The CraftJack Alternative That Skips the Race to Call: Exclusive, Already-Booked Leads

CraftJack is a pay-per-lead marketplace owned by Angi that serves roughly 50 home-service trades. When a homeowner submits a request, CraftJack verifies it and sends it to contractors in real time. Its signature feature is the Speed-To-Call Discount: call the homeowner within 30 minutes of receiving the lead and you save 20 percent on that lead. Pricing is per lead with no monthly subscription, and you can request credit for bad leads.

Credit where it is due: CraftJack caps sharing at up to four contractors, which is tighter than many marketplaces, and its speed incentive rewards the real-world truth that the first contractor to make contact usually wins the job. For a solo operator who answers the phone instantly and thrives on hustle, CraftJack can produce jobs.

The honest catch is the model itself. It is still a shared, per-lead system: you compete with up to three other pros on the same request, and you pay whether or not you close, or even connect.

Per-lead price is not your real cost. Your real cost is cost per closed job. When a lead is shared with three or four other contractors, the homeowner fields several calls and quotes, so close rates on shared marketplace leads commonly land in the single digits to mid-teens (often around 5 to 15 percent). Do the math and a cheap-looking shared lead can quietly cost well over $1,700 per job actually won.

Exclusive leads flip that math. Industry data puts exclusive close rates around 25 to 40 percent, which pushes the true cost per closed job down to roughly $240 to $320. The lead ticket looks higher, but the cost that hits your bank account is dramatically lower because you are not paying to lose races you never had a chance to win.

StingLeads does not sell you a phone number to chase. Our AI SMS assistant texts the homeowner, qualifies the job, and books a specific free-quote visit on your calendar. The lead is exclusive to you, and the homeowner is already expecting your visit, so there is no 30-minute countdown and no four contractors dialing the same person.

The difference in daily workflow is stark. With CraftJack you win by being fastest to interrupt. With StingLeads you simply show up to a scheduled appointment. That is why our platform has booked 1,372 plus appointments with a 94 percent show-up rate and a 4.8 out of 5 rating across 200 plus companies served.

CraftJack is part of Angi, so its history matters. In 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor, an Angi company that sells Angi Leads, to pay up to $7.2 million to settle charges that it made deceptive claims about lead quality, geographic matching, and how often leads turn into jobs. The FTC later returned more than $3 million to affected businesses.

The pattern is not ancient history. Angi Inc is not BBB accredited and shows roughly 1,946 complaints over the last three years on its BBB profile. In October 2025, the Vermont Attorney General settled with Angi for $100,000 over the misleading "Angi Certified Pro" marketing claim. None of this means CraftJack cannot deliver a job, but it is a fair reason to be cautious about lead-quality and matching promises from the Angi family.

It is also worth noting that CraftJack's own contractor resources now redirect into Angi's signup flow, a sign the brand is being folded into the larger Angi platform.

CraftJack charges per lead in a range that varies by trade and market, and its bad-lead credit process puts the burden on you to flag and request refunds after the fact. You are paying for a contact, not an outcome.

StingLeads is built around outcomes. You can pay per lead or pay per close, with no contracts. Founding per-lead pricing is about $30 for pressure washing and $50 for tree service (scaling up as we grow), and every booked appointment comes with bad-lead and no-show protection. Because leads are exclusive and pre-booked, what you pay for is a real homeowner sitting on your calendar, not a shared tip you still have to win.

Choose CraftJack if you want a broad, mature marketplace across dozens of trades, you answer the phone within minutes, and you are comfortable competing on speed against a handful of other pros for each lead. That model rewards hustle and can work for high-volume callers.

Choose StingLeads if you would rather stop dialing strangers and start showing up to booked visits, if you want the lead to be yours alone, and if you want your cost tied to jobs rather than contacts. We currently focus on pressure washing, soft wash, and tree service or removal, with more trades added over time. If your growth bottleneck is time and no-shows, not phone speed, the exclusive booked-appointment model is built for you.