A roofing owner shopping for leads gets quoted numbers that don't seem to belong to the same industry. One vendor wants $35 to $65 for a shared lead . Another sells exclusive leads at $125 to $150 . A third will book a confirmed appointment on your calendar for $175 to $200 . None of these vendors are lying. They're selling different products wearing the same name, and the price tag alone tells you almost nothing about which one is actually cheap.
This post breaks down what roofing companies are really paying in 2026, aged and shared marketplace leads, exclusive leads, and pay-per-appointment models, using live 2026 vendor rate cards instead of round numbers pulled from a sales page. Then it shows why comparing vendors on cost per lead is the wrong exercise, and what to calculate instead.
Short version: cost per lead tells you what you paid. Cost per booked job tells you what you got. The gap between those two numbers is where most roofing lead budgets quietly leak.
The 2026 Roofing Lead Price Bands, by Type
Every roofing lead vendor is selling one of a handful of underlying products. Here's what each one actually costs right now, pulled from published 2026 rate cards where a vendor discloses one.
| Lead type | What you're buying | 2026 price |
|---|---|---|
| Shared / marketplace lead | Same homeowner request resold to several contractors at once | ~$35 to $65 per lead, industry estimate (published bands run as wide as $20 to $100+) |
| Exclusive raw lead, single vendor | Sold to you only, not yet an appointment | $41 to $99 per qualified lead |
| Exclusive raw lead, volume tiers | Sold to you only, priced by monthly batch size, $750 order minimum | $125 to $150 per lead ($65 real-time option) |
| Exclusive appointment, call-center booked | Time slot on your calendar, no extra charge for the booking itself | $75 to $150 per appointment |
| Exclusive appointment, no-show replaced | Time slot on your calendar, 24-hour dispute window, invalid or no-show appointments replaced free | $175 to $200 per appointment |
| Exclusive appointment, no guarantee | Prepaid balance, month to month, no commitment that the homeowner will actually be there | $110 to $150 per appointment |
| Scheduled appointment, general market | Industry-wide estimate across vendor types, not one specific vendor | $200 to $400 per appointment, vs. $150 to $300+ for a raw exclusive lead, industry estimate |
CONFIRMED figures matched live vendor pricing pages verbatim. DIRECTIONAL figures are industry estimates from published cost guides, not one vendor's rate card.
Setup fees and minimums are part of the real price
The per-unit price isn't the whole invoice. Minyona charges a $4,000 setup fee, discounted to $2,000 as a limited-time offer, with no ongoing monthly retainer after that. HeyRoofers enforces a $750 minimum order before you can buy at all. Peak Marketing Service goes the other direction, zero setup fee, prepaid balance, month to month. Ask for the total first-month cost, setup plus minimum order plus per-unit price, before you compare any two vendors on their advertised per-lead number alone.
Why market tier barely shows up in published pricing
The angle every buyer expects, city A costs more than city B, mostly doesn't show up in what vendors actually publish. What does show up consistently is volume tiering. HeyRoofers drops from $150 to $140 to $125 per lead as your monthly order size climbs from 10 to 30 to 50 leads. The Lead Giants runs the same pattern on appointments, $200, then $190, then $175, as volume increases. If a vendor quotes you a materially different rate than their published tiers, ask what's different about your market or your criteria that justifies it, in writing, before you sign.
Cost Per Lead Is the Wrong Number to Compare Vendors On
Two vendors quote you $50 and $150 per lead. The $50 lead looks like the better deal until you ask one more question: what share of those leads actually turn into a signed job? Cost per lead measures what you paid for one unit. Cost per booked job measures what you actually spent to win one piece of work, and it's the only number that tells you anything about return on the money.
The formula is simple: cost per lead divided by your conversion rate equals your true cost per booked job. A $50 lead converting at 15% costs roughly $333 per closed job. A $150 lead converting at 30% costs roughly $500 per closed job on paper, worse on that math alone, until you factor in what the cheaper channel's real conversion rate actually is once you count every lead that never answers the phone.
That gap between nominal and real conversion is exactly where shared marketplaces get expensive. One industry estimate puts the true blended cost per booked customer through an Angi-style shared marketplace as high as $1,400 to $2,500, once every unreachable, price-shopping, or duplicate-sold lead in the batch is counted against the ones that actually became a job. A $50 sticker price never shows you that number. Only tracking your own conversion rate does.
