Is Checkatrade worth it? The sums that answer it for your business

Every trader asks this question twice: once before joining, and again — usually with more feeling — when the renewal comes round. The unhelpful truth is that both answers are common. Some members cover the fee with one won job a month. Others pay a year for shared enquiries that rarely turn into work. The useful move is working out which business yours is, and you can do that with a notebook and three months.

What you're actually buying

Checkatrade membership bundles four things:

• A directory listing. Customers searching the site — or checking up on a name someone gave them — find your profile, your reviews, and a way to contact you.
• The vetting badge. Members are checked before approval, and the logo on your van tells a customer someone has already looked into you. For a customer choosing between two unknown names, that can settle it.
• Lead flow, if you pay for it. The cheapest plan (£30 + VAT a month) is the listing only. Plans that send you leads are quoted per trade, postcode and volume, and members report bills from around £100 to £500+ a month. The full breakdown is in our Checkatrade cost guide.
• A work guarantee. Jobs booked through the platform carry a guarantee for work up to £1,000, subject to its terms.

Note what's not in the bundle: won jobs. The platform sends enquiries; converting them is yours to do, and that's where the worth-it question is actually decided.

When it tends to pay

The members who do well out of lead platforms tend to share a shape:

• They need flow, not fame. A newer business, a diary with gaps, a move into a new area — situations where the problem is not enough enquiries coming in.
• Their jobs carry the cost. Rewires, bathrooms, roofs — work where £30–£50 of acquisition cost per won job disappears into the margin.
• They answer fast. Enquiries on any platform go to whoever responds first with something useful. A business that replies within the hour converts a very different share than one that replies at 9pm.
• Their trade and postcodes have demand. The same plan buys very different lead flow in different areas — which is why one plasterer swears by it and another, two towns over, cancelled.

When it tends not to

• Your diary is already full from word of mouth. Paying for enquiries you don't have room to quote is the most expensive way to feel busy.
• Your work is mostly small call-outs. When the typical job is £80–£150, a per-job acquisition cost that would be trivial on big work eats a painful share of the margin.
• You can't respond during the day. No fault involved — some work means eight hours somewhere you can't answer anything. But on a shared enquiry, the slow reply usually pays the fee and someone else gets the job.

One more thing, common to every lead platform: some enquiries go nowhere, whoever you are. Customers gather several quotes, or were only pricing up a maybe, or stop replying altogether. That's not a fault you can fix — it's a share of dead cost to include in your sums.

The three-month test

This is the whole method. It costs nothing and ends the guesswork:

1. Before you sign, set your target. Profit on your typical job, and the share of it you're willing to pay to win the work. That's your target cost per won job.
2. Count everything for three months. Enquiries received, enquiries quoted, jobs won, revenue from those jobs. A notebook column does it; so does job software that keeps every enquiry in one list with a source against each one.
3. Divide and compare. Three months of fees, divided by jobs won, against your target. Now you have an answer about your own business, rather than someone else's experience in a different trade and town.

The 12-month membership raises the stakes on this discipline: you can't act on a bad month three, but you can walk into the renewal knowing exactly what the year cost per job won.

While you're counting, protect the number you can actually move — the win rate. Answer enquiries in the first hour where you can, and ask one qualifying question early to sort real jobs from browsers. grafter.ly helps here: a forwarded enquiry email becomes a job you can quote from the van, so the enquiries you've paid for don't wait until the evening.

If the numbers say no

The test paid for itself: now you know. It might mean the platform is wrong for your trade and area. It might mean a different charging model fits better: paying per shortlisted lead instead of a monthly plan, or credits you spend only on jobs you pick. The main alternatives — MyBuilder, Rated People, Bark — charge in genuinely different ways, and we've compared how all four work and what they cost. Or it might mean your word-of-mouth engine is already doing the job, and the fee is better spent elsewhere.

Worth it isn't a property of the platform. It's a property of the platform, your trade, your postcodes, and how you work an enquiry — measured, not guessed.

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Sources. Membership mechanics and published pricing are from Checkatrade's own pages, checked 20 August 2026 — see the cost guide's sources for the detail. Reported member bills are third-party figures, not a price list.