By Luis Johnson, founder of Lunere Digital. Published
The honest Angi alternative for a foundation repair shop is to stop buying contact details and start buying the appointment. Angi sells you a service request. You pay a fee the moment that request matches your preferences, and then you go and chase it. Nothing in that fee is attached to whether the homeowner picks up, owns the house, or lets your estimator through the door.
I sell the other end of the same chain. You get a dated slot on your estimator's calendar with a name, an address and a symptom, and you pay for the slot, not for a phone number that might turn into one. If the homeowner no-shows, or the booking doesn't match what you said you wanted, you report it inside 72 hours and the charge comes off.
The short version
- Angi runs a pro site that says a service request goes to three or four members at once, in plain print.
- Its pro FAQ says you pay a fee for each lead you match to, and that different sized jobs carry different lead fees.
- That same FAQ says it makes no guarantee about how much work you'll get.
- The Federal Trade Commission finalised an order in April 2023 against HomeAdvisor, an Angi company, over how it marketed its leads.
- The figure worth arguing about isn't the lead fee. It's what one estimator visit costs you once the dead numbers are counted.
What Angi publishes about its own terms
I read the pro pages Angi runs itself rather than somebody else's review of them, because a review hands you a number and the vendor page hands you a rule. The rules below are quoted from pages the company controls. I couldn't find a published per-lead price for foundation or structural work anywhere on those pages, and I'm not going to invent one for you.
Angi (Angi Leads), in their own words
Read off their own page. Terms change, so confirm anything you are about to rely on.
- How many shops get the same request
- The pro site says requests and the consumer's contact information are sent immediately to three to four members, and the FAQ says the profile is used to connect customers with multiple service professionals.
- How you're charged
- The pro FAQ says you pay a fee for each lead you match to, and that different sized jobs have different lead fees. No price for foundation work appears on the public pages.
- Credits or refunds
- No credit or refund rule for a bad lead appears on the public pro pages. The full service professional agreement sits behind a login.
- Volume promised
- The FAQ answers that question directly: it says Angi makes no guarantee about how much work it will generate.
- Turning it off
- The FAQ says you can turn the service on or off at any time by adjusting your profile, and set the matching engine to switch back on at a later date.
- Payments add-on
- Angi EasyPay invoicing is listed at 2.99 percent per transaction.
The number that matters is cost per estimator visit
A lead fee is a price for a phone number. An estimator visit is the thing that produces a signed job, so that's where I'd put the measurement. Take a month of Angi fees, divide by the number of homes your estimator actually stood in, and you have a figure you can argue with. Most shops I talk to have never run it, because the fees arrive one at a time and the visits arrive on a different day.
When three other shops got the same request, your share of that homeowner is a coin flip before anybody picks up a phone. That's not a complaint about Angi. It's the published design of the product, and it's why speed of response gets talked about so hard by everyone selling shared requests.
| Angi Leads | Per booked inspection | |
|---|---|---|
| What the money buys | A service request that matches your preferences | A dated slot on your estimator's calendar |
| Who else gets it | Three to four members, per its own pro site | One shop, never resold |
| When you're charged | On the match | After the inspection is booked, billed weekly in arrears |
| Qualifying | You do it on the phone, after you've paid | Done on the form before any calendar appears |
| A bad one arrives | No public credit rule on the pro pages | Report inside 72 hours and a no-show or unqualified booking comes off |
| Who owns the ad account | Angi does | You do, funded on your own card |
| Commitment | Switch the matching engine off in your profile | No retainer |
When Angi is the better buy
When Angi is the better buy
- You want volume tomorrow morning with nothing to build. Angi has the homeowner traffic already and you can switch matching on in an afternoon.
- You have a hungry inside salesperson who will call a new request inside two minutes, every time, all day. Shared requests reward exactly that and almost nothing else.
- You take small work as well as piering. A crack injection at a few hundred dollars can survive a lead fee that a single big-ticket channel wouldn't justify chasing.
- Your service area is thin, so you need to be in front of whatever comes up rather than filling a calendar at a steady rate.
- You're testing a new county and you want to know whether anybody there's searching at all before you fund ads of your own.
- You value the review profile. Homeowner reviews sitting on a site homeowners already use have worth on their own, separate from the lead fees.
What I'd not do is treat Angi as the whole plan. A channel where the vendor publishes that it makes no guarantee, and that three or four of you get the same homeowner, is a supplement. The way I see it, ads to homeowners running in your own ad account are the part nobody else can switch off on you, because the account and the data belong to you.
Does Angi tell you how many other contractors got your lead?
Its pro site states the design in general terms, that requests go to three to four members. It doesn't publish a per-lead disclosure on the public pages.
What was the FTC order about?
The Federal Trade Commission finalised a consent order in April 2023 against HomeAdvisor, which it describes as affiliated with Angi, over claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold. The order requires up to $7.2 million for redress. HomeAdvisor now trades as Angi Leads.
Can I run both Angi and my own ads?
Yes, and plenty of shops do while they're switching over. The only thing to watch is estimator capacity, because two sources filling one diary is how you cause your own no-shows.
Do I have to cancel anything to try something else?
Not on my side. There's no retainer, so you can keep Angi running and judge both on cost per estimator visit for a month.
Bring your last three months of Angi fees to the call and we will do the division together.
Book My Strategy CallSources
- Angi Leads sends a consumer request and contact details to three to four members at once. Angi Leads Pro, About Us.
- Pros pay a fee for each lead they match to, lead fees vary by job size, and Angi makes no guarantee of volume. Angi Leads Pro, Service Professional FAQ.
- The FTC finalised a consent order against HomeAdvisor, an Angi affiliate, in April 2023, requiring up to $7.2 million for redress. Federal Trade Commission.
Read next
- Lunere vs Angi for Foundation Repair ContractorsLunere vs Angi for foundation repair: a marketplace that bills on contact details against a pipeline that bills on a booked qualified inspection you attend.
- Shared vs Exclusive Leads for Foundation RepairShared vs exclusive leads for foundation repair, by how many shops call the same homeowner, what each really costs you per signed job, and which one to buy.
- Foundation Repair Lead Generation Companies, RankedEleven places a US foundation repair contractor can buy work from today, ranked by what one signed job costs. Last, with sources.
- How These Comparisons Are ResearchedWhere the numbers on the comparison pages come from, how vendors are picked and ranked, how often it's rechecked, and the conflict of interest in all of it.