How much does Rated People cost per month?

Trades report a subscription of around £35 + VAT a month, which comes with roughly £45 + VAT of lead credit built in. That is on top of whatever extra credit you buy once the included amount runs out, so the £35 is not the ceiling, it is the floor.

How does Rated People charge for leads?

Two ways at once, not one. You pay the monthly subscription whether you win work or not, and separately you spend lead credit on each job you take, reported at roughly £2 to £65 + VAT depending on job size, averaging around £15 + VAT. Rated People is the only one of the big four (alongside Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Bark) that charges both a subscription and a per-lead fee.

Is Rated People shared or exclusive?

Shared, with a stated cap of three tradespeople per lead. In practice it is often bought by only one or two, not always the full three, but you should assume you are quoting against at least one other trade who also paid.

Does Rated People vet tradespeople?

It runs fraud and identity screening on signup and then monitors accounts with a red-flag system. The one hard, checked requirement is Gas Safe registration, and only for gas-related leads. For every other trade there is no equivalent requirement to show insurance or qualifications before you can start buying leads, which is a lighter bar than Checkatrade sets.

Can you get a refund on Rated People?

Sometimes, but it is rationed. Rated People says it will refund credit for leads you genuinely cannot contact, but trades report the allowance runs out and that a customer simply ignoring your calls is not always covered. There is also a 12-month minimum contract with a 14-day cooling-off window, and spending any credit inside those 14 days forfeits your right to a refund on the first month.

Is Rated People a good site?

It depends which review platform you check, and that is itself worth knowing before you sign a 12-month contract. Trustpilot puts it at roughly 4 out of 5 from around 19,000 reviews; Reviews.io puts the same company at 2.3 out of 5 from 238 reviews. Neither cleanly separates tradesperson reviewers from homeowners, but the gap between the two platforms is the honest headline here, not either number on its own.

What is better, Checkatrade or Rated People?

Different cost shapes. Checkatrade charges a flat monthly membership with no per-lead fee and leans on brand recognition; Rated People charges a monthly subscription and then bills you again per lead on top. If you would rather one predictable bill than two stacked ones, that is the practical difference, before you even get to lead quality or vetting.

Is Rated People worth it for tradesmen?

Short answer: it can be, but check the sum before you sign a 12-month contract. Rated People is the only one of the big lead sites that charges you twice: a monthly subscription you pay whether you win work or not, and a per-lead credit fee on top of that. It tends to pay for steady, mid-value work where you win a fair share of what you buy. It is a harder case for small jobs, a quiet patch, or a trade just starting out.

Below is the honest version: what it really costs once you add the two charges together, what changed in who owns it, why the reviews look completely different depending which site you check, and the real sum for whether it pays.

The 30-second version

Rated People against the rest.

Where Rated People sits next to the other lead sites, and next to owning your leads outright.

Platform	How you pay	Lead shared with	Best for
Rated People	Monthly subscription + per-lead credit	Up to 3 trades	Steady, mid-value work
Checkatrade	Monthly membership, no per-lead fee	Several	Reactive trades who want the badge
MyBuilder	Free to join, pay per shortlist	~3 trades	Planned home-improvement work
Bark	Pay per lead, in advance	Several	Flexibility, wide range of trades
Your own website + ads	You pay for the site and the ads	Nobody, it is yours	Owning your leads outright

The defining mechanic

The only one that charges you twice.

Checkatrade charges a flat membership and stops there. MyBuilder and Bark charge per lead and stop there. Rated People does both: a monthly subscription you pay regardless, and a separate per-lead credit fee on every job you take. Neither comparison you have probably already read spells this out as plainly as it should.

Pay the subscription
~£35 + VAT a month, whether you win work or not

It includes some credit
~£45 + VAT of lead credit bundled in

Spend credit per lead
~£2 to £65 + VAT each, averaging ~£15

Run out, buy more
extra credit on top once the included amount is gone

Reported figures, not a published tariff

Rated People does not publish a fixed price list, so every figure here (and everywhere else you will read this) is a reported range from trades and reviewers, not an official rate card. There is also a separate "Unlimited" plan, a fixed monthly fee for unlimited leads capped to jobs under roughly £4,000, but the price itself is not published anywhere public, you would need to speak to Rated People directly to get a number.

The contract

The 12-month tie-in, and the 14-day trap.

