What do you check before letting a contractor work on your house?
I’m launching Find a Pro here on Friday, and I’d love to hear from people before it goes live.
Find a Pro matches every home-service pro to the state’s own license records before they’re listed, then re-checks them every morning. So far that’s 181,000+ pros in 27 states and DC. When a license lapses, the pro comes off the list, which has already happened about 400 times. Nobody pays to be listed or to rank.
Getting the records was the strange part. Some states post their license lists for free. Some sell them for $10 to $50 by mailed check. A few turned us down because they only answer requests from their own residents.
So I’m curious:
When you hire a plumber, electrician or roofer, what do you actually check first? License, reviews, insurance, a friend’s recommendation?
Have you ever hired someone who turned out not to be licensed? How did you find out?
What would make you trust a “verified” badge on a directory site?
I’ll read every reply, and it’ll shape what we show on each listing.
Replies
One more bit of context on why I built this.
On Angi, Thumbtack and Google’s Local Services Ads, the pro is the paying customer. Pros pay per lead, and the same request often goes out to several pros at once. Angi and Thumbtack send it to up to 5.
Angi’s own CEO put numbers on it in August: an average small pro pays about $600 a month for about 12 leads and wins about 2. That cost doesn’t disappear. It ends up in the quotes homeowners get.
What a pro pays also feeds into where they show up. Thumbtack says a pro’s lead price can raise their rank, and Google’s ads are ordered by an auction where the bid is one of the factors. These sites do check licenses, but mostly at sign-up. Google says that check will no longer be required once its local ads move to Performance Max.
And the lead model has been in legal trouble before. In 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor, Angi’s lead business, to pay up to $7.2 million over alleged misleading claims about its leads. HomeAdvisor denied the allegations.
Find a Pro closes that gap from the other side:
• Nobody pays to be listed, to rank, or for leads.
• Every pro is matched to the state’s own license records and re-checked every morning. When a license lapses, they come off the list (about 400 so far).
• Your number goes only to the pro you pick, not to five at once.
We make money from homeowners who want My Home, not from pros paying to reach you.
Every claim above is sourced here: findaprohub.com/compare