Pricing: $0 to join, 50% of the job after materials

What "50% of the job after materials" actually means

Your documented material cost comes off the ticket first. Pipe Well's share is half of what remains. In one line:

Four clarifications matter more than any others, so read them twice:

• Materials must be documented. Upload the supply house receipt or supplier invoice with the job. Undocumented materials are not deducted — if you cannot produce a receipt for the $3,200 of pipe and fittings on a repipe, that $3,200 goes into the split and it costs you $1,600.
• Labor, overhead, truck, fuel and taxes are NOT deducted. Only materials come off the top. Your tech pay, your fuel, your insurance, your truck payment and your taxes come out of your half — the same way our marketing spend, call answering and booking cost come out of ours. This is the part people misread, so we are stating it plainly.
• You are reimbursed for materials in full. Because materials are removed before the split, every documented material dollar comes back to you on top of your half. You never fund parts out of your share.
• It is calculated on collected, not invoiced. An invoice you never collect on generates nothing for either side. There is no accounts-receivable risk transferred to you.

This is the single most important thing to model before you join, and it is why we publish the worked examples below instead of a marketing sentence about "no upfront cost."

Worked dollar examples

Five realistic tickets, start to finish. "Plumber keeps" is your half plus full reimbursement of documented materials — it is still gross to you before labor, fuel and overhead, so it is not take-home profit.

Read the middle row slowly, because it is the clearest illustration of the model. A $2,800 water heater job with $800 of documented materials nets $2,000. Pipe Well is paid $1,000. You keep $1,800 — your $1,000 half plus the full $800 back for the equipment you bought. Under a share of gross you would have kept $1,400 and eaten the $800 out of it.

Row one is still the thin one. On a $400 drain call with $40 of cable and fittings you keep $220 before fuel and two hours of your time. Small tickets are better than they were, but they are not generous — see the next section, which we wrote on purpose.

Row five is the other end. On the repipe you keep $5,850, including the full $3,200 material bill, on a job that cost you nothing to acquire, that arrived as a scheduled appointment rather than a race against seven other bidders, and that you would not otherwise have had. The absolute dollars going to Pipe Well are still large; the question is only whether the job existed without us.

Run your own break-even →

When this is a BAD deal for you

Most companies do not publish this section. We do, because the fastest way to waste both our time is for you to join, take four small jobs, do the math afterwards and quit annoyed.

Your work is small AND labor-only

Deducting materials moved the threshold down, but not for everyone — and the difference is entirely about material load, not ticket size. On a $350 to $600 drain clear, a faucet swap or a toilet rebuild, materials are $20 to $60. Taking them off the top barely changes anything: a $500 call with $40 of parts leaves you $270 instead of $250. Once fuel and a couple of hours of labor come out, that job is still close to break-even, especially with a 25-minute drive each way.

So the honest line is this: below roughly $600 on labor-only work, the math still rarely works. If your book is mostly single-line drain clears and small repairs, buying $40 leads and closing them yourself will probably still beat a 50% share. Where the change genuinely helps is material-heavy work — heaters, tankless, repipes, sewer, softeners — and those jobs now clear at ticket sizes that did not work before. A $900 heater swap with $450 of equipment leaves you $675, which is a real job. The same $900 under a share of gross left you $450. Be honest about your actual mix, not your best month.

You are already at capacity

If your techs are booked out a week and you are turning work away, the correct move is to raise prices, not to add split work. A shared appointment that displaces a full-price job you would have booked anyway costs you the entire difference. This model fills gaps; it should never displace.

You have a strong Google Business Profile and steady referrals

If you have 150+ reviews, rank in the local map pack for your city, and a third or more of your work arrives by word of mouth, you already own the cheapest acquisition channel there is. Your marginal cost on those jobs is near zero. Handing half the post-material value of a job to anyone is strictly worse than making one more review request per job. Read our guide to free lead channels first — if you have not exhausted those, do that instead of this.

You want to own the customer outright

Pipe Well's agreement includes a 24-month non-circumvention on customers we introduce. For two years, work you do for that homeowner is treated as originating from our introduction. If your entire business model is built on converting one call into a decade of repeat work and a maintenance agreement you control end to end, that clause is a real cost to you and you should weigh it as one. We would rather you decline for that reason now than discover it later.

