Your Own Website or a Lead Marketplace? How to Work Out What One Enquiry Costs
The enquiry lands at 9:40 in the evening. A customer wants the plumbing replaced in a flat across town, work to start next week, floor area given, a photo of the bathroom attached. You reply within four minutes, because you know four other contractors bought the same contact and the one who answers first has the only real shot. In the morning you find out somebody quoted eight hundred less. You paid for the contact. You did not get the job.
Lead marketplaces work, which is why so many service businesses use them. Whether it is Oferteo or Fixly in Poland, Checkatrade or Bark elsewhere, the trouble starts when they become your only source of work. From that point the cost of winning a customer rises with the number of competitors, and you own no channel of your own. This article is not an argument for quitting them. It is an argument for working out what one customer actually costs you, and thinking about what belongs next to that channel.
What marketplaces genuinely do well
A marketplace gives you one thing no new website can: enquiries from day one. You sign up on Wednesday and have three contacts by Thursday. Nothing to write, no waiting on Google, no visibility to build over months. For a business that is just starting out, or moving into a new town, that is a sensible way to find out whether demand exists at all and what people are willing to pay.
The second benefit gets overlooked. A marketplace shows you the market in a form you can compare: what jobs people nearby are commissioning, at what budgets, what they ask about most often. That is free research, and it belongs in your own service descriptions and blog topics later. If six months of enquiries are dominated by riser replacements in 1970s blocks of flats, you already know what your home page should be talking about.
Where the bill starts
The mechanics are similar everywhere, whatever the branding: you pay for the contact, not for the job. Sometimes in points or credits, sometimes as a subscription with an enquiry cap, sometimes as a commission on the value of the work. There are four consequences worth knowing before you top up again.
The same lead goes to several firms at once. The customer gets five quotes within the hour and compares them mostly on price, because nothing else is known about any of you: no past work, no history, no faces. On top of that you pay for dead contacts, the ones who never answer the phone, and for people collecting a valuation for their bank. That part of the cost appears in no price list.
The third point matters more, because it concerns everything you build up. Reviews, job history and ranking position stay on the marketplace. When it raises its rates or changes how enquiries are distributed, you start again from nothing, with five years of good work you cannot take anywhere. It is the same mechanism we described in the post on using Facebook instead of a website, except here you also pay a fee for standing on someone else’s land.
The fourth thing happens in Google. Search for your service plus your town: the first ten results will almost certainly include marketplaces and directories. Traffic that could reach you directly goes through a middleman and gets resold to several firms at once.
Work out the cost of one job
Most conversations about marketplaces stop at impressions (“expensive”, “it used to be better”). Turn the impressions into two numbers. Take the last quarter and do the arithmetic.
| What you count | Where to find it | Example: renovation firm |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplace spend, 3 months | payment history | PLN 1800 |
| Contacts paid for | your marketplace dashboard | 60 |
| Of those, turned into a job | your diary and invoices | 7 |
| Cost per contact | spend divided by contacts | PLN 30 |
| Cost per JOB | spend divided by jobs | PLN 257 |
| Time spent handling enquiries | 10 min per contact, 60 contacts | 10 hours |
On its own, PLN 257 means nothing until you set it against your margin. For a bathroom renovation worth twenty thousand it is an excellent price for a customer. For swapping a tap at two hundred and fifty you are working for free and paying for the privilege. Count those ten hours too, because they came out of your evenings rather than your advertising budget.
Now the other side of the ledger. A website is a one-off cost plus upkeep, and the upkeep does not grow with the number of enquiries. In the done-for-you model a site costs PLN 249 including the first year of hosting, and from year two renewal starts at PLN 149 a year. The full market range, from site builders to agencies, is laid out in our post on how much a business website costs. The difference is that with a website the thirtieth enquiry of the month costs exactly what the first one did, which is nothing.
What each side gives you
| Lead marketplace | Your own website | |
|---|---|---|
| First enquiries | within days | usually after 1 to 3 months |
| Cost model | per contact, rises with competition | one-off plus renewal |
| Who owns the customer relationship | the marketplace | you |
| Competitors per enquiry | usually 3 to 6 firms | usually just you |
| Reviews and track record | stay on the platform | yours, on your domain |
| Position in Google | the marketplace ranks | you build your own results |
| Main risk | rates and rules change overnight | thin content, no reviews |
Look at that last row. Risk exists on the website side too, but it sits with you and you can do something about it. The marketplace risk sits with a company that owes you no warning.
Honestly: a website will not deliver on Monday
This is where most articles about “breaking free from the platforms” start bending the truth. A new site does not ring the phone the next day. Indexing takes days, first visits from long-tail phrases arrive after a few weeks, and decent local rankings build over months. We mapped it onto a timeline in the post on when a website starts bringing customers.
So the practical conclusion is simple. Do not switch the marketplace off the day your site goes live. Treat the two channels as overlapping shifts instead. You dial the marketplace down once your statistics start showing calls and form submissions arriving directly.
The arrangement that usually works
Service businesses that escape the single-channel trap tend to end up with the same set. A Google Business Profile, because it is free, puts you on the map and collects reviews. Your own website, which is the address you point to from the profile, from invoices, from the van and from every conversation. The marketplace stays as a valve: open it wider in the slow season, close it as the diary fills.
If you are wondering whether the profile alone will do, we compared the two in the post on a Google Business Profile versus a website. Briefly: the profile wins the map, the website wins the moment a customer wants to check that you really do the thing they are looking for.
When the marketplace alone is enough
Not everyone needs a website, and there is no sense spending money on something that will change nothing for you. Stay where you are if:
- your diary is full two months ahead and you want better jobs rather than more of them;
- you subcontract for larger firms and the end customer never looks for you;
- your service is a one-off bought purely on price, with no real choice of provider;
- you are trialling a new service for a quarter and want to see whether anyone asks about it first.
In those last two cases the marketplace is the better tool, because it answers the demand question quickly. You come back to the website question when the answer turns out to be yes.
What the site does once it is up
Ordering with Sitario looks like this: you describe the business in a form, about an hour later you look at the finished site, and only then do you decide whether you want it. Turn it down and you get your money back. The site costs PLN 249 as a one-off, the first year of hosting is included, and the domain is registered in your name, so it is yours from the first day.
After launch comes the part marketplaces have no way of matching. The contact form sends enquiries to your inbox and files a copy in the panel, so none of them get lost in spam. Statistics count leads from day one: submitted forms, taps on the phone number and on the email address. The autoblog writes articles about what people in your trade actually search for, and once a week the panel has a short plain-language summary of what happened and what it means. An AI analyst answers questions about the site and applies fixes with a single click.
None of that replaces a marketplace within a month. What it does is change the proportions after a year: you pay once for a channel that keeps working, instead of topping up for each contact separately.
What to do this week
Start with numbers, not with a decision. Open your marketplace payment history, take the last quarter, and fill in the table from the middle of this article: spend, paid contacts, closed jobs. You will see the cost of one customer that until now was blurred across small top-ups.
Then search Google for your service plus your town and count how many first-page results belong to marketplaces. If it is all of them, you know where your customers go before they reach you. Make the decision with those two numbers in front of you, because at that point it stops being a matter of opinion.