Is Checkatrade worth it? For some trades, in some postcodes, clearly yes, and for others it is a monthly bill that never pays for itself. The answer depends less on the platform than on one sum most tradespeople never do: what a won job costs you, set against what a job earns you. This article does that sum for Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Bark, with the fees as published in October 2026.
What Checkatrade charges in October 2026
Checkatrade’s pricing page lists three plans:
- Free, £0 a month. A profile you can share and use to collect reviews.
- Approved, £30 a month. The Checkatrade tick, a listing in its directory, review requests and job management tools.
- Growth, from £59 a month. Everything in Approved, plus a steady stream of enquiries or extra work when you want it, customers booking you from search, £100 to £200 of credit to appear higher in search results, and Checkatrade’s own card payments at fees of 1.29% to 1.79%.
Three things on that page are worth reading twice. The Growth price is “from”: the real figure depends on your trade, your area and how much work you ask for, and you see it during sign-up. The small print says fixed plan memberships are for 12 months. And the page does not say whether VAT is included, while trade reviews of the platform quote the prices as plus VAT, so ask before you sign.
A first month free is not a trial if the contract is for twelve. Read the membership terms for how and when you can leave before you join, not after the third quiet month.
What happened to Rated People
Rated People, for years the other big membership site, no longer has trade members of its own. In September its brand and website were bought by the Checkatrade Group, and its own announcement says the memberships ended before the sale. Jobs posted on Rated People are now matched with Checkatrade members, so a former Rated People member who wants that work now needs a Checkatrade membership.
If you are reading an older comparison that recommends Rated People, that is why the advice no longer applies.
MyBuilder and Bark: paying by the lead
The other two large platforms do not charge a monthly fee. They charge for access to a customer, in two different ways.
The difference that matters: on a pay-per-lead site, other tradespeople usually receive the same customer. You are paying to be one of several quotes, not to get the job.
The sum: what a won job costs you
Every platform reports leads, enquiries or views. None of those pays a bill. The number to work out is the cost of a job you actually won.
- Add up a year of spend. Membership times twelve, or every lead fee and credit pack, plus VAT if you cannot reclaim it.
- Count the jobs you won from it. Not enquiries, not quotes sent: jobs that went ahead and were paid.
- Divide. That is your cost per won job.
- Compare it with your profit on an average job, after materials and your time, not with the invoice total.
Two illustrations, with made-up figures so the method is clear. They are not quotes from any platform.
A membership. Say your Growth plan comes to £120 a month plus VAT, £1,728 a year if you are not VAT-registered. If it brings work you win three times a month, that is 36 jobs and £48 a job. For a bathroom fitter making £1,500 profit on a job, that is cheap. For a handyman making £60 on a two-hour visit, it takes most of the profit.
Pay per lead. Say leads in your trade cost £15 each and you win one in five. Each won job has cost £75. On a £3,000 job that is nothing; on a £150 repair it is half the margin.
The rule that comes out of it: lead sites suit trades with large jobs and high margins far better than trades with many small ones. A small-jobs trade needs customers who come straight to it.
What the fee buys that your own site does not
To be fair to the platforms, they sell some things that are hard to build alone.
- Work now. A new business with no reviews and no Google presence can get enquiries in its first month. Your own site will not do that, and how long a new site takes to show up on Google explains why.
- Borrowed trust. Vetting and a familiar badge reassure some homeowners, particularly for work inside the house.
- Reviews in one place. Customers who would never write a Google review will sometimes leave one when a platform asks.
For a tradesperson starting out, a year on a lead site while building a reputation can be a sensible spend.
What your own website does that a lead site does not
The trade-off appears when you stop paying. Your profile goes quiet, and the reviews you collected stay on someone else’s site. A customer who found you there once may go back there next time and be shown your competitors.
Your own website and your Google Business Profile work the other way round. The customer who finds you on Google sees you, not a list of four quotes. Reviews on your Google profile stay yours. There is no fee per enquiry, so a busy month costs the same as a quiet one.
None of that happens by itself. A website brings work when it names the towns you cover, gives each service a page, shows prices or what drives them, and makes calling one tap on a phone. What a tradesperson’s website needs covers that list, and Breakwater Roofing, a demo we built for a roofer in Wallasey, shows how it fits together on one site.
Running both, and deciding after three months
Most trades that use lead sites well use them alongside their own presence, not instead of it. Two habits make the decision a matter of numbers rather than mood:
- Ask every new customer where they found you, and write it down with the job. A spreadsheet with three columns, job, value, source, is enough.
- Review it before the contract renews, not when it ends. If the platform’s cost per won job is higher than the profit on your typical job, the answer is already there.
If you find most of your good jobs come from Google and word of mouth, the money might do more on the site and the profile; how much a website costs in the UK gives the figures to set against the platform’s fee. If the platform brings the big jobs and your site brings nothing, look at the site before cancelling anything: website not getting enquiries? goes through the nine places it usually leaks.
If you want a second opinion on whether your own site could carry more of the work, the free review tells you in writing the three things we would change first.
Related: should you put prices on your website? for the page customers compare you on, and how to get more Google reviews for the reviews that stay yours.
