Thumbtack charges service professionals for leads, and the real cost of a job is what you spent on all the leads that did not turn into one. The formula is simple: leads bought times price, divided by jobs won. This page works that formula on 20 leads, then looks at three alternatives you can run next to a marketplace or instead of it: your Google Business Profile and reviews, commercial and repeat accounts you find by name, and referrals from past customers. It ends with a mixed plan for a company with three crews.
Dolores runs an interior painting company in Columbus with three crews. She pays for leads on a shared-lead marketplace, and she wants to know whether the money is working before deciding anything else. The numbers below are hers, built to show the method, not benchmarks. Use your own from your account.
How shared-lead marketplaces charge
Thumbtack's help pages describe its model this way. It sends you leads that match your job preferences. Prices vary because a job's value changes with the type and size of the job, how many pros are available, and your market. You set how competitive you want to be by choosing your lead price, and you pay the price shown if the customer responds to you. For open requests it calls Opportunities, you are charged if you reach out and the customer responds. You also set a weekly spending budget, and when you reach it you stop receiving new leads until it resets. All of that is as described on Thumbtack's own help pages, October 2026. Dollar amounts are not listed there, because they depend on your trade and area. Read the numbers in your own account.
What it means in practice: you pay when a customer responds, not when you win a job. A customer who responds and then picks someone else still cost you the lead price. And the lead may have gone to more than one pro, so you are in a quote race from the first message.
What a job costs after the leads that went nowhere
Say Dolores pays $35 a lead and buys 20 in a month. That is $700. Of the 20, 12 customers reply to her messages. She visits 6 homes and sends 6 quotes. Three accept. Her average painting job is $1,800.
Cost per booked job: $700 divided by 3 is about $233. Revenue from the three jobs: $5,400, so the lead spend is about 13 percent of revenue. Now use gross profit, which is what pays for the lead. If her margin after labor and paint is 35 percent, a $1,800 job leaves $630. The $233 lead cost is 37 percent of that $630. Change one input and the picture changes. If only two of the 20 had booked, the cost per job would be $350, 56 percent of the gross profit. Write down your own booked jobs and your own margin before you decide anything.
A rule that keeps this honest: keep a marketplace channel running only while the cost per booked job stays under about half of the gross profit on an average job. Past that, cut the weekly budget or pause. The half is a judgment, not a law. Use whatever your margins can carry.
Alternative 1: your Google Business Profile and reviews
A Business Profile is free to claim and fill in. Add your service area, the jobs you do, photos of finished work, and your hours. Then ask each customer for a review while the job is fresh, with a text that links straight to the review form. People who search "painter near me" see the profile and the reviews before they see any marketplace. The cost is a few hours up front and ten minutes a week. The limit is volume. You cannot buy more calls from it, and a new business with no reviews starts slowly. Lead generation for service-based businesses covers the profile and other basics.
Alternative 2: commercial and repeat accounts you find by name
Property managers, builders, real estate offices and small commercial landlords buy painting repeatedly, and one account can be worth many homeowners. Find them by name: the property management companies in your county, the general contractors on recent permits, the offices that moved in this year. List 40, find the person who books vendors, and write to each from your own email. How to size and find that list is in B2B outreach strategy for a team of one, and finding the companies in the first place is covered in ZoomInfo alternatives for small business.
The cost is time or a tool. Rocketship finds the buyers by name, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own, and its home services page shows how that applies to trades. If one property manager signs a $9,000 yearly contract, the monthly cost of a tool is small next to it, so the number to learn is the response rate. Test with 40 names before you decide.
Alternative 3: referrals and past customers
Your last 50 customers are usually your lowest-cost leads. A short message to each one, "we're booking spring painting, do you know anyone who needs a room done?", brings jobs at no per-lead cost. People who said "not now" a year ago are another list; how to reactivate old leads gives the wording and timing. A referral thank-you, such as a $50 gift card, is a cost you set yourself, not a price that moves with the market.
The four sources side by side
| Source | You pay | You spend | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared-lead marketplace | Per lead, when the customer responds | Time to message and quote every lead | Cost per job rises when leads are shared |
| Business Profile and reviews | Nothing per lead | A few hours, then 10 minutes a week | Slow at first; volume not on demand |
| Commercial and repeat accounts | A tool or your time | Building the list, following up | Needs 40 names and a test to know |
| Referrals and past customers | A small thank-you | An hour to message 50 people | Only as large as your customer list |
For comparison, see how much a lead costs for a small business.
A mixed plan for a three-crew company
Dolores keeps the marketplace but caps it. She cuts her weekly budget in half and checks the cost per booked job each month against the half-of-gross-profit rule. She spends two hours claiming and filling in her Business Profile and sets up a review text after every job. She messages her last 50 customers once, and she builds a list of 40 property managers and builders and writes to them over four weeks. At the end of 60 days she looks at jobs booked by source and moves her money and time to the one with the lowest cost per job. Getting the first calls answered matters in every channel; getting customers for a plumbing business shows the same reasoning in another trade.
Marketplaces are one way to get customers, and not the only one. Rocketship finds the buyers by name, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own, and it answers your calls so no lead is missed. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required. Answering your existing number is included; a dedicated line is $5 a month. See the AI workers.