Short version: a shared lead is cheap and sold four times. An exclusive lead costs two to four times more and removes the race, but the homeowner may still be calling three plumbers they found themselves. A booked appointment is a different product entirely, not a premium lead. And a revenue share on completed work charges nothing until the money is in your hand. Every one of them can be the right buy. The comparison that decides it is cost per booked job, not cost per lead.
The five products, defined properly
Vendors use these words loosely, and the looseness is usually to their advantage. Here is what each one actually is.
1Shared leads
A homeowner's contact details, sold to several contractors at once — commonly three to five, sometimes as many as eight. Everyone pays the same fee and calls the same person inside the same ten minutes. Typical plumbing prices run $15–$85 depending on the platform and job category.
This is the product working as designed, not a scam. The homeowner filled in a form specifically to collect comparison quotes, and the platform promised them several. You are one of the several.
Realistic close rate: 10–20%. That range is not a comment on your sales ability; it is arithmetic on a contact sold four times. Whoever calls first frames the job, and the rest quote against a number they cannot see.
Where it works: high-volume shops with a live answering desk and a small average ticket, where a $20 contact against a $350 job is genuinely cheap and losing seven out of ten does not hurt.
2Exclusive leads
The same contact information, sold to one contractor only. Nobody else bought this lead from this vendor. Commonly priced at two to four times a shared lead — for plumbing, roughly $100–$250 depending on market and job category, and higher on emergency and big-ticket categories.
The important caveat, and the one that catches people out: exclusive means exclusive to that vendor's list. It does not mean the homeowner is not also calling three plumbers they found on Google, or asking their neighbor. You have removed the four contractors who bought the same form. You have not removed competition.
Realistic close rate: roughly 25–40%, commonly about double a shared lead. Two things drive that: you are not in a sixty-second race, so a two-truck shop is no longer structurally disadvantaged against a call center, and the conversation starts at diagnosis instead of price.
Where it works: shops with a decent average ticket and disciplined follow-up. Exclusivity buys time, and time is only worth paying for if you use it — three follow-up attempts over four days, not one voicemail.
3Pay-per-call
A network runs its own advertising, and when a homeowner calls, the call routes to your phone. You are billed when the call passes a set duration, commonly 30 to 90 seconds. Plumbing calls commonly run $25–$150 depending on category and market.
The structural advantage is real: a live human with a burst supply line is a much better prospect than a form filled out during a lunch break. Intent is high and the timing is right, which is why close rates commonly land around 20–35%.
The catch is in the billing trigger. You are charged for call duration, not for outcome. A three-minute conversation with someone forty miles outside your radius, or asking for well pump work you do not do, still bills. Some networks let you dispute clearly mismatched calls; the rules are narrower than they sound and you have to actually file them.
Where it works: emergency and after-hours service, where the caller has an urgent problem and low price sensitivity, and shops that can answer live at 11pm.
4Booked appointments
Someone else takes the inquiry, qualifies it, confirms the customer wants the work, and puts a named person, a confirmed address and an agreed time on your calendar. You are buying a scheduled visit, not permission to attempt contact.
This is where most comparisons go wrong. An appointment is not an expensive lead — it is a different product, because the expensive part of a lead is the part you were doing yourself for free. The dead numbers, the people who already hired someone, the ones who wanted a landlord to pay: all filtered out before it reached you.
Realistic show rate: 60–80%, and a high proportion of shows convert because the customer already agreed to a visit. Pricing varies by vendor: some charge a flat fee per booked appointment, often $150–$500 for plumbing, some charge a percentage.
The catch: quality depends entirely on who did the qualifying. An appointment booked by someone paid per appointment, with no stake in whether the job happens, is a lead with a time attached.
5Pay-per-booked-job (revenue share)
Nothing is owed until a job is completed and paid. No lead fee, no appointment fee, no subscription. The vendor is paid a share of work that actually happened, which means they carry the same downside you do.
This is our model, so weigh it accordingly. Pipe Well is free to join — no monthly subscription, no per-lead fee, no plan tiers. We book a real appointment and text it to one plumber; you reply YES to take it. You do the job and collect payment from the customer directly. Pipe Well is then paid 50% of the job after documented materials:
- Materials come off the top and are reimbursed to you in full, but only when documented with supplier receipts.
- Labor, overhead, truck, fuel and taxes are NOT deducted. Those come out of your half.
