Angi vs Thumbtack for Contractors: How Each Charges and Who Gets the Lead

The differences at a glance

Many comparisons online repeat figures neither company publishes, such as fixed per-lead prices or a set number of contractors per lead. These are the differences the platforms themselves describe.

• How you pay. Angi: leads within a monthly budget, with discounted leads for subscribers. Thumbtack: pay per lead within a weekly budget.
• Who sets the price. Angi prices leads by task, homeowner location, and demand. On Thumbtack you set your own lead prices per service, and the price you set is what you pay.
• How many pros see a job. Angi says it matches a homeowner with no more than five pros, and since 2025 homeowners choose which pros they connect with. On Thumbtack, customers can contact more than one pro for the same project.
• Bad leads. Angi credits specific kinds of bad lead as account credit, with conditions. Thumbtack has a refund process that pays to your Thumbtack balance by default.
• What you keep. On both, nothing carries over when you stop paying. The customer relationship starts on their platform, not yours.

How Angi charges

Angi's 2025 annual report describes several ways a pro can pay: full-priced leads within a monthly budget, discounted leads as part of a subscription package, individual opportunities bought one at a time, and fees on fixed-price services booked through the platform.

Angi's help centre says lead pricing varies with the task, the homeowner's location, and demand for the work. You set a monthly budget, which Angi describes as the target value of leads it will match you with each month. Pros without a subscription are billed weekly.

Opportunities work differently from matched leads. When you pick one up, the fee is charged immediately, it sits outside your monthly budget, and it does not get your subscription discount. That is easy to miss when you are watching the budget and wondering why the bill is higher.

How Thumbtack charges

Thumbtack's help centre says you pay for leads, meaning customers who reach out to you directly, and that the price you set for a lead is the amount you pay. You also set a weekly budget, the most you will spend on leads in a week.

Thumbtack also offers opportunities, jobs where you are shown the price up front and pay only if the customer responds to you. Those do not count against the weekly budget.

The price you set also decides how competitive you are. Thumbtack says a higher price for a service makes you more competitive for those leads, and it shows an estimate of how many leads to expect as you move the price. It publishes no standard prices, so the only reliable figure is the one in your own account.

How many contractors see the same lead

This is where most online comparisons are out of date. Angi's help centre says it matches a homeowner with no more than five pros. In January 2025 Angi also changed how matching works: homeowners are now connected only with available pros they select, and Angi discontinued most of the experiences where homeowners were matched automatically.

On Thumbtack, a customer can contact several pros for the same project.

On both, the practical point is the same. You are rarely the only company a homeowner is talking to, so a lead that waits in an inbox is competing with pros who have already replied.

Getting credit for a bad lead

Angi publishes specific rules, and they have conditions worth knowing before you rely on them. A lead can be credited if the phone number is disconnected or not the homeowner's, if the job is outside the ZIP codes you cover, if it does not match your services, if it is a duplicate, or if you were charged while your leads were paused. To request a credit, the lead has to be less than 45 days old and you have to have tried to call the homeowner within 24 hours.

Angi does not credit homeowners who never respond or who hire someone else; it says those outcomes are already accounted for in its pricing. Pros on an annual subscription are not offered credits at all. Credits are applied to future lead charges rather than refunded, expire if unused within six months, and are reviewed within five business days.

Thumbtack's help centre describes a refund process with a 45-day window, with refunds paid to your Thumbtack balance by default unless you ask for them to go back to your card or bank. It also refunds some leads automatically, such as ones flagged by its trust and safety team.

Angi and HomeAdvisor: what changed

If you used HomeAdvisor, you have effectively used Angi. When Angie's List became Angi in March 2021, HomeAdvisor was renamed HomeAdvisor, powered by Angi, and the pro side now runs under Angi.

In January 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million over what it called false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold to contractors. The order became final in April 2023, and later that year the FTC sent more than $3 million in refunds to businesses that had paid for HomeAdvisor memberships.

Angi has also changed as a company. IAC spun it off as an independent public company in April 2025, and in its second-quarter 2026 results Angi reported revenue down 11% and total leads down 13% on the year, alongside what it called a shift in its pro mix towards its subscription product.

Is Angi worth it for contractors?

It can be, for a contractor who answers fast and knows their numbers. The only fair test is cost per booked job: total spend on the platform in a month divided by the jobs you actually booked from it. Run that for two or three months, alongside the same number for your other sources, and the answer usually becomes obvious.

Three things tip it one way or the other. Response speed, because you are competing with up to four other pros on each matched lead. Discipline about the credit rules, because a lead you did not call within 24 hours cannot be credited later. And whether you are on an annual subscription, because that removes credits entirely.

The same test applies to Thumbtack. The platform that looks cheaper per lead is not always cheaper per job.

Alternatives to Angi and Thumbtack

For urgent local work, Google Local Services Ads are the usual alternative: you still pay per lead, but you pay only when a customer calls or messages your business directly from the ad. The longer-term answer is the channel neither platform can sell you, which is your own website and Google Business Profile. They cost money to build and look after, but the leads are yours by default and they keep coming in the months you spend nothing on ads.

Most contractors are best served by using Angi or Thumbtack to fill the calendar while those owned channels are built, then reducing platform spend as the owned channels start producing. That is a decision you make from your cost per booked job, not from any platform's pitch, including ours.