Thumbtack vs Google LSA vs Search Ads: What You Pay For (2026)

Three lead sources, three completely different receipts. Thumbtack charges you for a customer reaching out. Google Local Services Ads charges you for a "valid lead," priced by what other pros are bidding. Google Search Ads bills for ad clicks, and the cost-per-lead number everyone quotes is really a cost per conversion. None of those are the same unit — and the gap shows up hardest not in what you pay, but in what you get back when a lead goes nowhere.

Thumbtack: You Set the Price, Charged Only for Contact

Thumbtack's pricing model is the simplest of the three to describe, because you're the one setting the number. Thumbtack's own help center puts it plainly: you choose how competitive you want to be by setting your lead prices, and that's the exact amount you'll pay for each lead. There's no auction happening behind your back and no bid you're trying to outguess — you decide what a customer contact is worth to you, category by category.

That doesn't mean the price is static. Thumbtack is explicit that prices vary "since a job's value can change based on things like the type and size of the job, how many pros are available, and your market" — a plumbing pipe repair and a roof installation were never going to carry the same price tag, and neither will the same job type in a crowded market versus a thin one. Across every priced lead we've processed through Tack Tools Pro — 6,148 of them, spanning March through September of 2026 — the median price landed at $27.17. That's a single cross-category number sitting on top of enormous underlying variation, from cheap handyman work to a $300.00 roof installation lead, which is exactly why the trade-by-trade breakdown further down matters more than the headline median.

Google Local Services Ads: You Pay for a "Valid Lead" — Priced by Bidding

Local Services Ads flips the mechanic. Google's help center states the charge event directly: "With Local Services Ads, you pay for valid leads." A valid lead isn't just an impression or a click. Google's list of what counts includes a call you answer where you speak with the customer, and also a text message or email from the customer (in the United States and Canada). That's a different trigger from Thumbtack's "a customer reached out to you": Google defines a list of qualifying contact events, and a call that simply rings through isn't automatically one of them.

What you don't get with LSA is a number you set yourself. Per Google's own explanation of how lead prices work, "a bid is the most you'd pay for a lead. When similar local businesses bid on the same lead, those bids determine how much the lead is worth" — so your price is a function of who else wants that same customer, not a figure you type into a settings page. Google's help pages walk through how that price gets set — location, job type, lead type, and your bidding mode all move it — but none of the help pages we read publishes a typical dollar figure the way a benchmark report would. If you're trying to budget LSA the way you'd budget a Thumbtack category price, there isn't one number to anchor to; Google's own guidance leans on volume instead, recommending a minimum budget of 10 leads per week for optimal results on the "Maximize leads" bidding mode.

Google Search Ads: Billed for Clicks, Measured as Cost Per Conversion

Search ads are the odd one out structurally, because the thing you're billed for isn't a lead — it's ad clicks, whether or not a given click ever becomes a phone call or a form fill. The "cost per lead" figure that gets quoted in benchmark reports is a different measure: LocaliQ defines it as cost per conversion, which "highlights how much you're spending for a conversion." It's an average across a campaign, not a price tag on an individual lead the way a Thumbtack charge or an LSA valid lead is.

That structural difference is why search ads sit outside the refund comparison in this post: there's no per-lead charge to reverse. The spend on clicks that never converted is already folded into the cost-per-conversion average. (Google Ads has its own rules about billing for clicks; they're a different topic and we don't cover them here.) The LocaliQ benchmarks used in this post come from a sample of 3,211 US-based search advertising campaigns from home services businesses, and LocaliQ is upfront that its reported "averages" are technically median figures, specifically to keep a handful of outlier campaigns from skewing the number — worth knowing before you compare your own account's average against theirs.

