The shared-lead trap
Stop renting your customers.
You pay thirty quid for a lead, ring it, and hear you're the fifth to call. That is not bad luck, it is the business model. The lead sites make their money selling the same job to as many trades as they can, and you fight over it on price.
Everything here about Checkatrade's contract comes from its own published terms and conditions, last read on 26 August 2026. Terms get revised, so check yours against the current version before you act on anything.
How it works
One job, sold four times over.
A homeowner fills in one form. The site does not send that job to the best trade for it. It sends it to everyone who will pay, all at once. So before you have even said hello, you are in a bidding war with three or four others for a job you all paid to chase.
- One requesta homeowner asks for a quote
- Sold to four tradeseveryone who pays gets it
- A race to the bottomyou undercut to win it
- You paid either waywin or lose, the fee is gone
The bill
What it really costs you.
Every site dresses it up differently but lands the same way: you pay to show up, pay again for each lead, and get nothing back when the job goes to someone else. What none of them will tell you up front is the only number that matters.
| Site | What one lead costs you | How many of you get it |
|---|---|---|
| Checkatrade | Entry tiers published: free, £30/mo Approved, Growth “from £59/mo”. What a lead-generating plan actually costs is still quoted to you individually. | Not published |
| Bark | £1.75 a credit excluding VAT at standard rate, cheaper in bigger packs. How many credits a lead takes is not published. | Up to five, in Bark’s own terms |
| MyBuilder | A fee when a homeowner shortlists you, shown excluding VAT before you commit and never refunded. No fee table is published. | Not published |
| Rated People | A flat monthly fee with nothing charged per lead. The amount is not shown on the sign-up page, and it says the unlimited plan is not open to every trade. | No more than three, stated on its own sign-up page |
Read the table again
Notice what is missing from the middle column.
Not one of them will tell you what a single LEAD costs before you sign, which is the only number that decides whether this pays. Checkatrade publishes joining tiers and then quotes you individually at the end of a questionnaire. MyBuilder publishes no fee table. Bark prices a credit but not how many a lead takes. Rated People prints no figure for any plan. That is not an oversight, and it is the reason the sum below can only be done on one side.
We broke each site down on its own, honestly, in is Checkatrade worth it, is MyBuilder worth it and is Bark worth it, or put them side by side. Checkatrade publishes joining tiers but never what a lead costs, so there is a separate breakdown of what Checkatrade costs a month.
The real number
Cost per lead is the wrong number.
Nobody wins a job by buying a lead. The only figure that pays your wages is what you spent on the jobs you actually landed, and the two routes get there completely differently. Here is the sum, both sides, with the working shown.
Shared leads
Sold to five, you win one in five.
This is not pessimism, it is arithmetic. If one homeowner's job is sold to five trades, it can still only become one job. Across the five of you it converts at one in five, and no amount of being better at quoting changes the ceiling, because the other four are paying to chase the same single job you are. Bark's own terms say up to five professionals respond to a lead.
So a lead at £30, shared five ways, costs £150 in fees for the one job that gets won, before anyone has spent an evening writing quotes. At a tenner a lead it is £50. The multiplier is how many of you got sent it, and it applies before you factor in losing on price to the cheapest of the five.
Rated People is the one that breaks the pattern, and it is worth saying so. It charges a flat monthly fee with nothing per lead, so there is no multiplier to apply: your cost per won job is simply the monthly fee divided by the jobs you actually landed. The ceiling has not gone anywhere, mind. Its own sign-up page says no more than three tradespeople can buy the same lead, so you are still one of three quoting.
You will notice we have not given you a real figure for that £30. We cannot, and neither can anyone else, which is the next problem.
Your own ads
Here the price is published before you spend it.
A click has a market price you can read in advance. Turning clicks into enquiries is where the money goes, so the honest figure is the click price divided by the share of clicks that become an enquiry. The only published benchmark for that in this sector is WordStream's, at 7.33%, and it is measured on US campaigns rather than British ones, so treat it as the shape of the thing and not a promise. Our click prices below are UK.
| Trade | One click costs | One enquiry costs |
|---|---|---|
| Locksmith | £26.95 | £368 |
| Plumber, emergency | £22.57 | £308 |
| Electrician, emergency | £15.18 | £207 |
| Boiler engineer | £9.12 | £124 |
| Plumber, general | £8.00 | £109 |
| Electrician, general | £6.90 | £94 |
| Roofer | £5.54 | £76 |
| Painter and decorator | £3.47 | £47 |
| Builder | £3.46 | £47 |
| Tiler | £3.33 | £45 |
| Plasterer | £2.88 | £39 |
| Landscaper | £2.81 | £38 |
Click prices pulled August 2026 from Google Ads keyword data for the United Kingdom, and they run above what you actually end up paying per click. Enquiry cost is those figures divided by the 7.33% conversion rate published in WordStream's 2025 Google Ads benchmarks, Home & Home Improvement (US search campaigns). There is a fuller breakdown of the click side in what to spend on Google Ads.
The honest answer
On the first job, we are not always cheaper.
Look at the right-hand column properly. A general plumber's enquiry works out around a hundred pounds before you have quoted it, and if you close half of them that is two hundred a job. There are trades and there are months where a shared lead beats that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise on our own website.
What you cannot do on the shared side is the sum at all, and what you never get is the second job. The enquiry you paid for is yours: the number is in your phone, the customer knows your name and nobody else was quoting. That is where the ads route actually wins, and anybody telling you it wins on the first invoice is selling.
