We Checked What Seven Lead Platforms Charge a UK Plumber. One Publishes a Full Price.

Last Updated on August 28, 2026

Every plumber has been told to compare the lead platforms before signing up. It is sensible advice that turns out to be almost impossible to follow, because most of these companies do not publish what they charge.

On 20 August 2026 we went to seven platforms that sell work to UK plumbers and looked only at what each one prints on its own website. No sales calls, no quotes, no third party blogs. Just the published price.

One of the seven publishes a fee schedule you can read before you ring anyone. Two publish no price at all.

The mistake: comparing the advertised price

The advertised price is the cheapest number a platform is willing to put in public. It is chosen to get you into the funnel, not to tell you what the year will cost.

Checkatrade advertises from £30 a month. Boiler Guide advertises from £6 a lead. Bark advertises £1.80 a credit. Each of those figures is true and each of them is the floor of a range whose ceiling is not published anywhere.

So the comparison most plumbers make is between three floors. That is not a comparison. It is a guess dressed up as research.

What each platform actually publishes

All figures below were read on the platforms’ own pages on 20 August 2026.

Two of the seven send you to a salesperson to find out the cost of the product. A third publishes a starting price and hides every tier above it.

The £30 that does not put you in search results

This is the single most useful thing we found, and it is on Checkatrade’s own trade support site rather than its sales pages.

Describing the Approved membership, Checkatrade states that Approved members do not appear in standard search results, and that you should not expect leads through location or trade searches. Approved members are found when a customer searches for their business name.

Read that again with a plumber’s head on. The entry tier is for customers who already know who you are. It is a verification badge, not a source of work. If the plan was to pay £30 a month and appear when someone in your town searches for a plumber, that is not what the £30 buys. The sales page sells Approved with the line “Appear in the UK’s No. 1 Trade Directory”. The trade support page says Approved members do not appear in standard search results. Both are Checkatrade’s own words, and the second is the one that decides whether your phone rings.

That is not a scandal. It is a legitimate product for a plumber who wants a vetted profile to point existing customers at. It only becomes a problem when someone signs a twelve month term expecting leads.

Who else buys your lead

On a pay per lead platform, the number that decides whether the model works is not the price. It is how many other plumbers get sent the same job.

Two platforms out of five publish a number, and we could find none on the public pages of the other three. Both of the two chose three. That tells you roughly what the industry considers normal, and it tells you that a £15 lead is really a £15 ticket to a three way race. If you win one in three, the job you land cost you £45 in lead fees, not £15.

We worked that arithmetic through properly in the leads trap. The short version is that cost per lead is the wrong number and cost per won job is the right one.

The contract, not the price, is what catches people

Checkatrade states that most memberships run on a fixed twelve month term, renew automatically every twelve months, and cannot normally be cancelled partway through. Its support page is explicit that cancelling your direct debit alone will not end the contract. Cancellation is by phone.

Rated People’s payment terms say that if you cancel a minimum term plan early they are entitled to invoice you for the fees to the end of that term, that plans auto renew unless you give fourteen working days’ notice, and that lead credits are not redeemable for cash and expire at the end of the billing period.

Which? Trusted Traders is a rolling contract with no end date and three months’ notice to cancel.

None of this is hidden. All of it is on public pages. Almost nobody reads it before the direct debit starts.

One platform on most comparison lists closed nearly three years ago

Local Heroes, the British Gas owned platform, stopped accepting jobs on 20 October 2023. It still appears in plenty of guides to finding plumbing work.

Use that as a test. If an article recommending lead platforms still lists Local Heroes, it was not checked before it was published, and neither were its prices.

A small detail that says a lot

Checkatrade’s April 2026 joining offer split its trade categories into four discount tiers. Roughly 65 categories were given the first two months free. Seven were not. Builder, carpenter, gardener and plumber got one month free. Roofer got half off two months. Handyman and painter and decorator got a quarter off four months. Plumbing sits in the group that was discounted least.

We cannot tell you why, and Checkatrade has not said. The obvious reading is that a platform discounts hardest where it needs more supply and least where trades are already queuing up. If that reading is right, plumbers have more negotiating room than they think, not less, because the platform needs plumbers less than it needs gardeners to believe it needs them.

Treat that as an inference, not a fact. But do ask for a better price. The worst outcome is the price you were going to pay anyway.

The thing that actually changed in 2026

On 20 April 2026 Checkatrade launched an app inside ChatGPT. A customer can describe a job and get either a list of vetted tradespeople or a fixed price they can book without leaving the chat. Checkatrade says it has more than 50,000 vetted trade businesses.

This is the part worth thinking about properly, because it changes what a directory is. For twenty years these platforms competed with your website for a Google result. Now one of them sits inside the tool a growing number of customers use instead of Google, and your website does not.

We are not going to tell you that means you must join, because nobody yet has data on how much work that app produces. What it does mean is that the question is no longer only what a lead costs. It is which platforms are becoming part of the layer that answers your customer’s question before they ever see a search result. That is the same argument we made in will AI recommend your plumbing business, and the platforms are now moving faster on it than most plumbers are.

What we would actually do

Sequenced the way we sequence everything, because paying for leads before your basics work is the most expensive order to do this in.

Start

Do not buy leads yet. A bought lead lands on your website, your Google profile and your phone manner. If those are weak you are paying to lose in front of an audience. Get a site that answers the price question, a claimed and complete Google Business Profile, and a habit of answering the phone. That costs nothing but a fortnight.

Build

If you buy, buy pay per lead first, not a twelve month subscription. Boiler Guide, MyBuilder and Bark all let you stop tomorrow. That is worth more than a slightly lower headline price, because it lets you find out what a won job actually costs you before you commit a year of direct debits.

Track two numbers and no others: what you spent this month, and how much invoiced work came from it. If you cannot answer both by the end of a quarter, the platform is not the problem.

Scale

Subscriptions and endorsement schemes make sense once you have a repeatable close rate and enough volume that a fixed monthly cost is cheaper than a variable one. Which? Trusted Traders is the one to look at hardest if trust is what you sell on, because it is the only platform here whose full price you can see before you talk to anyone, and because its trade and town pages are plain, crawlable and heavily reviewed.

The sharp takeaway

A platform that will not publish its price has told you something about the deal before you ask. Six of the seven we checked will not show you a full one. Before you sign anything, get the annual figure in writing, get the contract length in writing, and ask how many other plumbers receive the same lead. If any of the three answers has to come from a phone call, price that opacity in.

Method

Seven platforms were checked on 20 August 2026 by reading their own public pricing, joining, terms and support pages. Where a platform publishes no price, that is recorded as no price rather than filled in from a third party estimate. Third party blog figures for Checkatrade and Rated People pricing were found and deliberately excluded, because they cite no method and most are published by competing lead generation companies. Company details were taken from Companies House. No figure in this article comes from a source we did not read.

Whito

Whito is an independent UK research bureau. We ask the AI engines what they recommend, then check the businesses they name against Companies House and the sector registers. Figures we publish carry the date they were checked. Companies cannot pay to appear or to rank.

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