10/15/2024
Written by Albert Hu
Angi, formerly known as Angie’s List, is a marketplace website that connects home service professionals with their prospective clients. For many businesses just starting, it can be a reliable platform to get their first initial clients to get their ball rolling. The platform provides a large, established user base of homeowners and consumers actively searching for services, which can increase visibility and potentially generate leads that might not have been accessible otherwise.
Additionally, the jobs secured through Angi, when legitimate, often pay back the initial investment, helping businesses offset their marketing costs.
However, there are an increasing number of businesses who express their dissatisfaction with the platform.
One user on Reddit posted how the reality of being on Angi is far less rosy. Here is what users are complaining about:
One of the biggest issues with platforms like Angi is the poor quality of leads they provide. You might be paying a hefty price per lead, but many of those will lead nowhere. Businesses often report that the majority of the leads they receive are either outdated, with disconnected phone numbers or from people who claim they never requested any services. This leads to wasted time and money as you chase after potential customers who simply aren’t there.
Imagine investing in 50 leads over several months and finding that only 4 of them are actual customers interested in your services. For many small businesses, that kind of conversion rate just doesn’t justify the cost of using the platform.
Another common complaint is that the leads you receive may not even be in your area of expertise. For example, if you’re a plumbing business, you might get leads for landscaping services or requests from regions far outside your service area. When you're paying upwards of $60 per lead, this kind of mismatch is not only frustrating, it's financially draining. This mismatch could lead to a situation where you're paying hundreds of dollars for nothing but dead ends.
The cost of using Angi is another reason many business owners feel burned. With fees ranging from $50 to $60 per lead, the price quickly adds up, especially when many of those leads are duds. In some cases, businesses have reported receiving multiple leads over a short period—only to find that every single one was bad. In one instance, a company paid $600 for 10 leads, all of which turned out to be false or inaccurate. This high cost of acquisition makes it difficult to achieve a return on investment, especially for small businesses with limited budgets.
Perhaps the most infuriating issue is the level of customer service that many users report. In many cases, businesses have tried to request refunds or credits for the bad leads they’ve been sent, only to be met with rude and unhelpful customer support representatives. Businesses often describe the customer service as condescending, with representatives refusing to issue credits even when leads were clearly unusable. This unwillingness to rectify problems adds another layer of frustration to an already bad experience.
In some cases, businesses report having to threaten to cancel their accounts just to receive minimal support or a credit. This makes resolving issues a grueling process, often requiring multiple calls and escalations, only to end up right back where they started.
Finally, canceling the service can be its own ordeal. Some businesses have reported that after multiple requests to cancel their accounts, Angi would only issue credits to prevent cancellation, creating a cycle of frustration. Even when businesses finally succeed in canceling, they often have to take extra steps, such as locking the payment card Angi had on file, to prevent unauthorized charges.
This tactic creates an unpleasant experience for the business, making them feel trapped in a service that doesn’t benefit them. Worse, once you leave, you may be hounded with offers to return to the platform.
If you are thinking of you using Angi to generate a consistent flow of leads, just be aware of what users are complaining about on the platform. The main issue with using a marketplace like Angi is that you lack control over your profile and your ways of generating leads are dictated by Angi’s policy.
However, you can choose not to play their game. Instead, you can retain total control over your marketing efforts by building your own website and optimizing it to generate organic leads. Thus, you save yourself the headache of dealing with it a platform such as Angi.
