Thumbtack: Home Service Pros 4+

No longer gives quotes. Rates too high.

The concept of this app is a great idea for a small business owner such as myself. It gives me a chance to market my counseling business to people in need of those particular services. I initially signed up for instant match in which the customer receives an immediate response when they put in a request. BAD IDEA!!!! Thumbtack did not give me an accurate idea of just how much these rates would cost and I ended up being charged over $40 in less than a week. I then turned off instant match and would send quotes only to the customers I chose and was told just how much I would be charged for the quote. The rates varied anywhere from $1-$12 and occasionally I was given the opportunity to quote for free. This was very reasonable although it was a gamble because the majority of the time, the customers would not respond to my quote.
I recently received notice that Thumbtack has changed their policy that I would no longer be charged unless the customer responded to my quote. This seemed like a great idea! I could still pick the customers I wanted to quote but I no longer had to worry about spending money on customers who were no longer interested in counseling. I assumed the rates were about the same as they were before. Boy, was I wrong! I was charged $23 for my quote! That is way more money than I am willing to spend for someone whose business I may not even get! I will no longer be using Thumbtack for marketing under these new rates.

개발자 답변 ,

Feedback helps us a ton and we'd love to hear your suggestions about this. Go ahead and send your thoughts directly to our Product Team here: https://help.thumbtack.com/suggestions.

Would not recommend this business model

Taskrabbit’s app isn’t very business friendly. You are charged for a potential customer reaching out to you. Most customers reach out to between 3-4 pros per job. That means you and 2-3 vendors are paying taskrabbit just for that potential customer. Meaning if you aren’t selected you paid anywhere between $15-$60 for a customer to message you. Often times customers don’t provide enough information for you to accurately quote a customer as pictures, descriptions, and customer knowledge is lacking. So if you reach out to a customer to quote and need more information you just paid Taskrabbit to get more information. It would be nice to only pay if your accept a customers message request. But Taskrabbit is instead incentivizing customers to reach out to up to 5 vendors. Meaning each vendor would pay $25 dollars each. Taskrabbit just made $125 dollars off the vendors and only 1 of you will be selected. Meaning everyone else is out $25.
Taskrabbit should allow vendors to read the description and accept or decline the customer before the vendor has to pay.
Taskrabbit should require more information from the customer before allowing them to reach out. Customers also sometimes select the wrong categories meaning the job appears bigger than it is and Taskrabbit will charge more. Now you must get the job to even have an opportunity to break even.

The history with thumbtack

I have been with thumbtack almost 3 years. I have watch them go from a platform I would recommend to just about any contractor to a company that just the same as the rest. Thumbtack used to be a reasonable and reliable source for getting new project leads. Now they are just like Home Advisor and the rest of the over prices lead generation companies. I’ve watched gutter projects go from $17 per to $52 per. Wow what an increase. Not to mention they allow a customer to choose from an unlimited amount of contractors. The competition is fine but let’s say,”Thumbtack is charging the contractors $40 per lead and the customer has selected to speak with 5 different contractors. Thumbtack makes $200 off a single lead while only 1 contractor will win the lead of course. The sad part of this equation is the lead itself will only go for roughly about $200. End of the day you only make $160 before expenses like paying for travel, and paying employees. Only 2 things can happen with this equation. 1. People go out of business or 2. Prices go way up for the home owner. It used to be a competition between contractors, but now it’s a competition between contractors and the middle man (Thumbtack). This defeats the purpose of even starting a business. The constant raising of prices really have me considering trying other avenues and letting thumbtack go.

개발자 답변 ,

We know there have been a lot of changes to Thumbtack. It's free for customers to use Thumbtack, and we really wanted to give them more control over which pros they see as well as speed up the hiring process. While each interaction can cost more for pros on Thumbtack, we are now only charging pros when customers show interest by contacting you instead of charging for every quote. This is because of feedback we got from pros that felt that they were wasting money on customers who weren’t even viewing their quote messages. We still really appreciate any and all pricing feedback, however it does look like your reviewing the customer app. We'd recommend leaving any additional comments on the pro app.