For contractors · lead costs
Nobody will tell you what a lead costs
We went looking for one honest answer to the question every Fairfield County heating and insulation contractor asks before signing up to anything: what does a lead actually cost, and what does a booked job cost once you count the ones that went nowhere. We could not find it. Not for Angi, not for Modernize, not for Thumbtack. None of the three publishes a price for an HVAC lead.
This page is what is actually documented, what is only a marketing blog’s estimate, and the arithmetic to run on your own invoices instead of ours. We sell something too, and we say where we are the wrong choice.
The one documented figure
A regulator, not the platform, published it
In 2023 the Federal Trade Commission ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2m and stop marketing its leads to contractors deceptively. The order states the annual membership fee contractors were charged. That number is the only platform price in this market that comes from a primary source rather than from someone selling marketing services.
The comparison to be careful with: a membership fee and a one-time seat are not the same kind of charge, and Angi’s fee buys access to national volume across every trade. What is fair to say is that one of these two numbers is knowable before you commit, and the other took a federal enforcement action to get on the record. FTC order against HomeAdvisor, January 2023
What each platform actually discloses
Not what an agency blog estimates. What the company itself, or a regulator, has put in writing about its own prices.
| Platform | Published per-lead price | What is on the record |
|---|---|---|
| Angi Leads / Angi Pro | Not published | A membership fee of $287.99 a year is documented — not by Angi, but by the Federal Trade Commission, which sued HomeAdvisor over how it sold leads to contractors and stated the figure in its 2023 order. No current Angi rate card for HVAC or insulation leads is published anywhere we can find. |
| Modernize | Not published | Modernize says on its own site that it prices leads dynamically, by what it predicts the lead is worth, rather than from a rate card. It markets HVAC leads as exclusive and delivered in real time. It publishes no dollar figure, for either the shared or the exclusive tier. |
| Thumbtack | Not published | Thumbtack’s own help centre states plainly that there are no fixed lead prices: the cost varies by job value, by market and by how many contractors are available. That is the company’s stated position, not an omission. |
| Google Local Services Ads | Variable, reported after the fact | You set a budget and pay per lead, and Google reports what you spent after the fact. The per-lead cost is genuinely variable rather than hidden. Marketing agencies publish national HVAC estimates that disagree with each other by more than double, and we found no Connecticut figure at all. |
| Calora | $99 once, per ZIP | $99 once, for one ZIP, forever. It is on the seat page and on the payment screen before you pay. Your first verified lead is free, and there is no membership fee, no per-lead charge and no renewal. |
Checked 27 September 2026 against each company’s own pages and the FTC order. On a narrow screen the table scrolls sideways. Every figure on this page is listed on our sources page.
The arithmetic, on your numbers not ours
Because no per-lead price is published, any cost-per-booked-job figure we printed would be a guess dressed as a fact. So here is the calculation instead. Pull your last three months of platform invoices and your own job log, and fill in two numbers you already have.
- Everything the platform charged you over those three months. Membership fee included, not just the per-lead charges. Most contractors leave the membership out and understate the total.
- Jobs you actually booked from those leads and finished. Not quoted, not scheduled. Booked and invoiced.
- Divide the first by the second. That is your real cost per booked job, and it is the only version of this number that is true about your company rather than about an average.
Then add the part that has no invoice line. Count the hours you and your estimator spent on leads that were sold to three or four competitors at the same time: the drive out, the roof measured, the quote written, the follow-up calls that went unanswered because somebody cheaper got there first. On a shared lead that work happens whether or not you win. It is usually the largest cost on the page and it never appears on a statement.
We are not going to tell you what that comes to. We do not have your numbers, and the industry estimates we found — per-lead ranges, how many competitors a lead is sold to, close rates — come almost entirely from companies selling marketing services to contractors, not from the platforms or any regulator. They may well be right. They are not evidence, so they are not on this page as figures.
What we sell, stated plainly
Calora gives a Fairfield County homeowner a free heat-loss report: an estimate, built from their house’s year, size and fuel, of which part of the house is losing the most heat and roughly what it costs them a year. Then that homeowner goes to exactly one contractor — the one who owns their ZIP.
- $99 once, for one of 15 ZIPs. No membership, no per-lead charge, no renewal. When a ZIP is taken it is taken.
- The first verified lead is free. You see the format and the homeowner before you decide whether the territory is worth anything to you.
- The homeowner arrives already diagnosed. They have read, in writing, that their attic is costing them a specific number of dollars a year. That is a different conversation from a form fill with a phone number on it.
- 36,783 oil-heated homes sit across the 15 ZIPs we cover, per US Census figures — 5,649 of them in Ridgefield 06877 alone.
Where we are the wrong choice
Three honest cases, and we would rather you read them now than find out after paying us.
You need volume this week
We are a young company with a small number of homeowner reports and no seats sold yet. One ZIP produces the leads that one ZIP produces. If your crews are idle on Monday and you need calls on Tuesday, a marketplace or Google Local Services Ads will put more names in front of you faster than we will, and you should use them.
You want exclusivity and somebody else already has the ZIP
Exclusivity is the whole product, which means every seat we sell closes a door on somebody. Modernize also markets HVAC leads as exclusive, on its own site, and it has far more volume than we do. If the ZIP you want is gone here, that is a real reason to look at them rather than wait for us.
You price on measured numbers only
Our report is an estimate and we say so on it, to the homeowner, in writing. Nobody has been in the house with a blower door. If you will not quote a job without measured data, you will still need your own visit, and the report is a starting point rather than a scope.
Calora is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is the reason this page says “not published” five times instead of quoting a number we cannot stand behind — and the reason we will correct it the day one of those companies publishes a rate card.
See which ZIPs are still unsold
Fifteen ZIPs, one seat each, $99 once. Applying is free and the first verified lead costs nothing. Every seat page names the town, the number of oil-heated homes in it, and whether it is taken.
See the 15 Fairfield County seatsA homeowner instead? What heating oil at $5.91 a gallon does to one winter.