You get a 14-day cooling-off window after signing up. But spend any of the lead credit inside those 14 days and you forfeit the right to a refund on that first month, so the cooling-off period is narrower in practice than it sounds. After that, you are in a 12-month minimum contract. Refunds for leads you genuinely could not contact are available, but trades report the allowance is rationed and that a customer simply not answering is not always covered once you have used your quota.

On lead sharing: Rated People caps a lead at three buyers, distributed first-come, first-served to available local trades. In practice, several sources report a lead is often bought by only one or two trades, not always the full three, so the real competition can be lighter than the headline cap suggests, but you should still assume at least one rival quoting the same job.

The number nobody works out

Your real cost per won job.

Because there are two charges stacked, the sum that matters is not the subscription and it is not the per-lead fee, it is what you actually spend against what you actually win in a month.

subscription + credit spent ÷ jobs won = your true cost per job

Say you are on the roughly £35-a-month plan with £45 of credit included. At an average £15 a lead, that covers three leads before you touch extra credit. Win one of those three, which is in the range you would expect when a lead is sold to more than one trade, and your true cost for that job is the £35 subscription you were paying anyway, because the credit spend sat inside what you had already paid for. Take a fourth lead that month and lose it, and that is an extra ~£15 on top of the £35, for nothing. The subscription is the part you cannot avoid; the credit spend is the part that punishes a losing month.

Busy, mid-value work

Enough leads a month to use the included credit and win a fair share. This is where the subscription pays for itself.

A quiet month

Few leads bought, the subscription still lands, and any extra credit spent on a loss is pure cost.

The rule

Total subscription plus credit spent, divide by jobs won. A big chunk of an average job going on that sum means the two charges are not paying for themselves.

Straight from the reviews

Two review sites, two different companies.

Check one review platform and you would sign up today. Check another and you would not touch it. Neither is wrong, they are just measuring different, smaller slices of opinion, and that gap is worth knowing before a 12-month contract, not after.

Platform	Rating	Review count
Trustpilot	~4.0 out of 5	~19,000
Reviews.io	2.3 out of 5	238

Neither platform cleanly separates tradesperson reviewers from homeowners, so treat both as a mixed signal, not a clean read on the trade experience specifically. What does show up repeatedly among trade-authored reviews and forum posts is billing and refund friction, not workmanship complaints. One Reviews.io reviewer described their monthly subscription being raised, in their words, "from £18 per month to £154 without me agreeing", an extreme single case, but consistent with a wider pattern of trades flagging unexpected subscription changes and rationed refunds.

You will also see "less used than it was" floating around comparison sites, ours included until this rewrite. We could not find any public usage or market-share data to back that up, only forum sentiment. The honest version is: there is no evidence of decline, just tradespeople who say they have moved on, which is a softer and more useful thing to know than a made-up statistic.

Vetting and trust

How well does it vet?

Rated People runs fraud and identity screening at signup, then keeps an eye on accounts with a red-flag system rather than a heavy upfront check. The one hard, verified requirement is Gas Safe registration, and that only applies before you can buy a gas-related lead.

For every other trade, there is no equivalent public requirement to prove insurance or qualifications before you start buying leads. That is a genuinely lighter bar than Checkatrade, which requires a vetting interview and proof of public liability insurance. Worth knowing both ways: it is quicker to get started here, and it means the badge on a profile is not proof of much beyond passing a fraud check.

Who you are actually signing up with

Who owns Rated People now.

Rated People Limited (company number 05540422) was venture-backed by Frog Capital from 2011. Companies House filings show that changed on 3 June 2024: Frog Capital stopped being registered as a person with significant control, and CEO Ottokar Rosenberger and Chairman Adrian Cox were each registered holding between 25 and 50 percent. There is no public press release explaining the deal in detail, so treat this as what the filings show, not a confirmed story. What it does tell you: the venture-capital chapter that funded its growth years has ended, and it is now run and largely owned by its own leadership. No evidence of financial distress in its filings, its accounts continue to be filed on the normal schedule.

The honest verdict by trade

Who it is for, and who should walk away.

Worth a go if

You do steady, mid-value jobs most months
You can win close to half the leads you buy
You would rather one bundled bill than juggling several sites
You are Gas Safe registered and want the gas-lead pool
You want the member discounts on top of the leads

Give it a miss if

You mostly do small or low-margin jobs
Your area is quiet, so the subscription still lands
You are new with no reviews and cannot absorb a losing month
You hate paying a bill regardless of whether you win any work
You would rather stop paying twice for a lead you never own

The bigger picture

Renting leads, or owning them.