- Due within 48 hours after you have been paid, never before. If the customer never pays, you owe nothing.
The catch, stated plainly: the cost scales with the ticket. That makes it cheap on small and uncertain work and expensive on big work. There is a full section on that below.
Why shared leads close at 10–20%
Three mechanics do all the damage, and none of them are about how good you are at selling.
- The speed-to-lead race. The homeowner's phone starts ringing within minutes of the form submission. First contact frames the job and often books it before the second plumber's voicemail finishes. A shop with someone permanently on the phones wins this structurally. An owner-operator halfway through a water heater swap does not.
- Price compression. When a homeowner knows four quotes are coming, the conversation opens at price rather than diagnosis. You are bidding against strangers whose overhead, warranty and competence you cannot see.
- Dead contacts. Wrong numbers, people who already hired someone, tire-kickers, tenants who need a landlord's approval. Some are creditable. Most are not.
Add the invisible cost. Every lead you lose still consumed a callback, sometimes a drive-by, sometimes a written quote. Twenty lost leads a month at 25 minutes each is a full working day given away unpaid, and that day never shows up on the platform invoice.
Cost per booked job across all five models
This is the only comparison that matters. The formula:
Worked across all five, using mid-range prices and realistic conversion rates:
| Model | What you buy | Typical unit price | Realistic conversion | Cost per booked job | Charged if it doesn't close? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared lead | Contact info sold 3–8 times | $45 | 15% | $300 | Yes, in full |
| Shared lead (premium category, slow callback) | Contact info sold 3–8 times | $85 | 10% | $850 | Yes, in full |
| Exclusive lead | Contact info sold once | $150 | 30% | $500 | Yes, in full |
| Exclusive lead (disciplined follow-up) | Contact info sold once | $150 | 40% | $375 | Yes, in full |
| Pay-per-call | A live connected call | $75 | 25% | $300 | Yes, if the call lasts |
| Booked appointment | A scheduled visit | $300 | 65% become jobs | $462 | Usually yes |
| Pay-per-booked-job ($400 drain clear, $40 materials) | A completed, paid job | $0 up front | 100% — only paid work is charged | $180 | No |
| Pay-per-booked-job ($1,200 heater, $520 materials) | A completed, paid job | $0 up front | 100% | $340 | No |
| Pay-per-booked-job ($2,800 job, $800 materials) | A completed, paid job | $0 up front | 100% | $1,000 | No |
| Pay-per-booked-job ($8,500 repipe, $3,200 materials) | A completed, paid job | $0 up front | 100% | $2,650 | No |
Prices reflect commonly reported 2026 US ranges for plumbing and vary by market, category, season and negotiated terms. Conversion rates are realistic mid-range assumptions, not guarantees. Verify current pricing with each vendor. Full pricing benchmark: what plumbing leads cost in 2026.
Read the bottom four rows carefully, because they are the honest part. A revenue share is a percentage, so its cost per booked job rises with the ticket while every other row stays flat. On the $400 drain clear it is $180 against roughly $300 for a shared lead. On the $8,500 repipe it is $2,650 against roughly $300–$500. Deducting $3,200 of documented materials first brings our share down to 31% of the ticket rather than 50%, which matters, but it does not turn $2,650 into $45.
The other four rows have a matching honesty problem in the opposite direction: they charge you whether or not anything happens. A month with no wins still produces an invoice. That is the trade — a fixed cost that is small per job and certain, against a variable cost that is large per job and only ever charged on money you have already collected. The calculator finds the ticket size where they cross over for your shop.
Lead credits and refunds, and why they're hard to claim
Every major platform advertises some form of credit for bad leads, and it is a real process rather than a fiction. It is also much narrower than most contractors assume when they sign up.
Usually creditable: disconnected or wrong numbers, duplicates of a lead you already bought, requests clearly outside your service area, and jobs in a category you never selected.
Usually not creditable: the homeowner who never answers after six attempts, the one who already hired someone before you called, the one who wanted a price over the phone and vanished, the one whose budget was a third of the job. That last group is where most of your losses actually live.
Three practical frictions worth knowing before you budget around credits:
- The window is short. Disputes commonly have to be filed within a few days. A lead you chased for a week can age out of eligibility while you were still chasing it.
- You have to prove the attempt. Platforms increasingly want call records showing you tried, and quickly. If you called once on day three, expect a denial.
- Credits are credits, not cash. A refunded lead is money that stays inside the platform and buys the next lead. Your bank balance does not move.
