Every Perth tradie who has paid for leads asks the same question around month four: is hipages worth it, or am I just renting work I could have won on my own?
It deserves a proper answer rather than a yes or a no. The honest one is that it depends on your gross profit per job, your win rate against the other tradies who received the same lead, and whether you already have anywhere else for a homeowner in Ellenbrook or Baldivis to find you at eleven at night when their hot water system has let go.
So let us do the maths properly. Not cost per lead, which is the number platforms prefer you to look at, but cost per job, which is the number that decides whether you are making money.
How hipages pricing actually works
Two things are being charged for, and mixing them up is where the confusion starts.
The first is a membership or subscription. You pay a recurring monthly amount to hold a listed profile, appear in the directory and receive job notifications. Plans sit at different levels, with higher tiers including more leads and more visibility.
The second is the lead itself. Jobs are paid for with credits, and different job types consume different numbers of credits. A quick handyman job and a full bathroom renovation are not priced the same, because the platform knows what the work is worth to you. When your included credits run out before the month does, you top up.
That means your real monthly outlay is not the subscription figure you remember agreeing to. It is the subscription plus every top up. Pull three months of bank statements and add every line that went to the platform. Most tradies are mildly surprised by the total, because the subscription is the number that sticks in your head and the credit purchases are the ones that drift past unnoticed on a Tuesday night.
Plans, credit values and job pricing change, so check the current terms directly rather than relying on what a mate told you two years ago. What does not change is the structure: a fixed fee for being there, plus a variable fee for each opportunity to quote.
Note the wording. You are buying an opportunity to quote. You are not buying a job.
The shared lead problem
When a homeowner in Canning Vale posts a job, it does not land with you alone. It goes out to a small group of tradies, usually around three, all notified at roughly the same moment.
This single fact drives almost everything else in the arithmetic.
It means your best case win rate is capped. Even if you are the fastest, the most professional and the best priced, you start from one in three before the customer has read a word. In practice it is worse, because some of those homeowners were price shopping from the start, some were testing a number against a quote they already had, and some go quiet after all three tradies have been out.
It also changes how the job runs. A customer holding three quotes behaves differently from one who found you, read your reviews and rang you. They compare line items. They ask you to match. They are more likely to haggle on variations once you are on site.
And it rewards speed above everything. The tradie who replies within minutes gets the conversation. If you are up a roof in Rockingham with your phone in the ute, you are paying for leads someone else is answering. That is not a criticism of the platform, it is simply how shared lead models work, and it means the real cost of a lead includes having someone free to respond to it.
Work out your cost per job, not your cost per lead
Here is the calculation. Use your own numbers, not the ones below, which are purely illustrative placeholders to show the shape of it.
Take one month:
- Total platform spend. Membership plus every credit top up. Say it comes to $700.
- Leads received. Say 25.
- Leads you could genuinely quote. Strip out the wrong suburb, the no answer, the duplicate, the job you do not do. Say 15 survive.
- Jobs won. Say 3.
- Cost per job. $700 divided by 3 is roughly $233.
Now the only comparison that matters. What is your average gross profit on one of those jobs, after materials, after the labour hours, after the drive from Wanneroo to Mandurah and back? If a typical won job leaves you with $900 before overheads, $233 is a cost of doing business and you should probably be spending more. If it leaves you with $280, you are working for the platform.
Two adjustments make the picture fairer. In the platform’s favour: some of those customers come back directly next time, or refer a neighbour. If one in five won jobs produces a second job that never touches the platform, your true cost per job drops meaningfully. Tag those customers in your job management software so you can see it rather than guess. Against the platform: count your own time. Fifteen unsuccessful quote conversations a month is the better part of a working day you did not bill. Put a dollar figure on it and add it to the spend line.
When hipages genuinely earns its keep
There are real situations where paying for shared leads is the right call, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
You are a new business with a fresh ABN. Nobody searching "electrician Joondalup" is finding you, because you do not exist yet in Google’s eyes. A platform puts you in front of homeowners this week rather than in six months.
You have no online presence at all. No website, no Google Business Profile, no reviews. The platform is doing the trust work you have not built yet.
You have a genuinely quiet patch. WA trade work is seasonal in places. If the reticulation phone goes dead in July, or a commercial job finishes early and you have two blokes with nothing booked, buying leads to fill a gap is a sensible short term lever. Volume you can turn on quickly has value.
In each case the platform is doing something you cannot currently do for yourself. That is a reasonable trade.
When it stops making sense
The maths turn against you once you are an established trade and the platform starts quietly competing with what you have built.
If you have been going five years in the northern suburbs, have a pile of genuine reviews and the phone rings on its own most weeks, think hard about what the subscription actually buys. Some of those platform enquiries come from people who would have found you anyway. You are paying to be introduced to your own market.
There is also the name problem. You have spent years building a reputation around Perth. On the platform you are a tile in a comparison screen next to two others, judged on price because price is the easiest thing to compare. That positioning trains customers to treat your trade as interchangeable.
And the reviews, the profile and the ranking inside the app are not yours. You cannot take them with you. Stop paying and the asset disappears, which is the defining feature of rented lead generation. The same test applies to any platform or agency selling you leads, and it is worth reading through how to judge a lead generation agency before you sign anything with a lock in term.
What the same spend buys as an owned asset
Take that monthly figure you added up earlier and imagine redirecting it.
A website built around suburbs and jobs. Not a brochure. Pages that answer what a Perth homeowner actually types: the service, the suburb, the price range, the timeframe, the proof. One page for each core service you want more of, and real content about the jobs you do rather than three paragraphs of waffle about quality workmanship.
A properly worked Google Business Profile. For local trades this is often the highest return asset there is. Correct categories, a service area covering the suburbs you actually want to drive to, photos of your own work, and a steady flow of reviews. It shows up in the map pack where homeowners look first, and it costs you effort rather than credits.
Google Ads on the jobs you want. You choose the suburbs and job types, and exclude the ones that waste your time. The enquiry comes to you alone, so your win rate starts far better than one in three. You are still renting the traffic, but the account, the search term data and the landing pages belong to you.
The honest trade off is time. A platform lead arrives tomorrow. Local SEO takes months before it carries real weight, and the first stretch of an ads account is partly tuition. If your diary is empty right now, that gap is not theoretical.
Which is why the sensible move is rarely a hard cancellation. It is a staged shift: keep buying leads while you build, then reduce the plan as your own enquiries grow.
The simple test
Give yourself one quarter and a spreadsheet. Five columns: source, date, what the job was, whether you quoted it, whether you won it, and the gross profit.
Log every single enquiry, platform or otherwise. At the end of three months you will know your cost per job from the platform, your cost per job from everywhere else, and your win rate on each.
Then work out your break-even. Monthly platform spend divided by gross profit per job gives the number of jobs you must win each month simply to stand still. If that number is higher than the jobs you are actually winning, you have your answer and you did not need anyone’s opinion to get it.
Pick one of three paths:
Keep paying if your platform cost per job sits comfortably under your gross profit per job and your own channels are not yet producing enough volume to replace it.
Cut back if the numbers are marginal. Drop to the smallest plan, use it as a tap for quiet weeks, and put the difference into your site and your Google Business Profile.
Replace it if you are winning plenty of work directly and the platform is mostly introducing you to price shoppers. Set a date, build the owned side first, then stop paying.
The question was never whether hipages is worth it in the abstract. It is whether it is worth it for your margins, in your suburbs, at your current stage. Run your own numbers for a quarter and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.
If you would rather the enquiries came to you alone and the asset stayed yours when the spending stops, see what lead generation you own looks like for a trade business and work out which of the three paths you are on.