hipages review: what a shared lead marketplace actually costs you

hipages is a marketplace, as are Oneflare and Airtasker. A homeowner describes a job, the platform matches it to tradies in that area and trade, and those tradies pay for the customer's contact details. That is the product. You are buying the right to make contact, not the job.

This is worth being clear about because it is where most of the frustration comes from. Tradies sign up expecting work and receive permission to compete for work. Those are different things, and the gap between them is the whole question of whether the platform is worth it.

When an enquiry goes to several businesses at once, the customer is being called by all of them within the hour. You are not having a conversation about the job. You are in a race, and the two things that decide it are who rang first and who quoted lowest.

That has knock-on effects that never appear on the invoice. You quote more jobs to win the same amount of work. You spend evenings pricing jobs that go to someone else. And because everyone in the race knows they are in a race, prices get squeezed towards whoever is hungriest that week.

Neither column is automatically right. A shared lead you win half the time can beat an exclusive lead that costs six times as much. The point is that you cannot tell which you have got without doing the arithmetic.

Most tradies judge a lead platform on the monthly bill. That number tells you almost nothing on its own. The figure that decides whether it is worth it is what you pay for every job you actually win.

Run it over three months, not one. A single quiet month is weather, not a trend, and lead platforms have seasonal swings like everything else in trade work.

You need four numbers, and you almost certainly already have all four sitting in your accounting software and your phone.

• What you paid the platform in total over the period, subscription and per lead charges together.
• How many enquiries you actually paid for in that period.
• How many of those turned into a job you invoiced.
• What those jobs were worth to you after materials and labour, not the headline invoice total.

Divide the first number by the third. That is your real cost per won job. It is often not the number people expect, in either direction, which is exactly why it is worth working out rather than arguing about.

There are real situations where these platforms earn their keep, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

• You have spare capacity. An empty Tuesday filled at a thin margin still beats an empty Tuesday.
• You answer the phone fast, every time. Speed is most of the win rate on shared leads.
• Your average job is worth well more than the leads cost you, so a low win rate still leaves you ahead.
• You are new, with no reviews, no referral base and no ranking yet, and you need work while you build those.
• You are testing a new suburb or a new service and want volume before you commit to it properly.

That last one is underrated. A month of shared leads is a cheap way to find out whether there is demand for bathroom work in an area before you spend real money marketing there.

The pattern is consistent. The platform works while you are hungry and has quietly stopped working by the time you are busy, and most businesses do not notice the switch because the invoice looks the same.

• You are already booked out. You are now paying to quote work you cannot take, or taking it at a price you resent.
• You cannot get to the phone inside a few minutes. On shared leads that is most of your win rate gone.
• The jobs coming through are smaller than the ones you want, so the leads are cheap and the work is not worth having.
• You are winning on price rather than on fit, and your margins have been drifting down for a year.
• You have a reputation, reviews and repeat customers, and you are still paying to compete with businesses that have none.

None of that means cancel tomorrow. It means the platform has moved from being your source of work to being one line in a marketing budget, and it should be judged like any other line.

Switching to Oneflare or ServiceSeeking is the move most tradies make first, and it is the one that changes least. The sign-up is different, the interface is different and the fees are worked out differently. The model underneath is the same one: an enquiry earns the platform more if more than one business pays for it.

So the arithmetic above travels with you. Work out what you pay for a lead. Then work out how many leads it takes you to win a job. That gives you your real cost per job, on any platform. Moving between marketplaces changes your bill. It does not change your odds, because your odds are set by how many other businesses got the same phone number.

Airtasker sits slightly apart, because a lot of what gets posted there is small odd-job work rather than the trade jobs a licensed business wants. That suits some trades and wastes the time of others. It is worth a look if your work includes small jobs and worth skipping if it does not.

None of that makes them a bad deal. It makes them the same deal. If you are comparing platforms hoping one of them sells you an enquiry nobody else has, that is the thing none of them are selling.

The genuine alternatives are the ones where the enquiry belongs to you.

• Your own site ranking for the work you want in the suburbs you cover, so enquiries come to you and no one else.
• A Google Business Profile that actually gets maintained, which is free and which most trade businesses set up once and never touch again.
• Paid search pointed at your own booking form rather than at a marketplace listing.
• Exclusive lead generation, where enquiries are capped to one business per trade and area.
• Referrals and repeat work, which cost nothing per job and which almost every busy trade business underuses.

All of those take longer to start working than signing up to a marketplace, which is exactly why marketplaces exist. The sensible position for most Melbourne trade businesses is not either or. It is using the marketplace to fill gaps while you build something you own, and being honest with yourself about when the second thing is ready to carry the load.

Whoever you buy leads from, marketplace or otherwise, these are the questions that separate a straight answer from a sales pitch.

• How many other businesses can receive the same enquiry I pay for?
• Am I charged for an enquiry that turns out to be outside my area or my trade, and how do I dispute one?
• Can I see, before I pay, what the job actually is and where it is?
• What is my contract term, and what happens to unused credits if I stop?
• Can I restrict leads to the specific suburbs and services I want, or do I take what comes?

Clear answers to all five means you know what you are buying, which is all anyone can ask. Vague answers to any of them are the answer.