Thumbtack is a company where you can supposedly get customer leads to book customers for your business. Unfortunately, 75% of the time they provide very little information about the job requiring you to need more information from your prospective customer to see if you can even help them at all. What your customer needs may simply not be in your skill set and with the purposefully vague inquiries from Thumbtack, you have no choice but to either skip the request, pay to ask the customer for more information or pay to send a blind quote hoping you can help them.
If a customer just wants to contact you and ask if you are available tomorrow for service and you are not or you actually decline the service request all together.. Guess what, Thumbtack has no problem charging you for that as well. If you just go on and send people quotes or messages asking for more info about the job all day long, you will actually pay Thumbtack more money then you will ever make on jobs. That actually happened to me. I ended up paying Thumbtack more on contacts that simply had nothing to do with my skill set that were matched to me, than the single job I booked through them.
After fighting and fighting with them telling them how unfair it is for them to charge us for services we did not book or simply do not offer, they refuse to refund and say the charges are justified and do not violate the terms. When someone is even able to get a charge reversed, it goes back as an account credit. So they take the money from your credit card for a service you did not and cannot perform and then give you a store credit in return. I can’t see any other words for this than theft and scam.
This company has found a way to legally scam people out of their money through terms and conditions. Also, I have my boundaries set to less than an hour travel and I kept getting matches for well outside my travel area. Even out of state matches. So I was getting charged for declining people outside of my travel area. If you search BBB you will see how people have spent $100’s and even $1000’s with this company and haven’t even booked a single job but kept spiraling down the rabbit hole because they were stuck with credits that they couldn’t use and mysterious leads that pop up and all of a sudden stop responding to you or change their mind in the end. I don’t know how this company is allowed to operate.