Most trade shops paying for Angi and HomeAdvisor have no idea which one is producing profitable jobs.
They know roughly what they're spending. They have a vague sense that work is coming in. When I ask which platform produced the most revenue last quarter (net of lead costs, not gross), almost nobody can answer that without an afternoon of spreadsheet work. Most can't answer it at all.
That's a problem. Here's why it's harder to fix than it looks.
What's actually happening with those leads
When a homeowner fills out a request on Angi or HomeAdvisor, that request goes to multiple contractors simultaneously. The exact number varies but it's typically three to five. The homeowner's phone starts ringing. The contractor who responds first has the highest chance of getting the job.
Most shops respond when they see the notification, sometimes 20 minutes after it came in, if someone happens to check their phone. The lead has usually already made an appointment with someone else.
This isn't speculation. It's the core complaint that produced a $2 million settlement between the Vermont Attorney General and Angi Inc. in 2025. The AG found that Angi misrepresented lead quality to contractors and charged for leads that had no realistic chance of converting. The settlement required consumer restitution and operational reforms. The fundamental lead-sharing structure has not changed.
The tracking problem
Even if a lead converts, most shops have no way to trace it back to its source.
Here's how it usually works: the lead comes in through the Angi app. Someone calls the number and books a job. The job gets created in the FSM manually, by whoever takes the call, because there's no integration between Angi and the FSM. "How did you hear about us?" gets asked verbally, written on a sticky note, and never entered anywhere.
Six months later, when the owner is wondering whether to renew the Angi contract, they're making that decision based on gut feel. Not data. The data doesn't exist.
Meanwhile, the shop may be running Google Ads, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, and Google Business Profile at the same time. None of those lead sources are tracked to completed jobs. None of the lead sources are compared by cost per acquired customer. The whole lead generation budget is running on faith.
The specific question to ask
The question isn't "is Angi worth it." The question is: last quarter, which lead source produced the most revenue net of what you paid for it?
For most shops, that's Google Local Services Ads. LSA is pay-per-verified-call. You only pay when a customer calls you directly, not when a homeowner fills out a form that goes to five contractors. LSA also comes with a Google Screened badge, which shows up prominently in local search results. For plumbing, HVAC, and electrical, LSA frequently produces three to five times better cost per lead than traditional Google Ads and significantly better than pay-per-lead platforms.
Most small trade shops have never set it up. Some have never heard of it. The shops paying $2,000 a month across Angi and HomeAdvisor often could produce the same lead volume with better quality through LSA at a third of the cost, if anyone tracked the numbers closely enough to see it.
What the fix looks like
First: close the loop. Every lead from every source needs to end up in the FSM as a tagged customer record, tagged with the source. That's not complicated. It requires someone to do it consistently, or an integration that does it automatically.
Second: run the numbers. After 90 days of clean tracking, compare cost per lead, conversion rate, and average job value by source. Let the data make the platform decisions.
Third: reconsider the mix. Most shops overweight pay-per-lead platforms and underweight owned channels: their Google Business Profile, their past customer database, and LSA. The owned channels cost less and convert better once they're properly managed.
Angi and HomeAdvisor aren't categorically bad. They're bad when you can't tell whether they're working. Most shops can't.
[Take the Service Trades Assessment][LINK: quick survey]. The lead generation section tells you exactly how your current sources are connected to your FSM and where the tracking gaps are.
Michelle Onizuka is co-founder and Systems Architect at Onizuka Studio. She builds automation and AI systems for small businesses — including service trades operations across Tampa Bay and beyond.