Two questions before you sign anything.
What does one lead cost me?
Not the monthly fee. One lead. If the answer is a range, or arrives only after a call with a salesperson, you cannot work out your cost per job and neither can they.
How many of us get sent it?
Multiply the lead price by that number and you have your floor, before you lose any on price. If they will not say, assume it is as many as will pay.
Ask us the same two and the answers are one, and one. That is the entire difference.
The catch nobody mentions
You are building on rented land.
Here is the part that really bites. Your profile, your hard-won reviews, your spot in the list, none of it is yours. It belongs to them. The day you stop paying, it all disappears, and the work dries up with it.
- Stop paying and your listing vanishes the same day
- Years of reviews sit on their site, not yours, and you cannot take them with you
- They change the pricing or the pecking order, and there is nothing you can do
- Fall out with them and you start again from nothing
Follow the money
You are not the customer. You are the stock.
Step back and look at who wins. The biggest directory is owned by a private equity giant whose job is to grow profit: pack more trades onto every lead and charge them all. The thing that is worst for you, sharing the lead, is exactly what makes them richest.
The bit that hurts both sides
The homeowner hates it too.
Picture it from their side: they ask for one quote and four strangers ring them. They cannot tell good from bad, so they pick the cheapest and hope. Find them yourself, be the only one who answers, and there is nobody to compare you to. They chose you.
The honest bit
But don't the lead sites work?
We are not pretending they never do. You will land the odd job. The real question is what each one costs you once you count the fees, the undercutting and the time, and whether that customer is ever yours.
"I do win jobs off them."
Some, yes. But you win by being cheapest, you pay whether you win or not, and the customer is rented, gone the day you stop paying.
"Aren't ads just as dear?"
Ads cost too, but the lead is yours alone, nobody else is undercutting you, and you can switch them off tomorrow. Get a lead site wrong and you are tied in for a year.
The way out
Own your leads, don't rent them.
There is a better way: your own website and your own ads, so every call comes straight to you and nobody else is sold the same job. The customer is yours to keep, and we will never sell your lead to the four other blokes down the road.
- Every lead comes to you, and only you, never shared
- No race to the bottom, because nobody else got the same job
- The customer relationship is yours to keep, not rented by the month
- You are not one of four names on a list, you are the one they called
Why us
Why take our word for it?
Honestly? Because we will tell you when not to buy. If ads are not right for you yet, we will say so. We make nothing from selling your lead to someone else, because we never do it. We only do well when your phone actually rings.
Straight answers
Questions trades actually ask.
- What is the shared-lead trap?
- It is how lead-generation sites work. You pay to be sent customer leads, but the same lead is sold to several trades at once, so you compete on price for a job you all paid to chase, and the fee is gone whether you win it or not.
- Are Checkatrade leads shared with other trades?
- Sharing is how all of these marketplaces work, and two of them publish the number. Bark’s terms say up to five professionals respond to a lead. Rated People’s trade sign-up page says no more than three tradespeople can buy the same lead. Checkatrade and MyBuilder do not publish how many trades a request goes to, so on those you are quoting against an unknown number of people who all paid for the same job.
- How much do lead-generation sites cost?
- Mostly, they will not say until you are in the sign-up flow. Checkatrade does publish entry tiers, a free profile, £30 a month Approved and Growth “from £59”, but its join pages never route you there: every “View our prices” button drops you into a questionnaire that ends in a figure quoted just for you. MyBuilder charges a fee each time a homeowner shortlists you, shown excluding VAT before you commit and never refunded, but publishes no fee table. Bark is the only one with a published unit price, at £1.75 a credit excluding VAT at standard rate, and it does not publish how many credits a lead costs. Rated People has moved the other way, to a flat monthly fee with nothing charged per lead, though it does not publish the amount either. Treat any monthly figure you read elsewhere as somebody’s own bill, not a tariff.
- What does a shared lead actually cost per job won?
- Multiply the lead fee by the number of trades it was sent to. If one job is sold to five trades it can only ever become one job, so across the five of you it converts at one in five: a £30 lead shared five ways is £150 in fees for the job somebody wins, before anyone has spent an evening quoting. Bark states up to five professionals respond to a lead, and Rated People says no more than three can buy one. Where the fee is a flat monthly subscription rather than a charge per lead, as Rated People’s now is, drop the multiplier and divide the monthly fee by the jobs you won instead. The catch is that Checkatrade and MyBuilder publish no per-lead price at all, so on those you cannot do the sum even if you want to.
- Are exclusive leads cheaper than shared ones?
- Not necessarily on the first job, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling. Running your own Google Ads, a UK click runs about £2.81 for a landscaper to £26.95 for a locksmith, and at WordStream’s 7.33% US search conversion benchmark that is roughly £38 to £368 per enquiry before you have quoted it. What exclusivity buys is that nobody else is quoting the same job, and that the customer is then yours for the next one. That is where it pays back, not on the first invoice.
- Do you keep your reviews if you leave?
- No. Your profile, reviews and place in the listings sit on their platform, not yours. Stop paying and the listing comes down, and you cannot take the reviews with you.
- What is the alternative to lead-generation sites?
- Own your leads instead of renting them. With your own website and your own ads, every call comes straight to you and nobody else is sold the same job, so the customer is yours to keep.
Want leads that are yours alone?
See what it costs, then tell us about your business and we'll get cracking. Got a question first? Just message us.