A HomeAdvisor, Angi or Thumbtack lead lands in your email. Three other contractors got the same one. Whoever calls the homeowner first usually books the job — and email does not tell you anything until you happen to look.
Tell me what missing leads costs you
Goes to signup@leadracealert.com. A person reads every one. No mailing list, and nothing to pay — there is nothing to sell yet.
What the alert is meant to look like. It is a mock-up, not a screenshot: nothing is sending texts yet.
Lead Race Alert watches the lead notifications those marketplaces already send you. The moment one arrives, it texts you the homeowner's name, phone number, job type and town, and then rings your phone so you notice it on a roof, under a sink, or in a crawlspace.
No new app to check. No new inbox. You keep buying leads exactly the way you do now — you just find out about them in seconds instead of whenever you next put the phone down.
Solo operators and one-to-three-person shops — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing and the rest of the trades — who buy pay-per-lead work from HomeAdvisor, Angi or Thumbtack and are in the van, not at a desk. If you have an office manager watching the inbox all day, you already have what this does.
This is not a running service yet, and nobody can sign up for it. Today there is working software that reads a HomeAdvisor, Angi or Thumbtack notification and pulls out the homeowner's details correctly. The texting and calling part is not built, because sending a text costs money and it is not worth paying for until some contractors say this is a problem worth fixing.
There is no price yet, no free trial, and no waiting list that will bill you later. I would rather say that plainly than dress up a landing page as a product.
If you are searching for why you are always too late to a lead, the answer is usually not that you are slow. It is that three things stack up against you before your phone ever makes a sound.
Pay-per-lead marketplaces do not sell you an exclusive customer. The same homeowner request goes out to several contractors in your trade and your area at the same time, and all of you are billed for it. You are not paying for a job. You are paying for a place in a race, and the homeowner picks up for whoever rings first while they are still sitting there with the form open.
The marketplace tells you about the lead by email. Email has no urgency built into it. It sits in a list with receipts, invoices, review reminders and every other message that platform sends you, and it looks exactly like all of them. If you are up a ladder, under a sink, in a crawlspace or driving between calls, you find out when you next put the phone down — which might be twenty minutes later or might be after lunch.
Contractors describe this happening even on platforms that are supposed to text them. One pro on Thumbtack's own community forum, fifteen years on the platform, put it plainly:
"we no longer receive any texts but, if I log into website I see them. That's not good, to late to get the job."
— a pro posting in the Thumbtack community forum
Homeowners fill in the form when the water heater fails, which is Sunday night and six in the morning as often as it is Tuesday at ten. Those are exactly the hours nobody is watching an inbox, and they are also the hours a homeowner most wants someone to answer.
Faster than the other contractors who got it. That is the only benchmark that decides who books the job, and it is why the marketplaces themselves tell pros to answer in minutes rather than hours.
You will find articles quoting precise figures — five minutes, eighty percent more jobs, and so on. Those numbers come from companies selling lead software, and this page is not going to repeat them as fact. What is not in dispute is the direction: a homeowner who has just submitted a form is expecting calls, and the further you get from that moment, the more likely they have already talked to someone, booked someone, or stopped answering an unfamiliar number altogether.
That is what Lead Race Alert is being built to do — and to say it in the same breath rather than bury it: it is not running yet and nobody can sign up. The intent is that it reads the lead notification the marketplace already sends you and turns it into the thing that actually gets your attention: a text with the homeowner's name, phone number, job type and town, followed by a phone call so you notice it with your hands full.
Nothing about how you buy leads changes. You do not move to a new app, a new inbox, or a new CRM. The lead still comes from HomeAdvisor, Angi or Thumbtack exactly as it does today; you just hear about it in seconds.
Most contractors have already tried this, and it half-works. A push notification for email is silent by design, it looks identical to the twenty other emails that platform sends you in a week, and it disappears off the lock screen when the next one arrives. You learn to ignore it, which is the opposite of what you need.
A ringing phone is different. You answer a ringing phone on a roof. That is the entire distinction this product rests on: not more information, but an interruption you cannot sleep through or scroll past.
Partly, and it is worth being straight about the limit. Thumbtack does not hand over the homeowner's real number the way HomeAdvisor and Angi notifications often do — it routes contact through its own proxy numbers, and in many cases you do not get a number to call until the customer replies to you first.
So on Thumbtack the honest version of this product is "a lead just landed, open the app now" rather than "here is who to call". That is still worth knowing within seconds instead of within an hour, but it is a weaker version of the same thing, and anyone telling you otherwise has not read a Thumbtack notification.
Email me and tell me what actually happens to you — how you get your leads, how fast you usually see them, and what it cost you the last time you were second to the phone. That is the thing I need to hear before building any more of this.
Email signup@leadracealert.com
A person reads every one. You will not be added to a mailing list, and your address will not be sold or passed to anyone. If you want to be told when there is something real to try, say so and that is the only thing you will hear about.