Head-to-Head: What Each Channel Actually Charges You For

	Thumbtack	Google Local Services Ads	Google Search Ads
What you're charged for	A customer reaching out to you	A "valid lead" — e.g., an answered call where you speak with the customer	A click on your ad
Who sets the price	You do — you set the exact amount per lead	Competing bids from similar local businesses	You set bids; benchmarks report cost per conversion
Cost figure we can cite	$27.17 median across 6,148 priced leads (our data)	Not published — Google's help pages explain how price is set but give no typical figure	$90.92 median cost per conversion across 3,211 campaigns (LocaliQ)
When the customer goes silent	Refunded automatically once no pro gets a reply within 72 hours, if you qualified	Explicitly NOT credited when the customer didn't respond to your return call or message	No per-lead charge to refund — you're billed for clicks
What IS credited	Same as above, plus case-by-case requests	Leads Google's models find invalid or low quality — at first contact, or on later reassessment	Not applicable
Credit/refund timing	Checked automatically after the 72-hour window; case-by-case requests within 45 days	Usually applied within 30 days	Not applicable
Where it lands	Your Thumbtack balance	Your account balance	Not applicable

Read the "customer goes silent" row twice. Ghost leads happen on every channel, and each one treats them differently enough that comparing headline prices without that row is comparing half the picture.

What Happens When the Lead Goes Nowhere

This is the part that actually decides which channel is the better deal, because the sticker price is only half the transaction. Thumbtack's Fair Shot Refund policy says that "when you use Thumbtack numbers or chat with a customer in the Messenger," the platform will "automatically refund you if a customer doesn't reply to any pro they contacted within 72 hours" — but the refund has conditions, and all of them have to hold at once. You need to have "accepted the lead and sent a response within four business hours of the request," with business hours defined as 8am–8pm in your local time. You also need to have kept the start of the conversation on-platform: your first contact has to be through a Thumbtack number or a message sent directly through Thumbtack, and Thumbtack requires that "you didn't share your personal phone number or email before the customer's first reply." Once the customer has replied, Thumbtack says you can communicate anywhere you'd like. And the customer has to have gone silent on every pro they contacted, not just you — Thumbtack is explicit that "a customer not replying to you isn't enough on its own, since they may still be talking with another pro." Miss any one condition and the automatic refund doesn't fire, even on a lead that genuinely went nowhere. When it does fire, the money lands back in your Thumbtack balance, and outside that automatic window, Thumbtack's separate case-by-case refund policy lets you request a refund within 45 days of the charge.

Google Local Services Ads runs the opposite logic on the same failure mode. Google's policy states that "leads are first assessed when the potential customer makes initial contact, and leads determined to be invalid or low quality are not charged," and that "charged leads get reassessed by our models over time, and may be issued credits automatically if later determined to be low quality." Credits are usually applied to your account balance within 30 days. That's real money back, but it's Google's models judging lead quality. It isn't a promise to refund leads that simply go quiet. Once a lead clears that screen, a customer going quiet on your callback works against you: Google's help center lists "a customer didn't respond to your return call or message" as a scenario that does NOT get credited, alongside "a valid lead was received outside of your business hours." Google has also tightened what it credits over time, stating plainly that "Google no longer supports credits for 'job type not serviced' and 'geo not serviced' leads." Put the two policies side by side and the asymmetry is stark: the exact scenario Thumbtack built an automatic refund around — a customer who never calls you back — is the exact scenario LSA's own help page says will not be credited. Search ads don't enter this comparison at all — there was never a refundable lead, just a click already paid for, priced into the cost-per-conversion average whether or not that visitor ever picked up the phone.

The Trade-by-Trade Numbers

Cross-category medians hide as much as they reveal, so here's the same comparison broken out by trade — our Thumbtack category medians against LocaliQ's search-ads cost-per-conversion figures for the closest matching category. A Thumbtack lead price and a LocaliQ cost-per-conversion figure are still different units — a customer contact versus a completed conversion — so treat this as a directional comparison, not an apples-to-apples one.

