I, like many others, have shelled out a lot of money to purchase "leads" from Thumbtack to hopefully gain prospective clients. Recently Thumbtack made some changes to it's lead pricing, making each lead more expensive for business owners, especially if the the prospective "client" said that they were willing to spend more money on a job. In reality, what really happens is that professionals don't want to spend $15+ on a lead, and the prospective client gets ZERO replies from professionals that could do the job for them.
To be fair, I have emailed Thumbtack several times, explaining that this new pricing system does NOT help either the professional or the prospective client. Each time they answer quite generically with no actual answers at all. In my eyes, if a company is TRULY concerned about the people that pay its bills, they would make some inroads to fix the problem. Charging a large rate for a 'lead" that gets answered by NO professional helps no one. I have lost track of the times I have seen this happen.
As soon as all of my current "leads" have expired, I will cancel my Thumbtack account, as seeing each email from them infuriates me more and more. BTW, In over two years, I have have not booked ONE customer from Thumbtack.
One final sham with Thumbtack is their delivering of education to people who visit their site. I dj weddings. I charged $300 to dj a wedding...in 1990. Thumbtack should give people realistic expectations of what they can look to spend for actual professionals that do these jobs. In this day and time, a 4 hour wedding is an 18 hour day for me, yet people are constantly looking for $300 dj's, in 2016. I am not hauling out $15,000 worth of equipment for a $300 wedding. Thumbtack does nothing to remedy this problem.
I cannot reccommend Thumbtack for any hard working professional in ANY profession.