Shared vs Exclusive Leads: What You're Actually Buying
The same homeowner sold to four contractors is a different product from one sold to you alone. How lead pricing works, and how to tell which one you bought.
A lead is not a thing. It is a permission, and what you are actually buying is how many other people got the same permission at the same time.
That is the entire difference between a $40 lead and a $200 lead, and most of the pages selling you either one will not put it in a sentence that plain.
The three things people call a lead
They are not the same product and they should not be compared on price.
A shared lead. A homeowner filled in a form on somebody else’s website. That form goes to you and to three or four other contractors, more or less at the same instant. You are all now in a race that the homeowner did not know they started. Whoever calls first usually wins, and the other three paid for the privilege of losing.
An exclusive lead. The same form, sold to one contractor. You. Nobody else is calling. It costs more, and the reason it costs more is arithmetic rather than quality: the seller can only sell it once.
A pre-qualified lead. Someone spoke to the homeowner before you got them. Not a form, a conversation. They established what the problem is, whether it is in your service area, whether the timeline is this week or next spring, and whether the job is the size you actually want. What lands on your phone is a person who has already answered the questions you were going to ask.
Those three things get sold under the same word. The word is doing a lot of work.
What they cost, and why nobody will tell you
Here is where this article does something the other ones on this search don’t.
The big marketplaces do not publish their prices. Not “hard to find”. Not published. On 25 August 2026 I tried to read the pricing pages of Angi, Thumbtack, Modernize, Networx and Porch. Angi, Modernize and Networx returned a 403 to anything that was not a browser. Thumbtack’s pro pricing page returned nothing readable. Porch’s gave a headline and no numbers. Google’s own Local Services Ads page sits behind a consent wall and the support article that explains the pricing model returns a 404.
Every “Angi costs $X per lead” figure you will read today, on any site, is a marketing agency’s estimate of somebody else’s price. Including the ones stated with great confidence in a table. I am not going to add another.
What can be sourced is the smaller sellers, because they print their rate cards.
- 99calls advertises organic mold remediation leads at a flat $129.99 each: https://99calls.com/Mold-Remediation-Leads.htm
- Minyona advertises exclusive foundation repair leads at “Cost per qualified lead $50 - $200” plus a “$2,000 setup fee (limited time)”, marked down from $4,000, and says plainly they are “Never shared with other foundation companies”: https://minyona.com/foundation-repair-leads
Both read 7 October 2026. Both will move.
Notice what those two have in common: they publish, and they are exclusive. [inference] The sellers who publish tend to be the ones selling the thing that is easier to defend on price.
The arithmetic that actually matters
Cost per lead is the wrong number and it is the only one anyone quotes.
The number is cost per booked job. Here is the shape of it. Plug in your own figures, because these are illustrative and nothing else.
| Shared | Exclusive | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per lead | $50 | $150 |
| Leads bought | 20 | 20 |
| Spend | $1,000 | $3,000 |
| How many other contractors called | 3 | 0 |
| Jobs booked | ? | ? |
| Cost per booked job | $1,000 ÷ ? | $3,000 ÷ ? |
The cheap column is only cheap if the blank at the bottom holds up, and the whole point of a shared lead is that it does not. If you book one job in twenty shared leads, you paid $1,000 for it. If you book four in twenty exclusive leads, you paid $750, and you did not spend four evenings losing races.
You cannot know your own conversion rate until you have bought some. That is awkward and it is true, and it is the reason to buy a small batch before signing anything with a term on it.
How to tell what you actually bought
The listing will not always say. Ask these, in writing, before money moves.
“Is this lead sold to anyone else? How many?” If the answer is a number greater than one, you are buying a race. If the answer is vague, assume the worst version of it.
“What happens if the phone number is wrong?” Ask about the refund process specifically, not whether refunds exist. Everyone says refunds exist.
“Where did this person come from?” A homeowner who searched for a foundation inspector and a homeowner who clicked a quiz on a social feed are not the same buyer, and they do not close at the same rate.
“What did they already agree to?” For a pre-qualified lead this is the whole product. If nobody can tell you what the homeowner was asked, nobody asked them anything.
“What is the term?” Month to month or twelve months. This one has ended more contractor relationships with lead sellers than price ever has.
One thing worth knowing about this market
Observed directly rather than repeated.
CraftJack is now Angi. craftjack.com returns a 301 redirect straight to
signup.angi.com/pro (checked 7 October 2026). If you were comparing the two as
separate options, you are comparing one thing to itself.
I would rather tell you where the evidence runs out than paraphrase a forum thread I could not open. The contractor forums that everyone quotes on this topic have mostly gone behind paywalls this year, which is why the pages competing with this one all cite “one Reddit user” and never link.
When buying leads is the wrong move entirely
This is a page about buying leads, so treat what follows as the part that matters.
When you cannot answer the phone. A lead is a permission to call someone back inside a few minutes. If you are under a house until six, shared leads are a subscription to losing races and exclusive leads are an expensive version of the same. Fix the phone first. That is not a sales line, it is the order of operations, and the piece on how fast a reply has to be to be worth anything is the argument in full.
When your close rate is the problem. If you are booking one in ten of the leads you already get, buying more of them multiplies a leak. Fix the estimate conversation before you widen the pipe.
When you have never counted. If you do not know what a booked job is worth to you, every price on this page is unreadable. A $200 lead is cheap against a $14,000 excavation and lunatic against a $400 sump swap.
When the contract is twelve months. Not because long contracts are always wrong, but because you cannot know your own conversion rate on a new source until you have run it. Anyone confident in their leads will let you buy a handful first.
The version of this that is not a lead at all
There is a fourth option and it does not appear in the price comparison because it is not sold by the lead.
You can own the source. A site that ranks and converts, a Google profile that shows up in the three-pack, and a phone that gets answered produces the same homeowners without a per-unit cost and without anyone else getting the same form. It is slower and it is not free, and for most contractors it is the thing that eventually replaces the invoice from a marketplace rather than sitting alongside it forever.
Buying leads is how you fill a calendar this month. It is a rental. Whether that is the right call this month depends on how empty the calendar is, and that is your read to make, not mine. If you want the rented version done properly there are exclusive contractor leads, and if you want the owned version, that is a different and longer conversation.
Work out your cost per booked job first. Everything on this page is unreadable without it.