Google Local Services Ads can charge you for a missed call with no voicemail once you return the customer’s message. The customer never has to speak with you for the lead to count. That is the basic rule across paid lead channels: you pay for contact, not for a job. The phone can ring while your technician is under a house or the office is closed, and the charge still happens.
Paid lead marketplaces charge when a customer reaches out
Thumbtack has no charge to join and no membership fee. You pay per lead when a customer sees your profile and contacts you directly, and because that lead matches the job preferences you set, you are charged automatically. You set your own lead prices, and every paid lead draws against a weekly budget that stops feeding you once it is spent.
Angi does not publish current pro lead pricing publicly, so treat any figure you find secondhand as unconfirmed. One part of the record is public. The Federal Trade Commission charged HomeAdvisor, which is affiliated with Angi, with making false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold, going back to at least mid-2014. Providers were told they would only receive leads matching their services and preferred geographic area, the FTC alleged, when many did not match. A final consent order was approved in April 2023 with up to $7.2 million in redress.
That order covered marketing years ago, but it tells you which promises needed policing. Test “lead quality” and “matched to your preferences” against your own records. A shared marketplace sells you a chance to buy contact, not a job.
Google Local Services Ads bill for valid leads, not clicks
You set an average weekly budget based on the number of leads you want and a bidding mode for the maximum you will pay for one. A text or email, a voicemail, a call where you speak with the customer, and booking requests all count. So does that missed call without a voicemail, once you return it.
Google says invalid or low-quality leads are not charged, that charged leads get reassessed and may be credited automatically, and that you can report a bad one through a feedback survey. There is a qualification cost first: Google verifies licenses, requires insurance, and may run entity verification plus owner and technician background checks. Businesses that pass carry the Google Guarantee badge.
The federal incentive that drove replacement calls is gone
The Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, section 25C, is over. The IRS puts it plainly: the credit will not be allowed for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025. That came from Public Law 119-21, enacted July 4, 2025, and section 25D ended the same way. While 25C ran, capped at $1,200 a year with a separate $2,000 cap for heat pumps and water heaters, every homeowner in every state had the same reason to call. It padded replacement pipelines from 2023 through 2025.
What replaced it is state-run. The Department of Energy’s Home Energy Rebates, HOMES at up to $8,000 and HEEHR at up to $14,000, are administered by state, territory, and Tribal energy offices and are live in select states only. Whether that stream exists in your market depends on your state energy office, not on anything national. Check your proposal templates too, because a shop still citing the federal credit is quoting something expired, and the ENERGY STAR central air conditioner label and the program’s move to DOE changed what else you can claim this year.
Your existing customers are the only leads without a per-lead bill
Repeat customers, maintenance agreement members, and referrals carry no per-lead charge. They still depend on access. A referral that lands in voicemail calls the next shop on the list, and a replacement inquiry deserves a different path from a routine service request, for the reasons laid out in how replacement callers behave differently: they are shopping, not panicking, and they are calling three shops in one sitting. Dial 72 recognizes existing maintenance-plan members on the call, flags a system-replacement inquiry as its own category, and books the appointment during that first conversation.
Response time matters more than the channel name
Harvard Business Review audited 2,241 US companies for its March 2011 article “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” timing each one’s response to a web-generated test lead. Only 37% answered within an hour, 23% never responded at all, and the average among responders was 42 hours.
A separate study in the same research covered 1.25 million leads at 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies. Firms that tried to reach a customer within an hour of the query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that tried an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day.
That work is from 2011 and was not HVAC-specific, so take it as the direction and size of the effect, not a promise about a furnace call. The direction is not subtle. 62% of HVAC calls come after 5pm, on weekends, or on holidays, and 85% of callers who cannot reach you never call back. Before buying another lead, compare your four after-hours coverage options, because the channel matters a lot less when the customer cannot get a person.
Your invoice hides a lead-answering problem
A shop can look like it has a lead-generation problem when what it actually has is a lead-answering problem. The paid channels hide this, because on the invoice a lead you answered and a lead you let ring look identical. Pull your billed-lead count for the month from each platform, then count how many of those you can remember having a conversation with. The gap is the number worth acting on, and tracking it takes a record that survives past the call, which is the whole argument for choosing an HVAC CRM around the right kind of record.
An average residential service call runs about $180, and what a missed no-heat call actually costs is more than the lost invoice. On a bought lead it is worse, because you already paid for contact that never became a conversation.
Be clear about the limit, though. An answering layer does not create demand and will not make the phone ring. If nobody is calling, that is a marketing problem. What coverage does is stop you paying twice for a call you never took. So before buying another lead, decide in writing who answers the ones you already bought, who books them, and how a replacement inquiry gets flagged before it lands behind a filter change.
