![]() Many of the negative reviews from tradespeople claim that the majority of the “leads” on Thumbtack are fake, that the customer accounts will disappear or change erratically,Īnd that few of the leads ever respond back if contacted. And that one $20.00 repair job just generated $300 in lead costs to vendors in a 150 mile radius of the consumer that made the request. Now Thumbtack is charging for the lead even if the vendor doesn’t contact the customer or even if they reply back saying they do not do that sort of work. ![]() Along with the floor re finisher and the framing carpenter. You want a drawer fixed on that $60.00 IKEA dresser that uncle Bob gave you? Surely this high end Kitchen Design company would love to bid on that. Soon those quotes were going to any vendor with a pulse that did anything remotely associated with the request. It didn’t take too long for Thumbtack to learn or for human nature to take over. I always told them not to call ever again and if a customer wanted a bid they could just call me. In reality they were trolling for new tradespeople to handle work that they either made up or requests coming in for work that they had no one to bid on. Thumbtack would call my business on a regular basis asking if we were interested in joining or claiming they had a customer that needed some work. Say it was a cabinet job, well that is a bargain if it is a real customer wanting a bid. The business would look at the request, if it was something they did and something they had the time to do they would contact the customer and be charged $20.00 to $50.00 usually as a finders fee. A “customer” would fill out a request for quotes and supposedly it would go out to the exact kind of tradesmen in the exact area the customer lived in or the business covered. Thumbtack walked the same road, vendors and tradespeople said it was great in the beginning and it slowly got worse. ![]() Then the bean counters take the company public, the consumer charge goes away and they start selling advertising and next your A rating as a business becomes only visible, in fact your company becomes visible, only if you pay thousands of dollars a year to. ![]() Soon I saw my customers putting reviews on Angieslist and I had and still have an A rating. I was one of those consumers in the early days of paying $20.00 a year to have a place with dependable reviews and it worked. Sometimes they did at one point, in the early days of organization they had low or even no fees to the tradesmen, some like even charged the consumer. The scam works by the referral company setting up a website claiming to have a stable of tradesmen and vendors pre approved and waiting to come solve problems for you. Read the horror stories from both consumers and tradespeople on Thumbtack on a site like. Their ads sound great, the tradesmen are pre approved and background checked, the reality is that they will allow anyone that will give them access to their bank account to advertise and become one of their “trusted” tradespeople. That is a bit old NO! These referral companies like Thumbtack, Yelp, Houzz,, and Home Advisor are nothing more than scam artists forcing their way between consumers and tradesmen. ![]() One victim’s record of Thumbtack robbing them blind ![]()
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