Every tradie in Canberra has had the HiPages conversation. Someone at smoko swears it books their whole week. Someone else calls it a subscription to disappointment. Both can be right, because lead marketplaces are a rental arrangement, and rentals suit some situations and bleed you in others.
Let's do the actual maths.
How the marketplace model really works
HiPages, Airtasker, Oneflare, ServiceSeeking: the details differ but the machine is the same.
- A customer posts a job.
- The platform sells that job to tradies as a "lead", paid for with credits on top of a monthly subscription. HiPages plans commonly run roughly $130 to $400+ a month depending on tier, with lead credits priced by job size on top.
- The same lead usually goes to three or more tradies at once. You are paying for the right to race your competitors to a phone call.
- You pay whether or not you win the job. Some platforms credit back the odd dud lead, but "the customer went quiet" is not a dud in their books.
Notice what the platform is actually selling: not customers, but access to customers, by the drink, forever. Their best outcome is you needing them next month exactly as much as this month.
The worked example: a Canberra sparkie's year
Meet a fictional but very familiar electrician in Tuggeranong. Mid-tier plan at about $200 a month, and lead credits averaging $25 a lead across small and medium jobs.
- Subscription: $200 x 12 = $2,400 a year
- Leads: 20 a month at $25 = $500 a month = $6,000 a year
- Total: $8,400 a year, every year, rain or shine.
Now the conversion maths. Each lead is shared with roughly three competitors, so a fair strike rate for a fast responder is one job in four or five. Twenty leads a month means 4 to 5 jobs. That is $8,400 for roughly 50 to 60 jobs a year, or $140 to $170 in marketing cost per job won, before you have driven anywhere.
And the meter never stops. Year two: another $8,400. Year five: $42,000 all up, and the day you stop paying, the phone stops ringing, because you built nothing. The reviews you sweated for over five years? They live on your marketplace profile, which is exactly the lock-in the platform wants. Walk away and your five-star reputation stays behind as their content, invisible to Google searches for your own business name.
The same money spent on owning the pipeline
Take the same electrician and the same first-year budget of $8,400:
- A proper business website, owned outright: $2,500 to $6,500 depending on size. Call it $4,000 for a solid trades site with service pages, photos of real jobs, reviews, and an enquiry form that actually works at 9pm. (Our full pricing is public: see what websites cost in Canberra.)
- A care plan keeping it fast, secure and updated: $199 a month = $2,388 a year.
- First year total: about $6,400. Already under the marketplace spend.
Year two is where it stops being close. The marketplace bill resets to $8,400. The website bill drops to $2,388, because the site is bought and paid for. Over three years: roughly $25,200 rented versus $11,200 owned, and the owned asset is compounding: every review lands on your Google profile, every job photo strengthens your pages, and your ranking for "electrician Tuggeranong" climbs while you sleep.
Leads from your own website are also not shared with three competitors. When someone finds you on Google, reads your reviews and fills in your form, you are not in a race. You are the choice.
When marketplaces DO make sense
This is not a "never use HiPages" article, because that advice would be wrong. Marketplaces earn their keep in three situations:
- You are brand new. No reviews, no reputation, no website traffic. Marketplaces are the fastest way to buy your first jobs and build a work history. Expensive, but expensive beats idle.
- You have gaps to fill. Quiet fortnight, a cancelled project, an apprentice on the tools with nothing booked. Switching lead credits on for a burst is a legitimate tactic.
- You are testing a new service or area. Ten bought leads will teach you faster than three months of waiting whether Canberra wants your new offering.
The trap is not using marketplaces. The trap is using them as the permanent, only source of work, which turns a bridging tool into a $8,000-a-year toll booth on your own trade.
The transition plan: do not quit cold turkey
If marketplace leads currently pay your bills, cancelling the subscription the day your website launches is how you engineer a hungry quarter. Websites take a few months to earn Google's trust. Overlap instead:
- Month 0: launch the site properly. Real photos of your work, your service areas by name, your prices or at least honest from-prices, and reviews. A build process that starts with you seeing the homepage before you pay is a good sign you have picked the right builder.
- Months 1 to 3: run both. Keep the marketplace at current levels. Meanwhile, set up your free Google Business Profile, and start asking every happy customer for a Google review instead of a platform review. This single habit moves your reputation from rented land to owned land.
- Months 3 to 6: taper. As website enquiries appear (track them, do not guess), drop a marketplace tier or trim lead credits. Redirect a slice of the savings into more Google reviews and better job photos.
- Month 6 onward: marketplace becomes a tap, not a pipeline. Keep the account if you like, switched on only to fill gaps. You have inverted the relationship: they fill your quiet weeks instead of owning your busy ones.
Watch one number the whole way through: cost per job won, from each source. When the website's number beats the marketplace's number, and it will, the taper decides itself.
The question to ask yourself
Five years from now, would you rather have paid $42,000 to a platform for the privilege of racing three competitors to every phone call, or own a website that ranks for your trade in your suburbs, holds every review you have earned, and costs you a care plan to run?
If you want to see what the owned version looks like for your business specifically, we will design a real homepage concept for it within 48 hours, free, before you spend anything. Look at it next to your marketplace profile and decide which one you would rather own.