When it's a good deal

• You have gaps in the calendar. A split job in an empty Tuesday slot is revenue that did not exist. Your truck was rolling anyway. This is the single clearest fit.
• Your close rate on purchased leads is poor. If you are converting shared leads at 8–12%, you are paying for seven or eight leads per job. A $60 lead at 10% is $600 per booked job before you have done any work — and you paid it whether you won or not.
• You are new and have no marketing budget. A newly licensed shop with three reviews and no ad spend cannot outbid an established company on Local Services Ads. Booked appointments at zero upfront cost are how you get the first fifty jobs that generate the reviews that eventually make you independent of us.
• You are expanding into a new service area. You have no reviews, no history and no local reputation in the next county over. Post-material split appointments let you test whether the market is worth a permanent presence without spending a dollar to find out.
• You are a large-ticket specialist. Repipes, sewer line replacement, tankless conversion, slab leaks. These are also the most material-heavy jobs there are, so deducting materials first works hardest in your favor. On a $6,000 job the acquisition cost of a lead-gen platform is trivially small, but the odds of you winning that shared lead are also small. One appointment sent to you alone, split after materials, can beat ten shared leads you lose.
• You buy your own equipment on the job. If you are fronting heaters, tankless units, softeners, pumps or a truckload of PEX, every documented dollar of that comes straight back to you before anything is split. You are never financing parts out of your share.

Pipe Well vs pay-per-lead platforms

Both models are legitimate. They fail in opposite directions, and the comparison below is deliberately unflattering to us in the rows where we lose.

Lead-platform costs referenced here reflect commonly reported 2026 US pricing for plumbing and vary substantially by market, category and negotiated terms — verify current rates directly with the platform. Our detailed platform-by-platform breakdown lives on the 2026 lead cost page.

The honest one-line version: pay-per-lead is cheaper when you win, and expensive when you lose. A post-material share is expensive when you win, and free when you lose. Which one suits you depends on your close rate, your ticket size and your material load — not on which pitch sounds better.

What's included at no cost

Everything below is carried by Pipe Well and is not billed back to you in any form:

• All marketing spend. Advertising, search, and every dollar spent to make a homeowner call. If a campaign loses money, that is our loss, not a cost we pass through.
• Call answering. A homeowner with a burst line calls us, not your cell while you are under a sink.
• Qualification and appointment scheduling. We establish the problem, the address and a time window before anything reaches you. You are not receiving a raw form fill.
• Customer details by SMS. Reply YES within the two-hour window and you get the full customer name, address, phone and job description immediately.
• No bidding. Each appointment is texted to one plumber whose radius covers the address. You are never racing another contractor to a phone.
• A three-plumber cap per service area. We deliberately limit how many plumbers we onboard in any area so the ones who join get real volume instead of a token appointment every quarter.
• No exclusivity demand on you. Keep your own advertising, your own Google Business Profile and every other lead source you use. Pipe Well is additive.

Payment mechanics

The 48-hour rule

The clock starts when you are paid, not when the job is completed and not when you invoice. Once the customer's payment clears to you, Pipe Well's share is due within 48 hours. On staged jobs — a deposit at start, balance at completion, or progress payments on a repipe — each collection starts its own 48-hour window on the share of that specific payment. Documented materials are deducted against the job as a whole, not re-charged on every stage. You are never asked to advance money against a payment you have not received.

Documenting materials

When you report a job you enter the amount collected and your material cost, and you upload the supporting receipts or supplier invoices with it. Materials actually installed or consumed on that job qualify: the heater, the tankless unit, the PEX and fittings, the valves, the pan, the permit-required components. What does not qualify: your labor, your tech's pay, fuel, truck, tools, insurance, overhead and taxes — those come out of your half.

Undocumented materials are not deducted. If the receipt is not attached, the amount goes into the split. This is not a penalty, it is just the only way a post-material split can work — so photograph the supply house ticket before you leave the counter.

How it is invoiced and settled

We apply the formula to the figures you reported — (collected − documented materials) × 50% — invoice that amount, and you settle it within the 48-hour window by the electronic method on file. Keep your own records — job ticket, invoice, material receipts, and proof of payment method — because that documentation is what governs any dispute about the amount, including refunds.

Refunds and chargebacks

A refund reduces the earned share only when all three of the following are true: it is documented, it was actually refunded to the customer, and it was not caused by contractor breach. When it does qualify, the share is recalculated on the same formula — the reduced collected amount minus documented materials, times 50%. In plain terms: if you refund a homeowner because a part you installed failed, because you no-showed, or because your work did not meet the 12-month workmanship warranty, that refund is your cost and it does not reduce what is owed. If the refund is a genuine, documented reversal outside your control, the share is adjusted accordingly. Chargebacks are treated on the same test.

Termination

No contract term, no minimum volume, no spend commitment. Either party may terminate on seven days' written notice. Appointments you accepted before that notice still carry the revenue share through to collection, and the 24-month non-circumvention on customers already introduced survives termination.

Requirements to join

We check every one of these before an appointment ever reaches you. There is no fee attached to any of them.

• Active state plumbing license
• $1,000,000 general liability insurance
• Valid driver license
• 12-month workmanship warranty on work you perform
• Minimum 30-mile service radius

Pricing FAQ

More reading: what plumbing leads cost in 2026 · how to get plumbing leads without paying for leads · book a plumber · home. Questions about the fee structure: info@pipewellplumbing.com or 904-712-6790.