Step back from the subscription and the credit fees and the shape is the same as every lead site: you pay for an introduction, share it with at least one rival, and the customer was never really yours. Win or lose, the subscription lands again next month. A lead from your own website and your own ads is owned outright, no rival quoting the same job, no bill just for existing.

We are straight about it: building that takes time, and a lead site can carry you while you get there. We laid out the full argument in the shared-lead trap, and the practical order for getting more work is in how to get more leads. If you are weighing the rivals too, see is Checkatrade worth it and is MyBuilder worth it, or put Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Bark side by side.

The 90-day test

How to tell if it is working.

Do not judge it on a good month or a bad one. Run it for ninety days and do the sum properly, then decide with numbers, not a gut feeling.

Log every charge. The subscription each month plus every credit spend, whether the lead turned into a job or not.
Work out cost per won job. Subscription plus credit spent, divided by jobs actually won. That is your real number.
Compare it to the job value. A small slice of an average job and the two-charge model is earning its keep. Eating into your margin means it is time to cut it loose.
Compare it to owning. Set that total against what a customer from your own website and ads would cost you once, and kept for good.

Why us

Why take our word for it?

Fair question, because we build websites and run ads for trades, so we have a horse in this race. Honestly? Because we will tell you to stay on Rated People when the sum works in your favour, and we make nothing from you doing that. We only do well when your phone rings with work that is yours, so we would rather give you the real sum than talk you off a subscription that is paying for itself.

Straight answers

Questions trades actually ask.

How much does Rated People cost per month?: Trades report a subscription of around £35 + VAT a month, which comes with roughly £45 + VAT of lead credit built in. That is on top of whatever extra credit you buy once the included amount runs out, so the £35 is not the ceiling, it is the floor.
How does Rated People charge for leads?: Two ways at once, not one. You pay the monthly subscription whether you win work or not, and separately you spend lead credit on each job you take, reported at roughly £2 to £65 + VAT depending on job size, averaging around £15 + VAT. Rated People is the only one of the big four (alongside Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Bark) that charges both a subscription and a per-lead fee.
Is Rated People shared or exclusive?: Shared, with a stated cap of three tradespeople per lead. In practice it is often bought by only one or two, not always the full three, but you should assume you are quoting against at least one other trade who also paid.
Does Rated People vet tradespeople?: It runs fraud and identity screening on signup and then monitors accounts with a red-flag system. The one hard, checked requirement is Gas Safe registration, and only for gas-related leads. For every other trade there is no equivalent requirement to show insurance or qualifications before you can start buying leads, which is a lighter bar than Checkatrade sets.
Can you get a refund on Rated People?: Sometimes, but it is rationed. Rated People says it will refund credit for leads you genuinely cannot contact, but trades report the allowance runs out and that a customer simply ignoring your calls is not always covered. There is also a 12-month minimum contract with a 14-day cooling-off window, and spending any credit inside those 14 days forfeits your right to a refund on the first month.
Is Rated People a good site?: It depends which review platform you check, and that is itself worth knowing before you sign a 12-month contract. Trustpilot puts it at roughly 4 out of 5 from around 19,000 reviews; Reviews.io puts the same company at 2.3 out of 5 from 238 reviews. Neither cleanly separates tradesperson reviewers from homeowners, but the gap between the two platforms is the honest headline here, not either number on its own.
Who owns Rated People?: Rated People Limited (company number 05540422) was VC-backed by Frog Capital from 2011. Companies House filings show that changed on 3 June 2024, when Frog Capital stopped being a person with significant control and CEO Ottokar Rosenberger and Chairman Adrian Cox were each registered holding 25 to 50 percent. No press release explains the deal in detail; this is what the public filings show.
What is better, Checkatrade or Rated People?: Different cost shapes. Checkatrade charges a flat monthly membership with no per-lead fee and leans on brand recognition; Rated People charges a monthly subscription and then bills you again per lead on top. If you would rather one predictable bill than two stacked ones, that is the practical difference, before you even get to lead quality or vetting.
Is Rated People worth it for tradesmen?: It can pay for a trade doing steady, mid-value work who wins close to half the leads they buy, because the included credit in the subscription absorbs the first few jobs a month. It is a harder sum for anyone on small jobs, in a quiet patch, or new with no reviews, because you are carrying the subscription every month regardless, then paying again per lead on top of it.

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