Are pay-per-lead sites worth it?
You have probably tried one: a platform where customers post a job and tradies pay to respond. The lead costs somewhere between thirty and eighty dollars, the same lead is sold to several of you at once, and you are quoting blind against four competitors before you have earned a cent. Whether that maths works is worth doing honestly.
The pay-per-lead maths
Say a lead costs fifty dollars and five businesses buy it. On average you win one in five, so a won job carries the cost of five leads: two hundred and fifty dollars before materials or labour. On big jobs that overhead might be acceptable. On the everyday work that fills most calendars, it eats the margin. And the treadmill never stops: the day you stop paying, the enquiries stop, because you never owned the customer relationship, the platform did.
What you are actually renting
Pay-per-lead platforms rent you demand, one enquiry at a time, and keep the asset: the customer connection. Every review you earn builds their marketplace. Every repeat customer goes back through their app. You are the interchangeable supplier at the end of the pipe, competing on price against whoever else paid for the same phone number.
The alternative: own your page
The opposite model is building a presence you keep. A free Soho’s listing is your own page: your reviews accumulate on it, your customers book you directly through it, and nobody else is sold the enquiry. Soho’s does not charge per lead and never resells your enquiries. You keep the customer, which means the second job, the referral and the review all belong to you.
It also changes what you compete on. A customer reading your profile, your photos and your reviews has already half-chosen you before they enquire. That is a very different conversation from a five-way blind quote.
A sensible way to use both
If lead platforms are feeding you today, no need to quit cold. Let them fill gaps while you build the asset: complete your listing, funnel every happy customer into a review, put the listing link on everything. Owner-operators who do this usually find the paid leads mattering less each month, until one day the subscription quietly is not worth renewing.
Stop renting, start owning
Your reviews, your customers, your page. No per-lead fees, ever.
