What do contractor leads actually cost?

Three different things get sold as a "lead", and they are not priced the same way. One is an introduction you buy one at a time. One is a monthly subscription to a list. The arithmetic that tells you which is cheaper is not complicated, but nobody publishes it side by side — so here it is, with every number sourced to the page it came from and the day it was read.

We sell one of these things, so read this knowing that. Everything below about a competitor is a figure they publish about themselves, quoted as they wrote it. We have not audited any of it.

1. Pay-per-lead: you buy the introduction

Shared-lead marketplaces and brokers charge per lead, and the same lead is normally sold to several contractors at once. Published figures, read on 9 August 2026:

What it is	Published price per lead	Where that figure comes from
Shared home-services leads (HomeAdvisor / Angi-class marketplaces)	$20–$150 per lead	PermitGrab’s published cost breakdown, permitgrab.com, read 9 August 2026. Their figure about third parties, not ours.
Lead brokers	$150–$300 per lead	Lone Star Leads’ own site, lonestarleads.com, read 9 August 2026. Also a vendor’s figure about third parties.

Those two ranges do not agree, and we are not going to pretend they do — they are two vendors describing someone else’s pricing to make a point. Treat them as the shape of the market, not as quotes. The number that matters is the one on your own invoice.

The arithmetic that decides it. A per-lead price is not a cost per customer. Divide by the share you actually win:

cost per won job = price per lead ÷ your close rate
Worked example, not a measurement: at a 1-in-20 close rate a $40 shared lead costs $800 of lead spend per customer; at 1-in-10 it costs $400. We have not measured anybody’s close rate, ours included, and neither the $40 nor the close rate is a claim — put your own two numbers in, because they are the only ones true for you.

2. Permit-data subscriptions: you buy the list

The other model charges a flat monthly fee for permits filed with the city, whoever pulled them. Nobody is introducing you to anyone; you are buying the record and making the call yourself. Prices read from each company’s own public pages on 9 August 2026:

Service	Published price	Coverage / tiers, as published
Permit Verdict (us)	$99/mo shared · $299/mo exclusive	7 metros. $99 is shared — other contractors in your trade can buy the same metro. $299 is the tier that closes a metro and trade to everyone else, and only one contractor can hold it.
PermitGrab	$149/mo, single tier	Coverage counts published on their own pages range from 444 to 1,061 cities. 14-day trial, no card. permitgrab.com/pricing, read 9 August 2026
The Permit Sheet	Free · $49/mo · $149/mo	17 cities. The free tier shows the same permits on a 7-day delay; paid tiers are real time. thepermitsheet.com/pricing, read 9 August 2026
Lone Star Leads	$99/mo Starter · $150/mo Pro	Texas. Starter is one county plus surrounding; Pro up to four counties. lonestarleads.com, read 9 August 2026
Permit Ledger	$39/mo	26 paid cities, residential permits only by their own stated choice. permitledger.com, read 9 August 2026
Bidro	$59.99/mo contractor · $99.99/mo supplier	Austin live; other metros listed as coming soon. gobidro.com, read 9 August 2026
Construction Monitor	Not published	No price appears on their site; quotes are custom. A competitor’s comparison page states that quotes typically start around $200–$800/mo — that is Permit Ledger’s characterisation, read 9 August 2026, not a figure Construction Monitor publishes.

If any figure above has changed, or we have read one wrong, email support@permitverdict.com and we will correct it and date the correction.

3. The only arithmetic that compares the two models

A subscription has no price per lead until you divide it by how many permits actually land in your feed. That divisor is a month of a city’s filings in one trade — not one introduction — and it changes every single day.

Which is exactly why there is no number printed here. A permit count typed into a web page is wrong by the time a search engine indexes it, and you would be right to distrust every other number on the page after finding one. So the divisor below is fetched when you press the button, from the same live count that gates our own checkout. It is the feed, run and counted, not an estimate.

Work out the per-permit cost for your own territory

Pick a metro and a trade. We run the feed, count what comes out over the last 30 days, and divide our price by it.

Two honest caveats on that figure. It counts permits, not jobs you will win — the close-rate division above applies here exactly as it does to a purchased lead. And a permit is a filing, not a guarantee that the work happens or that nobody else has already been hired.

What $99/mo does and does not buy

Shared means shared. $99 buys the full live list for one metro and one trade. Other contractors in your trade can buy the same metro. Only the $299 tier closes a metro and trade, and only one contractor can hold it at a time.
No refunds. We do not offer refunds, and we are not going to invent a money-back guarantee to win an argument on a pricing page. You cancel yourself from the billing portal whenever you like and the charges stop. That is the promise we can actually keep.
We refuse thin territories. Below 12 permits in 30 days we will not sell a metro and trade at any price — the calculator above will tell you so rather than quoting you a cost per permit for a feed that is not worth working.
Fields vary by city, and we say which. Every city publishes a different set. Some report a declared job value on most permits, some on a minority; some name the contracting business on the permit, some never do. We will tell you plainly what your city publishes before you buy — ask at support@permitverdict.com if it decides the purchase, and the free preview shows you the real rows either way.
No homeowner phone numbers, ever. These are property records. We publish property activity — address, work described, declared value, dates, status — and business information about licensed contractors where the city and the licensing board publish it. We do not map occupants or owners.

See it before you decide

The free preview is the product, not a mock-up: five live rows for any metro and trade, no account, no card, no email.

Show me the permits in my city — free →

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