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← Blog Scoreboard · homeadvisor vs thumbtack vs angi ranked worst to best 2
September 30, 2026 · 5 min read
Three platforms, one bill a month, and a phone that does not ring. You paid HomeAdvisor, or Angi, or Thumbtack, and the money left on time every month. The work never arrived on the same schedule.
Here is the ranking, worst to best, and then the part nobody ever ranks. HomeAdvisor comes last, Angi sits above it, and Thumbtack is the least bad of the three. That is why I built you a free app that fixes exactly this problem.
Start with what the money actually bought. A man who stayed on Angi long enough to add it up put his own number on it in public.
“Just cancelled my Angi. Spent $4,500 and got 6 leads! Biggest waste of money ive used for advertising.”
Kept in writing on this page. The address above is text, not a door.
Four thousand five hundred dollars is a truck payment for a year, and six leads is not a week of work. I am not going to pretend there is some clever way to claw that back out of them. You can't get that money back. But you can stop sending more after it.
HomeAdvisor ranks dead last because it charges you before anybody answers. The fee lands when the contact is handed over, not when a homeowner picks up the phone. Another man did that arithmetic out loud on his first hundred dollars.
“I just paid $100 on Home Advisor and already got 2 $35 worthless leads.”
Two of those at thirty-five dollars each, and nobody on the other end of either one. Fighting for the credit takes longer than the job would have taken. You can't make them admit the lead was fake. But you can call the homeowner yourself.
The next man counted a whole morning out, itemized, on one platform.
“I'm done with them. Today I got 4 gutter cleaning leads. 3 I can't reach, 1 already has someone coming out and doesn't want another quote right now. I'm out $118 dollars for nothing and it's only noon! And....I haven't even received ANY type of lead in over 3 weeks.”
Kept in writing on this page. The address above is text, not a door.
One hundred eighteen dollars gone before lunch, then three weeks of nothing behind it. That is not bad luck, it is the product working the way it was built. The same request goes out to a stack of men, the price per man drops as the stack grows, and nobody on that pile can charge what the work is worth. You can't split a $100 ceiling fan four ways. But you can keep the hundred.
Angi lands in the middle, and the reason is the paperwork, not the leads. You can walk away from Thumbtack in an afternoon, while Angi holds you to a year and then renews you on its own.
Thumbtack ranks best of the three, and best of three is still renting. It charges when a customer reaches out instead of holding you to a year, and some men genuinely make it pay.
“Thumbtack is my #1 lead generator. $125 per lead is not happening. I pay anywhere from $8 to $40 per lead. You have to set limits and preferences”
That is a fair account and it belongs in any ranking that means anything. He set his limits and he is winning on a platform. He is also still paying eight to forty dollars for permission to talk to somebody in his own town.
And the man standing next to him on that request is not the problem. Another contractor asked the only question that matters about the model, then answered it himself in the next breath.
“Please tell me why a customer writes to 4 pros in the same time? Everybody is charged! Thumbtack wins! And some people reported it was about $150! What a business!”
Kept in writing on this page. The address above is text, not a door.
Everybody is charged is the sentence worth keeping. And she did not write to four men to make your week harder. She was told for twenty years to get three quotes and never take the first price, and the outfit that trained her is the same outfit that sold her name to you and to the three men beside you. You can't blame her for being short with you on the phone. But you can be the one who isn't in a hurry.
I spent seventeen years as an insurance adjuster, reading policies written by people who never expected to be read. So I have a fixed view of systems this size: they do not bend and they do not owe you a hearing. The machine that decides who gets found in your town is the same kind of machine. You can't beat Google, but you can make it choose you.
The busiest shops in your town are not buying any of these leads. They own something that produces the call before a marketplace hears about it, and they followed a recipe to build it. It is Google's recipe for your trade, not mine.
I studied top-ranking map companies across more than 900 different types of businesses and over 100 cities to find these exact winning recipes. My complete book, Cracking the Matrix, is on Amazon at amazon.com/dp/B0H944HC4T for anyone who wants every detail.
You have been paying three companies and hoping one of them turns into work, and not one of them will hand you a number you can check. You can't keep paying and praying. But you can start counting.
Your own file starts calibrating the moment you type two things. Enter your website address and your exact trade. No credit card, no pitch, and no phone call you have to survive.
