Angi vs HomeAdvisor: You Are Comparing Two Brands of One Business.

The question does not really have an answer, because you are choosing a brand rather than a business model. What you are actually deciding is whether to buy shared leads. If the answer is yes, take whichever product your local rep is selling and negotiate the terms. If the answer is no, neither brand changes that.

In March 2022 the FTC issued an administrative complaint alleging that since at least mid-2014 the company made false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of leads sold to service providers — including that pros would only receive leads matching their services and preferred area, and that leads resulted in jobs at rates the company could not substantiate. In January 2023 the FTC issued an order requiring payment of up to $7.2 million and prohibiting the conduct.

Some did. In November 2023 the FTC announced it had returned more than $3 million to businesses that paid for HomeAdvisor memberships, sending 110,372 checks, and it opened a claims process for additional refunds. Whether any individual contractor was eligible depended on the period and circumstances of their membership.

Neither publishes a rate card, and we are not going to invent one. The per-lead figures widely quoted online come almost entirely from competing vendors' marketing pages rather than from any published source, and they vary by trade, market and job type in ways a single national range cannot capture. Ask for your specific category and market in writing, and model cost per booked job rather than cost per lead.

No. The shared-lead model is the defining characteristic of this category — the same homeowner enquiry goes to multiple contractors, which is why speed of response dominates close rates and why the effective cost per booked job is a multiple of the per-lead price.

Reviews collected on the platform generally stay on the platform. Your customer list is the one thing that is genuinely yours — export it before you cancel. That list can be uploaded to Meta as a custom audience and used to build lookalikes, which is the single most valuable thing most departing contractors fail to do.

No, and the naming genuinely does confuse people — enough that it is one of the more common searches in this category. Angi Leads is the pay-per-lead product descended from HomeAdvisor; Angi Ads is a placement and advertising product. Our Angi Ads vs Angi Leads page takes that distinction apart properly.

Yes, promptly and in writing, and keep records. Dispute windows on these platforms are short and the process is controlled by the platform. Contractors who dispute consistently and document what they sent generally recover more than those who complain by phone and let it go.

Yes — three, honestly. You are new and have nothing else running. You have genuine slack capacity this week and marginal revenue beats idle crews. Or you are testing demand in a new trade or territory before investing in channels you own. What makes it a trap is treating it as a permanent strategy, because you are renting demand indefinitely and building nothing.

Google Local Services Ads gives you pay-per-lead economics with a junk-lead credit mechanism and Google's placement. Paid social builds demand rather than renting it and produces an audience asset you keep. Most contractors who leave the marketplaces end up running some combination of the two, plus the customer list they should have been building all along.

No, and it would be unfair to imply that. The order addressed how leads were marketed and sold and required changes to those practices; it did not shut the product down. Read it as a reason to get specific claims in writing rather than as a verdict on whether the platform can work for you.