged, and said afterward that the people on the forum saved him. Pick the page that matches your week and keep going.

The chapters