YOUR TRADE'S CALCULATED TOP MAPS RECIPE
Don't Pay Rent on Shared Leads
You can't buy an exclusive lead from an app. But you can build your own pipeline. Enter your trade to get started.
Where you stand
Your own numbers, next to the Top Maps Recipe.
Every number on your side was taken off your own business while you were answering.
A national average tells you something the one rival down the street never can. The shop outranking you today might be lucky, or spending money he does not have. National numbers show what the machine actually rewards, in every town at once.
Look again at the man who added up his year.
“Just cancelled my Angi. Spent $4,500 and got 6 leads! Biggest waste of money ive used for advertising.”
Four thousand five hundred dollars bought him a spot on a page he did not own, for exactly as long as he kept paying for it. The page that ranked belonged to Angi, and so did every call that ever came off it. You can't rent the page that ranks. But you can own one.
Experience is the first letter, and it is the one you already have. Experience is your hands on the pipe, your boots in the crawlspace, the thing you fixed this morning that no marketing department could describe.
You are not going to turn into a writer, and nothing here is asking you to. You can't pipe a bathroom through a keyboard. But you can show the copper.
Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust are the other three, and they are earned the same way. You answer the questions homeowners in your trade actually type, honestly, in your own words. Showing how you solved a hard one counts for more than any amount of paid clicks.
People also ask: is Thumbtack better than HomeAdvisor. Slightly, and only on the billing. Both of them charge you before anybody has agreed to hire anybody, which makes them the same product wearing different paperwork.
You are not going to outrank a national brand across a whole state this year, and you do not need to. You can't own the whole county. But you can own your zip code.
Tap the letters on the scoreboard and each one opens up. Every letter tells you what that signal is and how it gets sent. That is the whole path, laid out in order, with nothing to buy inside it.
The scoreboard is a glass box on purpose, because the rules keep moving. You might see views today, or views yesterday, stacking toward views over time. Those are your numbers and nobody else's.
Owning your traffic is what changes the arithmetic. When calls arrive on their own you can hold a crew through January, and the money that used to leave every month stays where you earned it.
Building your own authority compounds. Renting never has. In my book, Sick of Winning: The Local Business Owner's Guide to Getting Found on Google, at amazon.com/dp/B0H8FC9FMH, I lay out what it looks like when the system picks you every day. You stop wondering where next week's work is coming from.
Your app is already built, because you entered your trade and your website earlier. Tap it, save it to your Home Screen, and it is installed. There is nothing to download and nothing to set up.
Five minutes, and no technical skill anywhere in it. You open your phone, you tap save to Home Screen, and that is the whole job.
One dollar is the entire test drive. For a dollar the system builds a full Content family of pages with Schema markup underneath them, which is the language search engines read. Those pages tie to each other and prove you really do the trade you say you do.
Seeds of Inspiration are measured, not guessed. Every one of them is a title already ranking somewhere in your trade, nationwide. You pick a seed and the system writes from it.
Every article comes to your thumb before a word of it goes live. You read it on your phone and approve it, or you tell the system what to change and read the next draft.
It wears your brand, never ours. Your colors, your logo, your business name, front and center. It attaches to your own website so a homeowner never sees a middleman standing between the two of you.
The Daily Harvest is the part that keeps sending. Ninety-nine dollars a month, grandfathered for the first thousand owners before the rate goes to four hundred ninety-nine, and it never moves again once you are inside it. That engine sends daily proof of real Experience and Trust instead of one burst a quarter.
July is when a slow January gets fixed, and by the time January is slow it is far too late to fix it. You can't make January ring like June. But you can build it in July.
You can feed it just by talking, on the drive home. Put the phone on the dash and tell Sofia about the job you solved that afternoon, the strange one that took two trips and a second part. Thirty minutes of talking is a month of pages.
Sofia sorts what you said into a shape search engines understand. She finds the main Pillar article buried in your story and builds the supporting pieces around it, then queues it up for your thumb.
If you do not feel like talking, the photos carry it. Open your Seeds, pick a job from last year, and upload two to five site photos to drop straight into the article.
You are one truck and a phone. The outfit down the road has a floor of people whose only job is being seen, and that gap is not closing on your payroll. You can't hire a marketing department. But you can copy theirs.