LocaliQ category (search ads)	LocaliQ median CPL	Thumbtack sub-service (our data)	Thumbtack median lead price
Handyman Services	$54.05	Handyman (n=357)	$27.57
Plumbing	$129.02	Plumbing Pipe Repair (n=175)	$44.74
Plumbing	$129.02	Plumbing Drain Repair (n=131)	$48.23
Air Conditioning Installation & Repair	$127.74	Central Air Conditioning Repair or Maintenance (n=84)	$95.88
Electricians & Electrical Contractors	$93.69	Electrical and Wiring Repair (n=216)	$43.71
Paint & Painting	$138.38	Interior Painting (n=47)	$75.43
Paint & Painting	$138.38	Exterior Painting (n=33)	$135.85
Roofing & Gutters	$228.15	Roof Repair or Maintenance (n=51)	$71.73
Roofing & Gutters	$228.15	Roof Installation or Replacement (n=25)	$300.00

Notice that Thumbtack's categories are narrower sub-services than LocaliQ's — "Plumbing Pipe Repair" and "Plumbing Drain Repair" both sit under the single LocaliQ "Plumbing" bucket, and "Roof Repair or Maintenance" is a different job than "Roof Installation or Replacement" even though LocaliQ reports one blended "Roofing & Gutters" figure. Eight of the nine Thumbtack sub-services in this table carry a lower median than their LocaliQ counterpart, several by a wide margin. Both plumbing sub-services come in at roughly a third of the search-ads plumbing figure, and electrical wiring repair at under half. Exterior painting is nearly level ($135.85 against $138.38). The single exception is roof installation or replacement, where the Thumbtack median of $300.00 sits above LocaliQ's blended $228.15 for the whole roofing trade.

Which Channel Fits Your Trade

None of this is a verdict that one channel wins outright — it's a read on where each one tends to make sense, based on the numbers above, not a claim about what will happen in your market. If most of your book is lower-ticket repair and maintenance work — handyman jobs, pipe or drain repair, interior painting, electrical fixes — the trade table above suggests Thumbtack's per-lead price usually undercuts the search-ads cost-per-conversion figure for the same category by a wide margin, and the automatic 72-hour refund gives you a real backstop on the leads that go nowhere. That combination is hard for a channel with no refund concept to compete with on a category where the lead price itself is already the cheaper option.

Higher-ticket categories are where the read gets more nuanced. Roof installation is the one spot in our data where the Thumbtack median sits above the LocaliQ search-ads figure for the same trade, and exterior painting is close to level. That doesn't make Thumbtack wrong there, but it does mean you're not buying a discount the way a handyman or electrician pro is. On those leads, the refund conditions matter more: missing the four-business-hour response window or slipping a personal phone number into a thread before the customer's first reply on a $300.00 roof installation lead is a bigger forfeiture than the same mistake on a $27.57 handyman lead. That's why responding fast and staying on-platform is worth building a habit around — Live Connect calls you the moment a Thumbtack lead arrives so you can answer to connect with the customer directly, and Rapid Reply gets a response onto the thread while that clock is still running. Tack Tools Pro connects pros to customers in under 27 seconds. For the response-time math behind the refund rule, see our 4-hour refund rule guide; for lead costs across every category we track, see what Thumbtack leads cost by category. Weighing Angi or HomeAdvisor too? Our Thumbtack vs Angi vs HomeAdvisor comparison covers that question.

Sources

• Thumbtack — How much do I pay for leads and opportunities?
• Thumbtack — Fair Shot Refund policy
• Thumbtack — Refund policy for pros
• Thumbtack — What to do when a customer doesn't respond
• Google — How leads work (Local Services Ads)
• Google — How bidding works for Local Services Ads
• Google — About Automated Local Services Ads lead credits
• LocaliQ — Home Services Search Advertising Benchmarks (2025 data)
• Tack Tools Pro internal data — 6,148 priced leads, 2026-03-12 → 2026-09-21
• Full citation list: tacktoolspro.com/sources

---

Ready to stop losing leads? Start your free trial and respond to every Thumbtack lead in under 27 seconds.