None of this is unreasonable — a platform cannot verify what happened on your call. But budget on the assumption that most bad leads will not be credited, because most will not be.
When exclusive leads are the right buy
Exclusive leads get dismissed as overpriced shared leads, and that is unfair. There are shops for which they are clearly the best product on this page:
- You cannot win the speed race and never will. Two trucks, no dispatcher, the owner is under a sink most of the day. Exclusivity is the only thing on this list that removes the disadvantage rather than asking you to out-hustle it.
- Your average ticket is high. At $150 a lead and a 30% close rate you are at $500 per booked job. On a $4,000 average ticket that is 12.5% of gross, which is a defensible marketing number. On a $450 average ticket it is catastrophic.
- Your follow-up is genuinely disciplined. Exclusivity buys time, and time is only worth money if you use it. Shops that run three or four contact attempts over several days are the ones reporting close rates near 40%.
- You want to own the customer outright. A purchased lead is your customer from the first handshake, with no restrictions on rebooking, maintenance plans or marketing to them forever. That has real long-term value that a per-job cost comparison does not capture.
- You want a predictable, controllable monthly number. Some owners genuinely prefer a fixed spend they can plan around over a variable percentage of revenue. That is a legitimate preference, not a mistake.
The one failure mode to watch: buying exclusives and keeping shared-lead habits. If you still call back six hours later, you have paid three times as much for the same result. The price premium buys an opportunity, not an outcome.
When Pipe Well is the wrong choice
A page that only flatters the author is worth nothing to you, so here is where our model is genuinely the wrong pick:
- Your pipeline is already full. Booked out three weeks and turning work away? You do not have an acquisition problem and should not give up half of anything. Raise your prices instead — that is the highest-return move available to a booked-out shop and it costs nothing.
- You run on repeat and referral work. A shop where most revenue comes from customers who already know you has the best acquisition economics in the trade. Adding a revenue share on top dilutes it to fill a schedule that is mostly full.
- Your work is mostly high-ticket repipes and large installs. The clearest case, and the table above shows it: $2,650 on an $8,500 repipe against roughly $300–$500 buying leads. Above about a $5,000 average ticket with a decent close rate, exclusive leads or your own advertising keep you far more money.
- You close 25%+ on shared leads. Close rate is the single biggest lever on cost per booked job. At 25% and $45 a lead you are booking jobs for $180 and keeping the entire ticket.
- You need the customer list as an owned asset. Network customers carry non-circumvention terms. If the plan is a database you market to forever and sell with the business, buy leads instead.
- You need wide-area volume tomorrow. We cap at three plumbers per service area, so in many markets the honest answer is that we have no room.
What a revenue share buys is the removal of fixed cost and downside risk. A slow February costs nothing, a customer who ghosts costs nothing, an eight-lead losing streak costs nothing. That is worth a great deal to a shop with gaps in the calendar and very little to a shop without them, because an empty slot costs you 100% of the ticket, not half of what is left after materials.
How to pick, in three questions
- Can you answer live within a minute, most of the day? If yes, shared leads and pay-per-call are open to you and they are the cheapest per unit. If no, stop buying shared leads — you are funding the shop that can.
- What is your average ticket? Under about $600, fixed per-lead pricing wins on any large job you land and a percentage model wins on the uncertain small stuff. Over about $5,000, fixed per-lead pricing wins outright. In between, it depends on your close rate.
- Can you afford to lose the money? Every model except pay-per-booked-job charges you before you know whether there is a job. If a losing streak would hurt, buy the model where a losing streak costs nothing.
Find your own crossover point
Put in your leads, your cost per lead and your close rate. You get your cost per booked job and the exact ticket size where fixed lead pricing beats a 50%-after-materials share. If buying leads is the better deal for your shop, it will say so.
Run the calculator →Frequently asked questions
What are shared leads?
A shared lead is a homeowner's contact details sold to several contractors at the same time, commonly three to five and sometimes as many as eight. Everyone who bought it pays the same fee and calls the same person within minutes of each other. That is the product working as designed, because the homeowner filled out the form specifically to collect comparison quotes. It is also why close rates on shared leads commonly sit around 10 to 20 percent.
What is an exclusive lead?
An exclusive lead is sold to one contractor only, so nobody else is calling that homeowner from the same source. It usually costs two to four times what a shared lead costs, and for plumbing commonly lands somewhere around $100 to $250 depending on market and job category. Exclusive means nobody else bought this lead from this vendor. It does not mean the homeowner is not also calling three plumbers they found on Google.