One video a month sets the whole thing in stone. Upload a short clip explaining a project and the system builds the thumbnail, publishes it to your channel, and pulls stills out of it to decorate the written pieces.
The progression stops wherever you decide to stop it. The walkthrough videos are free. Saving the app unlocks your Glove Box and your seeds. A dollar proves the mechanics on your own trade, and nothing turns on until you tap it.
Which brings it back to where this started. You have three companies ranked worst to best in front of you, and a year of receipts saying the ranking barely matters. You can't find a better middleman. But you can go around all of them.
Your app — it gets you found
That’s not a picture of an app. That’s yours — the one that gets you found. Your name, your colors, already built.
I spent seventeen years as a public insurance adjuster, fighting the giants for people who rarely had the same tools the giants had. Since 1988, I have also been building systems designed for mass production.
Just your website address. No credit card. No sales call. No pitch.
Pop the hood.
Under the Hood — the whole machine
For those who like to geek out on new information — we took a look under the hood. Tap a section, then any question inside it.
Content Architecture3
Why does scanning the country for proven titles beat writing something fresh and local?
Because we're not guessing what to write. Hunter scans your trade across the country and brings back the exact blog titles already booking customers, town after town. By the time a topic reaches your business, it's been proven to work somewhere else first. Local guessing is a coin flip; proven-everywhere is a head start.
Would you rather publish what you HOPE ranks, or what's already proven to?
How does "gravity" on a title predict whether it'll actually rank for you?
Gravity is simple: it measures how widely a topic is already winning across the country. The more places it's pulling customers in, the heavier it pulls, and the more likely it ranks for you too. A topic winning all over isn't luck, it's a pattern. We hand you the heaviest hitters first, never the leftovers.
If a topic's already booking jobs all over the country, what are the odds it works in your area?
Why does one pillar with its clusters beat the same number of standalone posts?
Google trusts depth, not scatter. One main pillar page with its supporting clusters all linking together tells Google you're THE authority on that subject in your trade — a web, not a pile of lonely posts. Standalone pieces compete with each other for the same spot; a cluster makes every piece stronger.
Do you want twenty-five articles shouting alone, or twenty-five backing each other up?
The Sophia System4
How does Sophia turn a 20-minute voice memo into a full pillar and its clusters?
You just talk — about a job, a weird customer question, a "you won't believe what happened today." Sophia listens, asks questions back, and pulls the lessons out of your story. Each lesson becomes a pillar plus the supporting questions people actually search for. One ramble turns into a month of content only your business could've written.
What if the best content you'll ever publish is already in your head?
Why does talking it out beat typing up a brief?
Because you talk like someone who's actually done the work — and that's exactly what Google now rewards: real experience it can't fake. A typed brief is sterile; your spoken story carries the details, the proof, the voice. And it's effortless — your drive home becomes the easiest content session you'll ever do.
Who knows your trade better — a writer who Googled it, or you who lived it?
How does Sophia handle your Google reviews?
She keeps an eye on your Google Business Profile around the clock. The moment a new review lands — good or bad — she flags it and writes back a reply in your own voice, the way you'd say it. You read it, and if you like it, you tap once to post. No review sits ignored for three days while your top rival looks more responsive than you.
When a customer takes the time to review you, how fast do you want to be the one who answers?
Does Sophia actually remember me, or reset every time?
One Sophia, just for your business, for as long as you're with us — and she remembers every conversation. She's not starting over each morning; she's getting sharper about your business every single day. That's why she can greet you before coffee and already know what's going on in your territory.
Would you rather a tool that forgets you, or a chief of staff who knows you better every week?
Publishing Velocity2
How does daily harvesting keep up at four or five posts a day without choking?
Most "post more" plans choke because a human has to feed them. Daily harvest feeds itself — from the proven seed bank Hunter fills and from your own stories — so the queue never runs dry. Scaling to four or five a day isn't five times the work; the machine just keeps eating, always at a pace Google rewards.
What's the point of "post daily" if YOU'RE the bottleneck?
Why bank the overflow instead of just publishing everything at once?
