Tristar vs lead-gen platforms.
If you have paid for leads that went nowhere, you were not imagining it and you were not bad at sales. In 2023 the Federal Trade Commission fined the largest home services lead platform $7.2 million for telling contractors those leads turned into jobs far more often than it could prove. Here is the whole record, with sources, and what we do instead.
The FTC took action, and the language is worth reading.
In January 2023 the FTC entered an order against HomeAdvisor, an Angi company. The finding was not about a technicality or a billing dispute. It was about what contractors were told they were buying.
HomeAdvisor “often tells service providers that its leads result in jobs at rates much higher than it can substantiate.”
Federal Trade Commission, order against HomeAdvisor, January 2023The alleged conduct ran “since at least mid-2014.” Membership was $287.99 a year on top of the per-lead fees. So contractors paid a subscription, then paid again for each lead, against job-rate claims the seller could not support.
The redress cap per service provider. Of the $7.2 million judgment, roughly $3 million was ever actually returned. Years of paying for leads that went nowhere, and the federal remedy was thirty dollars.
Source: FTC, FTC v. HomeAdvisor order and refund administration, 2023.It did not stop there. In October 2025 the Vermont Attorney General settled with Angi for $100,000, requiring the company to stop using the term “Angi Certified Pro.” Vermont has no contractor certification process, so Angi “cannot confer, or vouch for, credentials.”
Roughly 4,850 complaints in three years, and the themes repeat.
Better Business Bureau complaint volumes for the major lead platforms over a three year window:
| Platform | BBB complaints, 3 years |
|---|---|
| Angi | 1,910 |
| Yelp | 1,656 |
| Thumbtack | 929 |
| HomeAdvisor | 180 |
| Networx | 114 |
| Porch | 64 |
The same four things come up over and over: junk and shared leads, no refunds, auto-renewal traps, and aggressive sales calls. These are contractors in their own words, dated, from public BBB filings.
“Every lead is completely unresponsive. None of the leads received have ever called back.”
BBB complaint, 06/30/2026“Majority of leads are complete spam. People in other countries, other states, non-existent numbers.”
BBB complaint, 03/23/2026“Not only are the leads fraudulent. They are completely made up. Manufactured leads.”
BBB complaint, 02/23/2026“I’m spending way more on leads than I am making on the few jobs I do get.”
BBB complaint, contractor, undated excerptThere is also a practical problem with fighting back. In Turbin v. Thumbtack, filed in the Northern District of California in April 2025, the plaintiff alleged Thumbtack “does not subject any Leads to any meaningful check, filter or verification.” In October 2025 the court compelled individual arbitration under a class-action waiver. To be precise about what that means: this is not a won case and not a pending class action. It means the dispute was pushed out of court and into individual arbitration.
The contractors are leaving, and it is in the filings.
You do not have to take our word for the state of the model. Angi is publicly traded, so the numbers are audited and filed with the SEC.
| What Angi reports | Figure |
|---|---|
| US revenue per active pro, FY2025 | $618 / month |
| US revenue per active pro, Q1 2026 | $643 / month |
| Active pros, Q1 2026 | 105,000 |
| Change in active pros, year over year | down 22% |
| Advertising revenue, Q1 2026 | negative $46K |
Two things fall out of that table. First, the going rate for “marketing” in your head is probably around $600 a month, because that is what the platform has been charging. Second, more than a fifth of their contractors walked away in a single year. You are not the only one who noticed.
Buying leads got dramatically more expensive at the same time.
This is from a paid media vendor’s own campaign data, 3,211 US home services campaigns. Median cost per lead, and how much it moved in four years:
| Trade | Median cost per lead | 4-year change |
|---|---|---|
| Roofing | $228 | +125% |
| Plumbing | $129 | +164% |
| Heating | $129 | +107% |
| Air conditioning | $128 | +132% |
| Landscaping | $118 | +207% |
| Electrical | $94 |
Renting attention is getting more expensive every year. Owning it does not work that way, which is the entire argument for doing this differently.
A shared lead versus a customer who came looking for you.
Buying leads
- The same lead is sold to you and several competitors
- You are bidding against them before you have said a word
- The moment you stop paying, it all disappears
- You own nothing at the end of it
- The price per lead has risen every year
- Bad leads are your problem to dispute, one at a time
Being findable
- Somebody searches, finds you, and calls only you
- No bidding war, because there is no auction
- The work compounds instead of resetting monthly
- You own the site, the profile, the content and the logins
- Cost per job tends to fall as visibility builds
- If you leave us, all of it stays yours
That is the whole distinction. We do not sell you leads. We make your own phone ring, from your own website, under your own name, in the three places customers actually look: Google and the map pack, and the AI tools people now ask for a recommendation.
We measured 64 real local service businesses that already rank in their local map pack. Only 27 of them showed up in all three places. A quarter turned up in just one. The full study is here, with the method and the raw numbers.
When a lead platform is actually the right call.
We would rather tell you this up front than have you find out later.
If you need work this week, buying leads is faster than earning visibility. Search and map rankings take time to build. If your trucks are empty on Monday, a lead platform can put something on the schedule and we will not pretend otherwise.
If you are brand new with no reviews, no history and no site, platforms can bridge the first few months while the foundation gets built.
And if you are already at capacity, you may not need either one. Most of the home service owners we talk to are closer to full than they are to empty, and their real problem is what happens when the phone rings, not how many times it rings.
What we would not do is stay on a lead platform for years as the permanent plan. That is renting forever at a price that keeps climbing, on ground you never own.
One more fairness note, because the point here is accuracy and not smearing an industry: not every marketing company has a complaint record. Blue Corona, for example, has zero BBB complaints over the same three year window. The problem we are describing is the lead-resale model specifically, and it has a federal enforcement record attached to it.
The things contractors actually ask us.
Are you just going to sell my information to somebody else?
No. We do not buy, sell or resell leads at all. It is not part of the business. When somebody finds your business through the work we do, they contact you directly and no one else gets that contact.
How long before this actually works?
Map pack and profile improvements often move within a few weeks. Search rankings for competitive terms usually take a few months. Anyone who promises page one in thirty days is either guessing or lying, and a rankings guarantee is arithmetically impossible anyway because there are only a handful of slots in the map pack and nobody controls who fills them.
What we can commit to is the work, the reporting, and telling you honestly when something is not moving.
What happens to everything if I leave?
You keep all of it. The website, the code, the content, the logins, the ad accounts, the Google Business Profile. We do not hold accounts as leverage. We put it in writing because the opposite is common enough that contractors ask about it.
Am I locked into a contract?
No. Month to month, no annual commitment and no early termination fee. If the work stops being worth what you pay for it, you should be able to stop paying for it.
Can I keep using Angi or Thumbtack while you work?
Yes, and plenty of clients do at the start. They are not mutually exclusive. Most people wind the platform spend down on their own once their own phone is ringing, because at that point they are paying twice for the same job.
What does this cost?
Our prices are published on the site, all of them, including what you get at each level. You can see them here without talking to anybody.
See exactly where you stand.
Free 30-second check: see who gets the call instead of you, and a link to your result you can keep. No sales call.
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