Checkatrade Fees vs Your Own Booking Page: The Honest Economics

Let us start with the thing most articles on this subject get wrong. You will find plenty of pages online claiming to tell you exactly what Checkatrade costs. Treat them all with suspicion, including anything with a confident number in the headline. Checkatrade does not publish one simple public price list. As of July 2026, membership is quoted individually, per trade and coverage area, and many categories also carry charges per lead on top. Two plumbers in different towns can be paying meaningfully different amounts for the same badge.

That is why questions about Checkatrade fees rarely get a straight numeric answer: there is not one number to give, and anyone quoting you one is quoting somebody else's deal.

So this post will not pretend to know their numbers. What it will do is something more useful: walk through the structure of what you are buying from a lead marketplace, compare it with the structure of owning your own booking page, and be honest about when each one wins. Because they do both win, at different stages of a trades business, and the expensive mistake is being on the wrong one for your stage.

How a lead marketplace actually makes its money

Strip the branding away and every lead marketplace, Checkatrade included, runs on the same economic frame:

• You pay to be present. A membership fee, quoted for your trade and area, buys you a listing and the right to receive enquiries.
• In many categories you also pay per lead, win or lose. The enquiry costs what it costs whether it becomes a £3,000 job or a voicemail that never calls back. Pricing risk sits with you, not the marketplace.
• You compete on your own shop window. The listing that shows your profile shows your competitors beside it, ranked and reviewed. The marketplace has no preference about which of you wins, because it is paid either way.
• The reviews you sweat for live on their profile. Five years of five star reviews builds a wall you cannot take with you. Leave, and the reputation asset stays on their domain.
• The repeat customer often is not yours. This is the quiet one. When that customer needs a trade again next year, the habit the marketplace spends its advertising budget building is: search the marketplace again. There is every chance you pay again for an enquiry from a person you already served well.

None of this is a scam, and it deserves saying without a sneer: the marketplace spends enormous sums on national advertising so that demand exists for you to buy, and its vetting badge lends a new firm borrowed trust that would otherwise take years to earn. What you are doing is renting demand and renting trust. Renting is a perfectly rational thing to do. The mistake is renting forever what you could own.

The economics of owning your booking page

Now the other structure. Your own booking page, on your own domain, where customers book you directly, is a different set of trade-offs:

• The cost is flat and known. Software is priced publicly per month, the same number regardless of how many jobs you win. As volume grows, cost per job falls. In lead economics, more jobs means more fees; in owned economics, more jobs means the fixed cost shrinks per job.
• There is nobody else on the page. A customer on your booking page can book you or leave. They cannot scroll down and pick the firm with one more review.
• The customer is yours. Their number, their history, their boiler's service dates, in your system. The repeat job comes to you by name, at no acquisition cost, and repeat work at zero acquisition cost is where trades businesses get properly profitable.
• The money is yours at booking. A deposit taken through your own page can go straight into your own Stripe account. On our platform there is no percentage cut of it, which we can afford precisely because the model is flat software cost rather than a toll on your work.
• The honest trade-off: a booking page manufactures no demand. It converts and keeps demand that already exists, from your reputation, your van, word of mouth and your local search presence. If nobody is looking for you, a beautiful booking page is an empty shop on a quiet street.

That last point is the whole decision, so let us give it its own section.

When the lead marketplace is the right call

Said plainly, because this is the part a software company is not supposed to say: if your diary is empty, buy leads.

A brand-new trader with no reputation, no reviews and no word of mouth has one problem that dwarfs every other, and it is demand. The marketplace solves exactly that problem, fast. Pay-per-lead economics that look expensive against a full diary look cheap against an empty one, because the alternative to an expensive job is no job. The same logic applies to an established firm entering a new patch where nobody knows the van, and to trades with brutal quiet seasons who need a demand tap they can open in January.

In those situations the marketplace fee is not a tax, it is tuition and rent rolled together, and paying it is the correct move. Anyone who tells a first-year trader to skip the lead sites and wait for word of mouth is giving advice with someone else's mortgage.

The switch point, and the season of running both

The economics flip as your repeat base grows, and there is a simple way to spot it. Look at next month's diary and ask: how full would this be if the marketplace vanished tonight? In year one the answer is empty, and the marketplace is earning its keep. The year the answer becomes nearly full, every lead fee has quietly changed from buying demand you lacked into paying a toll on demand you now own, and every repeat customer routed back through the marketplace is a fee you did not need to pay.

Almost nobody should switch overnight, and this is not a switch-overnight argument. Reviews complicate the exit too: the wall you built on the marketplace does not travel, so the owned side needs its own proof, gathered from day one, on pages you control. The pattern that works is a season of both: keep the marketplace membership while building your own page, take the deposit-backed direct bookings as they grow, watch the share of direct work rise, and taper the paid leads as the owned side proves itself. What that own-page setup looks like in practice, deposits and diary included, is covered in how to take a deposit before a job, and the wider system around it in the guide.

Where OptiTech Automation fits, and where it does not

Our side of this is the owned half, so weigh the bias accordingly: a booking page on your domain, the customer record, deposits at booking into your own Stripe with no platform cut, at a flat published monthly price. We keep a straight structural comparison at our Checkatrade comparison, and per the rule above it compares models rather than inventing their prices.

And the wrong-choice cases, stated as plainly as the rest: if you are in year one with an empty diary, buy demand first and come back when you have repeat customers worth keeping. If a spreadsheet and a full solo diary are working, they are working, and spreadsheet vs a booking system is the fair fight to read before spending anything.

Key takeaways

• Checkatrade quotes membership per trade and area and does not publish one simple price list, so distrust any article claiming their exact numbers, this one included if it ever did.
• Lead-market structure: pay to be present, often pay per lead win or lose, compete beside rivals on your own listing, and the reviews and repeat relationship accrue to the marketplace.
• Owned-page structure: flat known software cost, no competitors on the page, the customer and the deposit are yours, but it manufactures zero demand on its own.
• Empty diary means buy leads, and that is said without a sneer: renting demand beats having none, and marketplaces solve a new trader's biggest problem fast.
• The switch point is visible in your own diary: when next month would be nearly full without the marketplace, fees have become a toll on demand you already own. Run both for a season, then taper.