The pricing models
Most comparisons focus on price. The more useful question is what you are being charged for, because that determines who absorbs the loss when a lead does not work out.
You pay for a contact. Whether they answer, whether they are in your area, whether the job is one you want, whether you win it. All of that risk is yours. The seller is paid the moment the contact is delivered, so their incentive is volume.
This is the standard model and it can work, but only if your close rate is high enough. It punishes anyone slow to respond, which is most contractors who are also doing the work.
You pay when an appointment is set. Better, because a contact who never answers costs you nothing. But an appointment is not revenue. No-shows, tire-kickers and jobs you quote and lose are all billable under this model.
The incentive shifts to booking as many appointments as possible, which is closer to what you want but not the same as it.
You pay when you get paid. A lead that ghosts, an appointment that no-shows, a quote that loses, all cost you nothing. The risk sits with whoever is providing the leads, which means they only make money if they send you work you actually win.
It is rare, because it requires confidence in the quality of what is being sent. Anyone charging per closed sale is betting on their own performance.
A $299 start deposit returned as credit, then $29 per won job. No monthly fee, no per-lead charge. The first 20 booked jobs are free. On a typical home services ticket, $29 is a fraction of one percent of the job, and you only ever pay it on work you won and got paid for.
Pricing shapes incentives, and incentives show up in what you actually receive. Paid per lead means volume, so quality control is weak by design. Paid per booking means appointments, including ones that were never going to close. Paid per closed sale means the provider carries the loss on anything that does not convert.
You can predict what you will get from any lead source by asking what it gets paid for. It is a more reliable guide than anything on the sales page.
Per-closed-sale sounds strictly better, so it is worth being skeptical about the details. Ask how a closed sale is defined, who decides when one happened, what stops it being claimed on a job you sourced yourself, and whether there is a minimum charge that quietly makes it a monthly fee.
For clarity on ours: you start with a $299 deposit that comes back as credit, not cash, when you win 5 of your first 20 booked jobs, and $29 is charged on jobs we booked that you closed and got paid for. No monthly fee. The first 20 booked jobs are worked free, so you can see your own numbers before paying for a won job.
Because it only works if the leads convert. A provider charging per closed sale makes nothing on a bad month, which means they carry the risk that per-lead sellers pass to you. It requires either confidence in the quality of the work or a willingness to lose money proving it.
That is the honest reason it is rare, and it is also the reason it is worth looking at. The pricing model tells you who is confident enough to be paid on results.
Different models are hard to compare directly, so convert everything to one number: cost per job actually won. Per lead, multiply the lead price by the number of leads it takes you to win one. Per booking, multiply the booking fee by bookings per win. Per closed sale it is simply the fee.
Only once everything is expressed that way can you see which is cheaper for your business. A $20 lead and a $150 booking fee can easily come out at the same real cost, and the headline prices tell you nothing about which.
The other axis is variance. Per-lead spending is fixed and your return is not, so a bad month costs you the full spend and returns little. Per-closed-sale spending moves with revenue, so a slow month costs proportionally less.
For a business with uneven cash flow, which describes most contractors, that predictability is worth real money on its own. A cost that only appears alongside revenue is much easier to carry than one that arrives whether or not the work did.
99BOLD answers every inquiry in seconds, qualifies it, quotes from your price list and books it. $29 when you win the job. Nothing when you don't. Your first 20 won jobs are free.
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