You open the app in the evening and there are leads in it from this afternoon that your phone never mentioned. You are not imagining it and you are not the only one — pros have been posting about this on Thumbtack's own forum for years.
Lead Race Alert is not a running service, and nobody can sign up for it. The first half of this page is a checklist you can work through today for free, and it is genuinely the thing to try first. The second half is honest about how little a product like ours could do for one specific version of this fault.
These are from Thumbtack's own community forum, quoted as written and linked so you can read the threads in full.
"I have not been able to receive any of my leads ever since this recent update."
— a pro who said they had missed over eight jobs that week, Thumbtack Pro new update notification glitch
"I have looked in every section of my PC and phone to ensure everything is turned on TXTs, emails, phone etc but I still don't recieved notifications of new leads."
— a pro in Not Recieving New Thumbtack Leads
A separate thread has a pro of fifteen years describing the same shape of problem — no texts arriving, the leads visible only after logging into the website, by which point the job was gone. That one is quoted on the home page, and the thread is here.
Two things are worth noticing about these posts before drawing any conclusion from them. They are self-reported and unverified, and forums collect the people with problems rather than a representative sample — most Thumbtack notifications presumably arrive fine. But the second quote matters regardless of how common it is, because that pro had already done the obvious checks. "Everything is turned on" and still nothing is a different problem from a setting left off.
Free, ten minutes, and it clears the most common causes before you go looking for anything more complicated.
This is the part where a landing page normally says yes. The real answer is that it depends entirely on which part of Thumbtack's notification chain stopped, and it is worth being specific about it.
| What failed | Would an independent alert help? |
|---|---|
| The texts and push stopped, but the lead emails still arrive | Yes. This is the case the product is for: something else is watching the email and can text and ring you. |
| The emails are arriving but reaching your phone twenty minutes late | Yes, and some of it you can also fix for free — see why lead emails arrive late. |
| Thumbtack sends nothing at all — no text, no push, no email | No. There is nothing to read, so we are exactly as blind as you are. Nobody can build an alert from a message that was never sent. |
| You are not being shown leads at all | No. That is a targeting, budget or account problem inside Thumbtack and it has nothing to do with notifications. |
Row three is the uncomfortable one and it is why this page is not a sales pitch. If your complaint is that Thumbtack has gone completely silent, a third-party alert service is not your answer, and we would rather say so than take money from someone it cannot help.
Even a perfectly working alert is weaker on Thumbtack than on the other two marketplaces, because of how Thumbtack handles the homeowner's phone number. That limit is set out in full on the home page, and it is worth reading before you assume an instant alert puts you straight on the phone to the customer.
It watches the lead notification emails the marketplaces already send, and turns them into a text with the details and a phone call that rings you on a job site. It is not built yet — the parsing works, the texting and calling costs money and is not worth paying for until contractors say this is a problem worth fixing.
It is not affiliated with Thumbtack, it cannot fix anything inside your Thumbtack account, and it cannot get you a refund on a lead. It is a second, independent pair of eyes on the same email, for people whose first pair has let them down.
What stopped — texts, push, email, or all of it — how long it went on, and what it cost you. Whether the answer for you turns out to be a setting, a support ticket or something like this product, I want to hear the real version.
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.