On a big day you might dump fifteen ideas at once. Google won't let you publish all fifteen in one shot without a penalty, so we bank the extra and drip it, up to a few a day, for weeks. Your burst of energy becomes steady momentum instead of a flash that fizzles. The throttle is a governor, not a cap.
Would you rather flame out in a week, or out-publish your top rival for a month straight?
Google's Algorithm2
What do schema, cross-linking, and click-to-call actually do for E-E-A-T?
These are the things under the hood you'd never see and never want to touch — Weaver handles them. Schema tells Google exactly what your page is. Cross-links prove depth and authority. Click-to-call turns a reader into a phone call. Together they hit Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — the four signals Google grades you on — automatically, on every post.
Want to hand-code that on every article forever, or never think about it again?
Why does the uniqueness test stop your own pages from cannibalizing each other?
If two of your pages say the same thing, they fight each other for the same spot and BOTH lose. Every article clears a 100 percent uniqueness test before it ever reaches you, so your pages lift each other instead of tripping each other up. Tools that spin near-duplicate content quietly sink the very sites that use them.
What good is publishing more if your own pages are competing against each other?
Competitive Intelligence3
How does Hunter watch competitors across the country?
Hunter only watches what's already public — what's ranking, what's being published, what's changing — the same signals any customer could see. It's not hacking and it's not sneaking; it's paying attention everywhere, at a steady, respectful pace. Just attention, at a scale and speed you could never spare the time for yourself.
When's the last time you had time to study every competitor in town?
Why does answering your top rival's every move compound your lead?
your top rival gets a bad review, raises prices, or publishes an article — and Hunter flags it to Sophia, who has your response out before you'd even have noticed. Do that every single day and the gap doesn't just hold, it widens. Small daily counters stack into a lead they can't catch.
How far ahead would you be if you answered every move the day it happened?
How do you out-publish your top rival without getting penalized?
If they publish one, you publish two; if they publish ten, we step it up — but always at a pace Google rewards, never one it punishes. The system is throttled on purpose to protect your rise, not to game the algorithm. You close the gap on offense without ever tripping a penalty on defense.
What happens to your top rival when, no matter what they do, you're always a step ahead — and never at risk?
Authority Multiplication3
How does Weaver make ten articles feel like a hundred to Google?
After a post goes live, Weaver shows up and links it to all the right siblings, so Google sees a connected web of authority instead of ten lonely pages. The links pass strength around, lifting the whole site at once. Ten well-woven articles outrank a hundred disconnected ones.
Would you rather have a hundred scattered posts, or ten that make each other stronger?
Why does one monthly video create a permanent citation back to your site?
You shoot a quick clip on your phone. We turn it into a pillar, push it to YouTube, and cite your business's site in the description. That's a brand-new link from the most authoritative video site on the planet — every single month, stacking up. We haven't found anyone else packaging this for the local guy; agencies charge thousands for far less.
What's a fresh citation from Google's own network, every month, worth to your business?
How do photos turn into more clicks?
When someone's searching at two in the morning, they click the result with the image — every time. Add your job snapshots and before-and-afters, and each one becomes a custom thumbnail on your post. So you're the one they tap, not the plain blue link sitting above you.
Two results side by side — which gets the click, the one with a picture or the one without?
Daily Intelligence3
What's in the Presidential Daily Briefing every morning?
Every morning, at the time you choose, Sophia’s built to hand you the state of your territory: ground gained overnight, views that rolled in while you slept, conversations on your site, what your top rival did, and exactly how we already countered it. your top rival wakes up to yesterday's news; you wake up to today's strategy. It's not magic — it's just watching everything, every day, and reporting only what matters.
Who wins the day — the one guessing, or the one briefed before coffee?
Why a daily briefing instead of a dashboard you have to go check?
Because a dashboard makes YOU do the work — log in, dig around, try to figure out what changed. The briefing flips that: Sophia does the digging and brings you only what moved, in plain English, at the time you pick. No login maze, no charts to decode. You hear what matters and get on with your day.
Would you rather hunt for the numbers, or have them handed to you before coffee?
Can I act on the briefing, or do I just read it?
You act on it, right there. See a competitor move you want answered? Tell Sophia and she sets it in motion. Want to send your tech a job? Say "tell Marcus to handle it" and she surfaces the message to him. The briefing isn't a report you file away — it's the desk you run your day from.
