What Checkatrade is selling an electrician
Checkatrade’s join page describes a membership built around your trade and the postcodes you want. You choose a plan and a number of job enquiries. Customers can call you, request a quote, or book from your profile. The price sits behind “view our prices” for that trade and those postcodes. A starting-from figure you saw somewhere else is not that quote. Use the quote, then the invoice.
The same page’s footnote says fixed-plan memberships are for 12 months, on the offer they were advertising when this was written. Read the agreement you actually signed before you assume you can stop this month.
There is a second door. The Opportunities Board, on their support page updated September 2026, is a feed of local leads you can browse and unlock with credits. Credits are bought up front, last six months, and do not roll over. Their page says unlocking buys the customer’s contact details and the chance to quote, not a guaranteed job, and that credits are not returned simply because the customer does not go ahead. If the details are wrong or the enquiry does not look genuine, they say you can raise it and they will review it against their lead quality policy.
Members on a fixed or pay-as-you-go plan get their own leads first, on that same page. The board is described as extra. A call from your profile and a lead you unlock with credits are different products. Count them separately or the monthly sum lies to you.
Cost per lead and cost per job
Cost per lead is what you paid Checkatrade that month, divided by the enquiries that reached you. Membership, credits you spent, and credits that expired unused all belong in the top number. The bottom number is calls, quote requests, bookings and unlocked leads. One enquiry that arrived as a call and a message is still one enquiry.
Cost per job is the same spend, divided by paid jobs that came from those enquiries. This is the figure that tells you if the membership earned its keep. Cost per lead can look tidy while cost per job is ugly, which happens when most of the enquiries never become work.
Compare cost per job with what you keep on that sort of job after materials and the labour you had to pay, and before this marketing cost. The price on the customer’s quote is the wrong comparison. Say a quote is £900 and it costs £600 to deliver. Those two numbers are round figures for the point, not a price list, and they do not leave £900 to spend on leads.
Do it for two or three months. One quiet month, or one fat rewire, will swing a single month around. A short run shows the shape.
What to track on Checkatrade
A notes app is enough. Once a month, write down:
- What you paid. Membership, credit bundles, and any credits that expired.
- Enquiries that reached you, split if you can: direct calls, quote requests, bookings, board unlocks.
- How many you replied to the same day, and how many waited until the next morning or never got a reply.
- How many became a visit or a quote you actually sent.
- How many became a paid job, and what you kept on those jobs.
Then the two divisions. Cost per lead, cost per paid job. If you want the leak in pounds from missed and late replies across every door, not only Checkatrade, the missed enquiry calculator uses your counts and your job value.
When Checkatrade leads are not converting
“The leads are rubbish” is three different problems wearing one coat. Separate them before you cancel anything.
You never got back to them. An enquiry you paid to receive, then answered the next day, cannot be judged as a bad lead. It never had a chance. This is the common one for a sole trader who is up a ladder at 10am and in traffic at 4pm. It is also the one you can change without leaving the platform.
The job was the wrong job. Too small, too far, evenings you do not work, a board you do not want to touch. That is a plan and a postcode problem. The join flow asks you to pick both. If the mix is consistently wrong, the membership is buying the wrong work, however quickly you reply.
You replied, you quoted, they went elsewhere. Then you have a real conversion question: price, trust, how you came across, or someone else who was simply there first. On the Opportunities Board, Checkatrade says each lead can only be unlocked by a limited number of trades. They do not publish, on the pages we read, a single number for how many firms receive an ordinary quote request. We are not going to invent one. Ask what your plan actually sends, and watch your own reply times.
Their support page also says a lead with bad contact details, or one that does not look like a real enquiry, can be raised with them. That is their published route. It is not a reason to treat the whole membership as suspect. Use it when a lead meets that description, and keep using your sheet for everything else.
When Checkatrade makes sense, and when to cancel
It makes sense when three things are true at once.
- The jobs match the work you want, in the area you cover.
- Cost per paid job sits comfortably under what you keep on that job.
- You, or something acting for you, answer while the enquiry is still warm. A full diary of better work is a reason to pause, not a reason the platform “failed”.
Cancelling makes sense when two or three months of that sheet show the cost per paid job swallowing the job, or the work is consistently the wrong kind and a different plan would not fix it. Do it off the sheet, not off a bad Tuesday. If you are inside a fixed term, “cancel” may mean “stop buying extra credits now, and leave at the end of the term”. The join page describes fixed plans as 12 months. Your contract is the document.
If the jobs are decent and the replies are slow, cancelling throws away the spend a faster reply would have kept. Read Checkatrade alternatives for UK trades before you assume the next platform will behave differently. The phone problem travels with you.
How response speed changes the Checkatrade maths
Checkatrade’s own blog, updated 19 March 2024, tells members that a slow reply is how a lead goes cold, and the FAQ on that page calls a response in under five minutes the best lead response time. We are not repeating the conversion multiples on that page. The sourced figure we use is older and narrower. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that responding to an enquiry within five minutes rather than thirty makes you roughly 21 times more likely to qualify the lead.
Put that next to a van day. The enquiry lands at 9.40am. You are in a loft. You see it at 6pm. On a direct call, the customer may already have booked the electrician who picked up. On a quote request or an unlocked lead, you still paid for the chance. The membership did not get more expensive. The reply got later, and cost per paid job moved because the bottom of the division shrank.
Speed does not rescue a plan full of jobs you do not want. It changes the maths on the jobs you do want, which is most of what an electrician is paying for.
A worked example with illustrative numbers
Illustrative example. Every number below was invented so the arithmetic is easy to follow. This is not a Checkatrade price, not a client, and not a result.
Sketch, not a person: a one-van electrician. In this made-up month he pays the platform £240. Sixteen enquiries reach him. Cost per lead is £240 ÷ 16, which is £15. He replies to nine of them the same day. Two become paid jobs. Cost per paid job is £240 ÷ 2, which is £120.
Say he keeps £450 on a typical job after materials, before this marketing cost. That £450 is also made up. Two jobs are £900. Take off the £240 and £660 is left, on these figures. On this sheet the membership is earning its keep, with room.
Same sketch, a second made-up month. Still £240, still 16 enquiries. He is on the tools and only gets to them the next day. One paid job falls out the bottom. Cost per paid job is now £240. One job at £450 leaves £210. Nothing about the platform’s price changed. The reply did.
Put your invoice and your diary in those boxes. If you do not know what you keep on a job, start with a conservative number you would defend to your accountant, not a hopeful one.
Shoogly works with Checkatrade, not instead of it
Shoogly does not replace a lead platform and we are not asking you to leave one. The same enquiries, from Checkatrade or anywhere else, get an instant reply in your voice, are qualified (the job, the place, the timing, a photo where it helps), and land on your phone ready to book. A missed call is texted back in seconds from a background number, so the number on the van stays yours. The customer’s reply goes to the same text agent as the website form, WhatsApp, and Facebook. The agent never gives a price and never promises a date.
There is a one-off build and a flat monthly figure, agreed on a call. We do not publish the price. A three-month minimum on the monthly side, then 30 days’ notice, and a 60-day money-back guarantee on the build. If your enquiry volume is too small for it, we would rather say so on the call.
The electrician page is the trade-specific version. Missed call text back is the bit that covers the calls you cannot take. Checkatrade vs MyBuilder vs Rated People is the wider comparison, still without a made-up price list.