You buy a lead. You pay for it before you have spoken to a single homeowner. Then you call, and it is the wrong town, or the wrong job, or three other guys already got the same name. You paid for that.
Meanwhile a real homeowner texted your business line an hour ago. They found you on their own. That lead was free. And it is the one you missed because you were on a roof.
This is the trade most general contractors make without meaning to. They spend cash chasing cold leads while warm ones walk out the back door. Let us do the math on both.
What the regulators actually found
This is not a forum rumor. The Federal Trade Commission took HomeAdvisor, the company behind Angi, to task over the leads it sold. Two findings matter most for you.
First, the leads did not match. In the FTC's words, “while HomeAdvisor represents that services providers only will receive leads matching the types of services they provide and their preferred geographic area, many of them do not.” You pay for a kitchen remodel in your zip code. You get a handyman call two counties over.
Second, they oversold the payoff. The FTC said “HomeAdvisor told service providers that its leads resulted in actual home improvement jobs at rates higher than HomeAdvisor's own data supported.” The close rate they sold you was better on paper than in their own files.
The complaint traces these claims back to at least mid-2014. This was not a bad month. It ran for years.
The refund tells you the scale
When the dust settled, the FTC pushed out $3 million in refunds to contractors. That came as over 110,000 refund checks.
Sit with that number. A hundred and ten thousand contractors got money back because the leads they bought were not what they were sold. That is not a few unlucky guys. That is the model.
What a bought lead really costs
Cost per lead sounds small until you do the division. You do not pay per job won. You pay per lead, up front, before you have spoken to a soul. Knock off the ones that were the wrong trade, the wrong town, or already cold, and the real cost of each lead that becomes a job climbs fast.
The bigger the job, the more a platform charges for the lead. A remodel lead costs more than a small repair. So the work you most want to win is the work that costs you the most to buy.
Now look at the other column. The homeowner who texted your line found you for free. Your only cost there is answering before they give up and call the next name.
Why answering first wins the job
The owners who do this for a living are blunt about it. Steve, a Californian handyman with twenty years in, puts it plainly in an interview. “The number one mistake people in this business make is not answering their phone.”
He goes further. “The first person that answers the phone professionally will get 99% of the business.” Not the cheapest, not the closest, just the first to answer.
That lines up with how homeowners actually shop. They do not call one contractor and wait by the window. They work down the list. The first useful reply usually gets the job. Get back to a lead within the hour and you are far more likely to turn it into real work than the owner who waits half a day. That is directional, but the shape is right.
We dig into the real targets in how fast to reply to leads. The short version: minutes beat hours, and seconds beat minutes.
The catch with answering your own
Here is the honest problem. The free lead only wins if you actually catch it. And you are the contractor. Your hands are full.
Steve names this too. “The one downside is that you have to do all the work yourself.” You are the estimator, the crew, and the front desk, all in one truck. The phone competes with the tools, and the tools usually win.
So the warm free lead hits voicemail. By the time you climb down and call back, they booked someone who picked up. You did not lose on price or skill. You lost on speed, on the one lead that cost you nothing. More on that exact trap in missing the call while you are on the job.
Where SvarKlar fits
SvarKlar is built to win the free column for you. It is the receptionist for your inbound leads.
When a text, a web form, or a direct message comes in, it replies in seconds, day or night. Miss a call, and it texts that caller right back before they move on. It asks the questions your jobs need, the location, the scope, the urgency. Then it books the job or sets a callback, and anything urgent or unclear goes straight to you with the full story already gathered.
What it does best is the written side. It replies by text and web in seconds, qualifies, books, and hands you the clean version. That is the part most owners are too busy to do well, and it is the part that turns a free lead into a paid job.
If you want the longer walk-through, see the AI receptionist guide and how SvarKlar works.
Buy leads, answer your own, or both
This is not a vow to never buy a lead again. Paid platforms can fill a slow week. The point is the order of operations.
Catch every free lead first. Those are the warmest and the cheapest you will ever get. Once you are sure not one of them is slipping to voicemail, then weigh whether paid leads earn their cost on top. Most owners have it backwards. They pay for cold names while warm ones die in the inbox.
The free leads are not really free, though. They cost you a fast reply, and being the contractor, that is the one thing you cannot spare in the moment. That is the gap SvarKlar fills. We also cover the close cousin of this problem, the trade where one owner has to do everything, in the one-owner trap.
The rest of our guides for your trade live in the general contractor resource hub, including how price-shoppers eat your phone time in price-shopper phone leads.
A hundred and ten thousand contractors got a check because the lead they bought was not the lead they were sold. The one already texting your line is exactly what it looks like. A real homeowner, in your area, who wants your trade. It just needs an answer before the next guy gives it one.
Want to see how fast your inbound leads would get one? Book a call, or see how the service works first.