The Checkatrade alternative: stop renting leads. Own them.

What you actually win

Leads are shared with three or four other trades. You pay whether you win or not. Reported conversion on shared platforms is 1 in 5 to 1 in 10, which puts the cost per won job at £95 to £375.

In tradesmen's own words

Three comments left publicly by tradespeople on Trustpilot:

• "I spent around £4,000 on 106 job leads. I only won 10 to 15% of the leads I paid for."
• "Leads that you do manage to get hold of have already been bombarded by multiple engineers."
• "It's basically a money-making exercise for them to eventually charge more."

The bit nobody mentions

Cancel, and everything disappears. Your reviews, your profile, your visibility. Years of paying, nothing to show.

The alternative

Take the same £300 a month and put it into things you own.

• A website with a page for every service and every town, built to rank for the searches Checkatrade is currently intercepting.
• A Google Business Profile that ranks in the Maps pack, where the urgent calls come from.
• Reviews on Google, which stay on Google, under your name.
• Missed-call text-back, so the calls you do get don't leak.
• A monthly report so you can see every enquiry and where it came from.

Twelve months on, one of these has an asset and the other has a receipt.

Not that it has to be either or. Plenty of trades keep Checkatrade running while the site ramps up, then drop it when the report shows the site's winning more. That's fine. The point is that the money you're spending should be building something.