What's a morning report worth if you can't do anything with it on the spot?
Ecosystem Effects2
Why does a $1 start beat normal software pricing?
A dollar removes every reason to say "let me think about it." You're not deciding whether to spend ninety-nine dollars — you're deciding to spend a buck and SEE. By the time the machine's been running on your site for a few days, the value is obvious and the decision makes itself. Friction kills software signups; a dollar erases it.
What's left to think about when the risk is one dollar?
What do the first people in actually get?
You get me. The early ones are the people I build around — you tell me what is missing and I go and build it, and you watch it land. What I am not going to do is print a price on this page that I have not settled yet. When the terms for the early ones are set, they will be written in plain English and you will read them before anything changes.
Would you rather have a number on a page, or the man who picks up the phone?
Foundational Philosophy3
Why call it a production machine instead of a tool?
A tool is a thing you operate. You pick it up, you do the work, you put it down — and nothing happens while you sleep. This is built the other way round. It works the shift you cannot work: it writes, it watches the shop above you, and it keeps the score. You read what it made and you say yes or no. That is the whole of your job in it.
Do you want one more thing to operate, or something that runs the shift you are not there for?
Why did one guy on a balcony build this instead of a big company?
Because the big companies aren't building it for you. They chase the franchises and the chains with ad budgets bigger than your whole revenue. I built this for the little guy getting beaten by those budgets — lean, focused, no boardroom. One person who's done nothing but build production machines can out-engineer a committee any day.
Who do you trust more — a committee selling to everyone, or the guy who built this for exactly you?
This is one machine — so why is the whole crew (Hunter, Sophia, Weaver) better than separate tools?
Because they hand off to each other. Hunter finds what's working and what your top rival is doing. Sophia acts on it — books the job, answers the review, briefs you each morning. Weaver perfects it after it publishes, weaving your posts into one web of authority. Five separate tools can't talk to each other; one crew never drops the ball between them.
Do you want five logins that ignore each other, or one crew that passes the work down the line?
Ranking Thumbtack against HomeAdvisor comes down to who holds the billing. Is Thumbtack better than HomeAdvisor? Thumbtack ranks slightly better because it charges as you go instead of holding you to a year, so a bad month stays a bad month instead of becoming a bad year. You still pay eight to fifty dollars to reach somebody who may never answer. HomeAdvisor ranks dead last because it stacks a shared-lead fee on top of an annual commitment and a sales rep who does not stop calling.
The federal government took HomeAdvisor to task over how it described its leads. Why did Angie's List get sued? The Federal Trade Commission brought an action against HomeAdvisor, which operates alongside Angi under the same owner, and it ended in an order to pay up to seven million two hundred thousand dollars back to service businesses. The complaint alleged the company misled contractors about where its leads came from and how good they were, telling them prospects were ready to hire when many of the contacts were unvetted, invalid, or sold to several competing pros at the same time.
What is better than Angi is anything you actually own. What's better than Angi? Building your own presence on the local map beats renting leads, because the asset stays yours when you stop paying. A library of honest answers in your trade, plus real reviews from real customers, is what a search engine reads when a homeowner in your town types your trade, and when it chooses you the call arrives on your phone with nobody invoicing you for your own name.
For most local trades, Angi's numbers do not survive the margin. Is Angi list worth it for contractors? For most local service businesses it is not, because the fees are high, the contacts are not exclusive, and the renewal is automatic. Add the cancellation fee and the hours spent chasing contacts who never agreed to anything, and the same money spent on visibility you own keeps working after you stop spending it.
One line sits under all four of those answers. The man quoting under you is not your enemy. He is you one worse year in, standing on the same request, paying the same fee to stand there. You can't be the cheapest. But you can be the obvious one.You can't win a race to the bottom. But you can leave it.
THE CLOSE
You know the order now. HomeAdvisor last, Angi in the middle, Thumbtack the least bad of the three, and the order was never the point. All three of them get paid the moment a homeowner fills in a form, whether or not you ever do a day's work.
The Blog Scoreboard is right here on this page. Pick your trade, enter your website address, and read the real numbers that decide who gets found in your town.
Get the app that gets you found — free to open
See where you actually stand, then save it to your phone. Everything else — the writing, the publishing, the getting found — happens inside the app.