The Shared-Lead Problem, by the Numbers
Shared leads are cheaper per unit because the vendor sells the same homeowner request to more than one buyer. HomeAdvisor and Angi typically resell the same lead to three to eight contractors at once, and one industry estimate for roofing specifically puts the number as high as sixteen contractors on a single lead.
That resale pattern is exactly why shared roofing leads convert at roughly 13% to 20% versus 27% to 30% for exclusive leads, by industry estimates. You're not competing on price or pitch when a lead is shared eight ways. You're competing on who dials first.
The complaint record backs this up. A contractor on Angi's Indianapolis Better Business Bureau profile documented $5,749.79 in charges and wrote, "I called every lead and not one person ever answered." And in 2023 the FTC issued a final order requiring HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million over false and unsubstantiated claims about its lead quality and sourcing, dating back to 2014. Neither of those is an isolated bad review. They're regulatory and public records tied to the exact business model driving the low sticker price.
What "Pay Per Appointment" Actually Buys You
Moving from a raw lead to a booked appointment removes the step where most shared leads die, someone answering the phone at all. But "pay per appointment" isn't one product either. Three live 2026 vendor policies show how differently that phrase gets defined.
| Vendor | Price | No-show handling |
|---|---|---|
| Minyona | $75 to $150/appointment | Booked via call center at no extra charge on top of the lead price |
| The Lead Giants | $175 to $200/appointment | No-show or invalid appointments (false information, out of area, not the homeowner) replaced free if disputed within 24 hours |
| Peak Marketing Service | $110 to $150/appointment | Prepaid balance, month to month, explicitly no guarantee the homeowner will actually be present |
The cheapest appointment price on this list carries the least protection. Compare the replacement policy before you compare the invoice.
A $110 appointment with no no-show guarantee and a $200 appointment with a 24-hour replacement window aren't the same purchase. The second one shifts the risk of a no-show back onto the vendor. That's worth a real premium, and the market is already pricing it that way. See the full breakdown of that tradeoff in exclusive vs. shared roofing leads: the real cost-per-job comparison.
Doing the Math: Three Models, One Real Metric
Here's the same cost-per-booked-job formula applied to three real pricing models above, using the industry-estimate conversion rates cited earlier in this post. This is back-of-envelope math built from the price bands and conversion figures already sourced, not a vendor's guarantee.
| Model | Price | Conversion to a closed job | Nominal cost per booked job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared marketplace lead | $35 to $65/lead | 13% to 20% (industry estimate, full funnel) | ~$175 to $500 |
| Exclusive raw lead | $125 to $150/lead | 27% to 30% (industry estimate, full funnel) | ~$420 to $560 |
| Exclusive confirmed appointment | $175 to $200/appointment | 20% to 40% close rate on a sat estimate, industry estimate | ~$440 to $1,000 |
On paper, that makes the cheapest shared lead look almost competitive with an appointment on cost per booked job. In practice, it rarely holds up. That nominal math assumes every lead in the batch is workable, and a meaningful share of a shared batch simply isn't, unanswered, already sold to a competitor who beat you to the door, or a homeowner who was never a real prospect. That's exactly why the real-world blended cost through an Angi-style marketplace runs to $1,400 to $2,500, not the $175 to $500 the sticker math suggests. The confirmed appointment model doesn't have that gap between nominal and real, because the hardest step, getting a real homeowner to agree to a time, already happened before you paid.
What a closed job is worth backs up why this matters. A full roof replacement runs around $10,000 on average by industry estimates, and roofing sales teams close somewhere in the 20 to 40% range on estimates they actually sit, again by industry estimates. Even at the high end of the appointment model's cost-per-job math above, that's one closed roof paying for several appointments with room to spare.
What this means for you
- Never compare two lead vendors on price per unit alone. Ask what's shared vs. exclusive and what stage of the funnel the price actually buys.
- Track your own conversion rate by source for at least a month before deciding a cheap lead is actually cheap. The invoice price and the real cost per booked job are rarely the same number.
- If you're buying appointments, read the no-show and replacement policy before the price. A guarantee is worth more than a discount.