Somebody else called the homeowner first. You never spoke to them. You still paid for that lead, and the marketplace's own rules say that is not a refundable reason.
Lead Race Alert is not a running service, and nobody can sign up for it. It is being built to text and call a contractor the second a HomeAdvisor, Angi or Thumbtack lead notification arrives. The texting and calling part is not built yet. This page exists because the money side of a missed lead is worth setting out plainly whether or not that ever ships.
This is the part that catches new pros out. On a pay-per-lead marketplace the fee is attached to receiving the homeowner's details, not to booking the work. Angi's own service professional FAQ puts it in one line: "you pay a nominal fee for each lead you match to. Different sized jobs have different Lead Fees."
Several contractors in your trade and your area get that same homeowner at the same time, and every one of them is billed. So the fee buys you an opportunity to be first on the phone. If you are third, you bought the same thing the winner bought and got nothing out of it.
No. This is not a matter of opinion or of how good your account manager is. HomeAdvisor and Angi Leads publish the list, and these are quoted straight from their Lead Credit Guidelines as reasons that do not qualify for a credit:
Compare that with what the same document says does qualify: a duplicate submission, the wrong zip code, the wrong job type, a competitor testing the system, or "all contact information provided by the consumer is wrong or disconnected". Every creditable reason is a defect in the lead itself. Every non-creditable reason is about what happened after it reached you.
Read the two lists next to each other and the rule is clear enough: the marketplace will make good on a lead that was never real. It will not make good on a real lead you were too late to. There is also a clock on the ones you can claim — credits "must be requested by you within 30 days of the date that the charge was incurred", so a dispute you meant to file last quarter is gone.
Exactly the lead fee, and nothing is recovered. What the fee is depends on your trade, your area and the size of the job, and none of the three marketplaces publishes a rate card you can check before you sign up. That is worth saying rather than filling the gap with a confident average.
What you can read are pros posting their own figures. An electrician on Thumbtack's community forum, writing about a call-out he charges $75 for:
"The lead for this job cost me $102."
— an electrician posting in the Thumbtack community forum
That is one pro, in one trade, in one market, on the platform where the pro sets their own maximum price. It is not a benchmark and this page is not going to dress it up as one. The only number that matters for your own arithmetic is the one on your own invoice, which you already have.
The honest version of the sum is structural, not statistical. Take the leads you bought last month, count the ones where you know somebody beat you to the phone, and multiply by what you paid. That is the size of the problem for you. For some contractors it is a rounding error. For others it is the month's margin. We would rather you worked it out than took our word for it, because if it comes out small then this product is not worth your time.
Search for this subject and you will find precise-sounding claims: respond within five minutes and win some multiple more jobs, and so on. Every version of that figure we could trace led back to a company selling lead-response software, with no primary source underneath it. We are trying to sell something in the same category, which is exactly why we are not going to repeat it.
The claim this page will stand behind is narrower and checkable: the fee is charged on delivery, several contractors are charged for the same homeowner, and losing the race is not on the refundable list.
It would suit us to pretend otherwise. It would also be misleading. In January 2023 the Federal Trade Commission ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million and stop deceptively marketing its leads, over allegations that it "has made false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads", that pros did not only receive leads matching their services and preferred area, and that it "often tells service providers that its leads result in jobs at rates much higher than it can substantiate".
If a meaningful share of what you buy is out of area, out of trade, or not a real job, then being first to the phone gets you there faster and the answer is still no. Being fast makes a good lead winnable. It does nothing at all for a bad one, and anyone selling you speed as a fix for lead quality is selling you the wrong thing.
What I need before building any more of this is contractors saying what actually happens: what you pay per lead, how often you know you were beaten to the phone, and whether you have ever got a credit for it.
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