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By Darren DeYoung
You open the Angi bill, then the Thumbtack bill, and you can't remember which of those calls turned into a job. Half the people you called back said they'd "already hired somebody."
Stop scoring lead services by cost per lead.
Score them by cost per booked job: last month's spend divided by the jobs that actually landed on your schedule.
Run that number for Angi, Thumbtack and Google side by side.
Then remember one difference: rented leads stop the day you stop paying, and your own Google presence keeps working.
Because you paid for that call before you ever picked up the phone.
On a shared-lead service, the same customer may hear from several companies, and the fastest one usually wins. So the bill counts every lead, while your schedule only counts the jobs you won. That gap is the real cost.
Owners on lead services know this one well. You call back in an hour, and the customer already booked the company that called them back in five minutes.
Speed matters here. These ways to tighten your response time help on any platform. Still, some of those leads were gone before your phone buzzed.
If you want the platform-by-platform breakdown, we already compared them in Angi Homeservices v. Thumbtack. This post is about something else: whether either one beats owning your spot on Google.
Thumbtack doesn't charge a subscription. It charges you when a customer contacts you or books with you, up to a budget you set.
It isn't a flat "cheap leads" deal: some charges can fall outside that budget, and if the customer hires another pro, Thumbtack says it doesn't refund it.
Here's what Thumbtack's own public pages said when we checked on October 23, 2026:
We didn't find one public price per lead on those pages. What you pay depends on your trade, your area and your settings, so your own bill is the only reliable number.
Take last month's spend for each channel and divide it by the booked jobs that came from it.
A booked job means it's on the schedule, not "they said they'd think about it." Do the same math for Google. The lowest number wins, whatever the cost per lead looks like.
Fill this in with last month's numbers:
| Channel | Spend | Booked jobs | Per job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angi | $ | $ | |
| Thumbtack | $ | $ | |
| $ | $ |
Where to find the numbers:
If you can't fill in the booked jobs column, that's the first thing to fix. You can't compare channels you can't count.
There are three: your Google Business Profile (the map listing, free), Local Services Ads (pay per lead, if your trade qualifies), and regular Google Ads (pay per click).
Each one costs differently, so score each one by booked jobs, just like Angi.
This is the free listing with your reviews, hours and photos. Google says local results are "mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity."
You don't pay per lead here. You pay in effort: a complete profile, steady reviews, and fresh photos. Our Google Business Profile guide walks through the setup. To see it the way a customer does, run through What Customers See When They Look You Up.
Local Services Ads sit at the top of the page with a Google Verified badge. Google says you "only pay when a customer gets in touch from your ad." Its US list includes garage door services, landscaping, painters and tree services.
Rental companies may not qualify, so check the list first. More in Are Google Local Services Ads Worth It? and how to improve your Local Services Ads ranking.
You pay per click, and you choose the towns, the job types and the hours. It's flexible, and it's the easiest one to get wrong. If you're weighing ads against organic, our SEO vs PPC post covers it.
Yes. If the ad sends people to a slow or confusing page, or nobody tracks which calls booked, Google Ads can burn money as fast as any lead service.
The fix isn't more budget. It's a page that answers the call and tracking that ties every click to a job.
The usual problems are targeting, one page for every service, and no idea which calls came from ads. Our Google Ads Not Working page covers the fixes, starting with tracking.
Rented leads stop the day you stop paying.
Your Business Profile, reviews and website pages keep working after an ad campaign is paused. That's the difference that doesn't show up in one month's math: owned presence builds, and rented leads reset to zero.
Precision Landscape & Tree is our clearest example. Hoist built its website and ran its marketing. The company tracked a 550%+ increase in leads.
The business grew with it, from about 10 staff to over 50. That growth sits on pages and reviews the company owns.
It looks like a full calendar, not a pile of leads.
A Garage Door And Gate Store in San Diego County was booked out six months after Hoist started its Google Ads. Then they asked us to pause the ads so the crew could catch up.
Before that, A Garage Door And Gate Store relied on mailers and saw "diminishing returns." Pausing ads you own is easy. You can turn them back on when the schedule opens up.
If you're comparing firms to run this for you, put their fee into the same table: fee plus ad spend, divided by booked jobs. Ask them how they'll count booked jobs before you sign.
Grab last month's Angi and Thumbtack bills and count the booked jobs from each. Divide spend by jobs. That's the only math that matters. Then look at what you're getting from Google today.
Want help running the Google side of that table? Talk to Hoist, and bring your numbers.