Are exclusive plumbing leads worth it?
For some shops, genuinely yes. Exclusivity removes the speed-to-lead race, so a two-truck operation that cannot answer within sixty seconds is no longer structurally disadvantaged, and the conversation starts at diagnosis instead of price. Close rates commonly run roughly twice a shared lead. The math works when your close rate on exclusives clears about 30 percent and your average ticket is high enough to carry the higher unit price. It fails when you buy exclusives and keep the same slow callback habits, because you are then paying three times as much for the same result.
How is a booked appointment different from a lead?
A lead is permission to attempt contact. An appointment is a named customer, a confirmed address and an agreed time already on your calendar, where someone else did the qualifying, the calling and the scheduling. The unqualified people, the wrong numbers and the tire-kickers were filtered out before it reached you. It is a different product rather than a more expensive lead, which is why appointment show rates commonly run 60 to 80 percent while shared lead close rates run 10 to 20 percent.
How do you calculate cost per booked job?
Divide everything you spent on a channel by the number of jobs you actually completed from it: cost per booked job = total channel spend ÷ jobs won. Include membership fees, spend minimums and prepaid credits you did not use. One hundred shared leads at $45 is $4,500; at a 15% close rate that is 15 jobs, so $300 per booked job. The same spend at 10% is $450. Cost per lead is a marketing number; cost per booked job is a bank account number. The calculator does it for you.
Can you get a refund for a bad lead?
Sometimes, but the categories are narrower than most contractors expect. Platforms generally credit clearly invalid leads such as disconnected numbers, duplicates, out-of-area requests and jobs outside your service categories, usually as account credit rather than cash and usually within a short window of a few days. A lead who simply never answers, or who hires someone else, is generally not creditable — and that is the category most of your losses fall into. Credits also keep the money inside the platform, so a refunded lead still funds the next lead.
What is pay-per-call for contractors?
Pay-per-call networks route a live inbound call to your phone and charge you when the call lasts past a set duration, commonly 30 to 90 seconds. Plumbing calls commonly run $25 to $150 depending on job category and market. The advantage is that a live caller with an urgent problem is a far better prospect than a form fill. The catch is that the billing trigger is call duration rather than outcome, so a long conversation with somebody outside your service area or asking for work you do not do still bills.
What is pay-per-booked-job and how does Pipe Well charge?
Pay-per-booked-job means nothing is owed until a job is completed and paid. Pipe Well Plumbing is free to join with no monthly subscription, no per-lead fee and no plan tiers. We book a real customer appointment and text it to one plumber. The plumber does the job and collects payment from the customer. Pipe Well is then paid 50% of the job after documented materials: (amount collected − documented material cost) × 50%. Materials require supplier receipts. Labor, overhead, truck, fuel and taxes are not deducted, so they come out of the plumber's half. Payment is due within 48 hours after the plumber is paid, and if the customer never pays, the plumber owes nothing. On a $2,800 job with $800 of documented materials, $2,000 is left after materials, so Pipe Well is paid $1,000 and the plumber keeps $1,800 plus material reimbursement.
No fee to join. No subscription. No lead charges.
Send your license, insurance and service radius. If there's room in your area — we cap at three plumbers per service area — appointments start arriving by text. Reply YES to the ones you want. You collect from the customer, upload your material receipts with the job, and Pipe Well's 50% of what's left after those documented materials is due within 48 hours after you've been paid. If you're not paid, nothing is owed.
Join Free →See how the split worksQuestions: info@pipewellplumbing.com · 904-712-6790 · Homeowner needing a plumber? Book here.
Keep reading
- 9 Angi alternatives for plumbers — every real option, with the honest downside of each.
- What plumbing leads cost in 2026 — the maintained pricing table.
- Pipe Well vs Angi Leads — the head-to-head, including where Angi wins.
- Pipe Well vs Thumbtack — cheapest contacts on the market, and what that actually buys.
- Cost per booked job calculator · How the 50%-after-materials split works · Join free
This page is independent commentary for plumbing contractors. Pipe Well Plumbing is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any lead platform named or referenced here, and all names and marks belong to their respective owners. Pricing figures and conversion rates reflect commonly reported 2026 US ranges and change frequently — verify current terms directly with each vendor before making a budgeting decision.