It usually starts at renewal. The invoice lands, you look at what went out over the last twelve months, and you try to work out how many of those jobs you would have won anyway.
It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch. So here is what we can tell you honestly, including the part we cannot tell you.
The first thing to know: they do not publish the price
Checkatrade does not put its membership prices on its website. The sign-up journey asks you to pick your trade and your postcode first, and the figure comes back after that. Memberships run for twelve months.
That matters more than it sounds. You cannot weigh it against anything until you have handed over your details, and by that point you are talking to somebody whose job is to sign you up.
You will find plenty of articles quoting exact monthly figures. Look at who wrote them. Almost all are published by lead generation companies and web agencies chasing the same tradespeople — us included, which is exactly why we are not going to print numbers we cannot stand behind. What members report paying varies enormously by trade and by area, and the only figure that means anything is the one they quote you.
So the first piece of advice is the dullest one: get your own quote, in writing, for your trade and your postcode, before you compare it to anything at all.
Ask what the membership actually covers
The monthly fee is not always the whole bill. Depending on the plan, there can be charges attached to the enquiries themselves, which means the number on the call can be the floor rather than the total. When you get your quote, ask plainly:
- Is this the full monthly cost, or is there a charge per enquiry on top?
- What counts as a chargeable enquiry – a phone call, a form, a missed call?
- What happens if the enquiry is nothing to do with my trade, or the customer never replies?
- How many enquiries am I promised each month, and what if they do not arrive?
- When does the twelve months end, and what is the window for cancelling before it renews?
Get the answers by email rather than over the phone. A reasonable company will not mind.
What you are actually buying
You are renting visibility on somebody else’s platform. That is not an insult, it is simply what the product is, and for some people it is worth every penny.
But two things follow from it. The position is rented, not owned – the day you stop paying, it goes, and you have nothing left to show for the years of fees. And you are shown alongside your competitors, because that is the entire point of a directory from the customer’s side. They are there to compare three of you.
When it is genuinely worth it
If you are starting out with no reviews and no reputation, a directory puts you in front of people who are ready to buy, this month, without waiting for word of mouth to build. That is real value and it is hard to replicate any other way.
It also helps in trades where people are nervous about who they let through the door. A vetting badge does reassure a certain kind of customer, particularly older ones, and particularly for work inside the house.
If you are in either position, the fee may well pay for itself. Nobody should tell you otherwise.
When it stops making sense
The point where people start questioning it is usually a few years in. You have regulars. You get recommended. The phone rings without help. And you begin to notice you are paying a fee on work that would have found you anyway.
There is a sum worth doing before you renew. Of the jobs you won through the platform last year, how many were genuinely new customers who had no other way of finding you? Not how many came through it – how many could not have reached you otherwise. That second number is what you are really paying for.
For a lot of established trades it is smaller than expected.
The comparison people actually want
Here are numbers we can stand behind, because they are ours and they are on our pricing page in public where anyone can read them.
A three page website is £349 as a one-off. Five pages is £499, ten pages £999. If you would rather we looked after it, the care plan starts at £39 a month or £120 a year, and it is optional – the site is yours whether you take it or not.
The difference is not really the amount, it is the shape. A directory fee recurs and never finishes. A website is bought once and then it is an asset you own. Whatever your quote turns out to be, multiply it by twelve, then by three years, and put that next to a one-off figure. That is the honest comparison, and you can only make it once you know your number.
What a website does that a directory cannot
Nobody else is listed on it
A customer on your own site is reading about you, not comparing you with two other firms on the same screen. That alone changes how the conversation starts.
There is no fee attached to the enquiry
The hundredth enquiry costs exactly what the first one did, which is nothing. That changes the maths completely once the work picks up.
It feeds your Google listing
A proper website supports your free Google Business Profile, which is what puts you on the map when somebody searches for your trade nearby. We covered how to set that up in getting your business on Google Maps, and it costs nothing.
That listing lives or dies on its reviews, and they are free: how to get more Google reviews.
You own it
The domain, the content, the photographs, the reviews you have gathered. Stop paying anyone and it is all still yours. That is worth checking carefully with whoever builds it, and we wrote about what goes wrong when it is not in what happens when your web designer disappears.
It does not have to be one or the other
Plenty of trades run both and there is nothing wrong with that. The sensible version is to keep the membership for a year while your own site and Google listing build up, ask every caller how they found you, and write it down.
Then at the next renewal you are deciding with a year of evidence in front of you, rather than on a phone call with somebody who would like you to say yes today.
Where to start
If you are weighing this up, get your renewal quote in writing first. Then, if you want to see what the alternative costs, our prices are published and our website design for tradesmen page explains what is included.
Checkatrade is not the only one charging for work. We compared the pay-per-lead sites in Bark, MyBuilder or Rated People: which is actually worth it.
If you would rather just talk it through, get in touch and tell us your trade and your area. We will give you a straight answer about whether a website is likely to replace those leads or just sit alongside them, even where the answer is that you should keep paying the membership for now. If you want to understand pricing more generally first, read what a small business website should cost.