Checkatrade Alternative — Stop Paying £1,800/yr to Compete with Yourself
Checkatrade works for some trades. If you're brand new, no website, no customer list, no Google reviews — yes, Checkatrade buys you visibility you'd otherwise spend years building. But if you've been trading for a while, you've probably noticed the same thing every Checkatrade alternative page on the internet says: you're paying £1,800 a year to be listed next to your three nearest competitors, on a profile you don't own, with reviews you can't take with you. We built a Checkatrade alternative that does the opposite. Your booking page on your domain. Your customer list. Flat £599 a month, no per-lead fees, no annual contract. Read the comparison below — then decide.
- ✓ No annual fee
- ✓ No per-lead charges
- ✓ Your customers stay yours
- ✓ Migration in a weekend
Six steps. No drama.
Cancelling Checkatrade is not as straightforward as cancelling Netflix — they want it to feel hard. It isn't. The contract is annual and auto-renews on the anniversary; if you don't cancel inside their notice window you're rolled for another year. So: diary the renewal date sixty days early, write a clear cancellation note, send it through their formal channel and follow up by email to create a paper trail. Export anything you can. Screenshot the reviews. Then go.
1. Cancelling Checkatrade
Go to your member area, find the cancellation form. Don't ring the call centre — they're trained to retain. Submit in writing, follow up the same day by email. Keep the screenshot.
2. Exporting reviews
Checkatrade does not officially support review export. Screenshot every one, save as PDF, paste the text into your own site as testimonials. Real customer name plus quote is the trust signal — not the Checkatrade logo.
3. Customer SMS flow
If you have your customer list (Xero, a spreadsheet, anything) we set up an SMS announcing your new booking page. Two sentences. "We've moved off the platforms. Book direct, no admin, here's the link."
4. Cristian's Checkatrade story
A mate of mine in Paignton paid Checkatrade £1,800 a year for four years. He worked out he'd paid them roughly £7,200 against a measurable £4,000 of unique jobs that wouldn't have come from his Google profile anyway. He left in 2023. His revenue went up the next year — Checkatrade had been selling his jobs to his cousins.
5. First 30 days off-platform
Expect a 20% temporary dip in inbound from the marketplace if you relied on it. Replace it with: Google Business Profile reviews, your new booking page (Google indexes it), the SMS to your customer list. Most trades land net-positive by day 60.
6. Migrating in a weekend
Export your customer CSV. We import it. Your booking page goes live by Sunday night. Monday morning your existing customers can book themselves; new customers come in via your Google profile direct to you. The setup fee is waived if you're the first trade in your county.
Run the numbers. They don't say what they used to.
Checkatrade's published 2024-2025 packages commonly land between £1,500 and £1,800 a year before VAT, depending on profile size, area, and trade category. Some packages charge a base fee plus per-lead. Either way, the rough order of magnitude is £1,800. Compare to OptitechAutomation: £599 a month flat (£7,188/year for our cheapest tier), but that price includes the entire booking and dispatch platform — Checkatrade's £1,800 buys you a profile listing. Two different products. The math any honest Checkatrade alternative will run isn't apples-to-apples; it's whether you'd rather pay £1,800 a year to be listed somewhere, or £7,188 a year to own the customer relationship outright. For 1-30 worker shops with a customer list, the latter usually wins.
~£1,800/yr fee + per-lead charges in some packages. Profile listing. Reviews on their domain.
£599/mo flat. Full booking platform on your domain. No per-lead fees, no exit fees, monthly cancel.
Renting customers never compounds.
Here's the real difference, and the reason every Checkatrade alternative pitch eventually circles back to it. On Checkatrade you're renting an audience. Every year you pay the rent again, and the year you stop paying, the audience disappears. Your reviews can't follow you. Your customer list is opaque — Checkatrade has it, you don't, the customers themselves don't know they're "Checkatrade customers." The whole architecture is designed to make leaving expensive. On OptitechAutomation you're building. Your booking page lives on your domain. Customers know your brand, not a marketplace's. Reviews land on your Google profile, not someone else's. Every customer who books once is in your database for next time — exportable in one click, forever, no holdback. That's the gap that compounds.
We do the platform. You do the trade. No marketplace in between.
You own the booking page
Your domain, your branding, your customer data. No competing trades shown next to your slots. No "Checkatrade verified" mark above your name.
Your data is yours
Customer list, job history, photos, invoices — exportable as CSV/PDF in one click. Yours forever, including on the day you cancel.
No annual contract
One-month subscription. Cancel from the dashboard. No phone call, no retention script, no anniversary auto-renew trap.
One person answers
UK hours, weekends off, but always nearby. Message Cristian directly — not a support queue, not a chatbot.
I'm Cristian, in Torbay, Devon. I built this because I watched a Paignton plumber pay Checkatrade £7,200 over four years for jobs his cousins were also bidding on.
He had 1,400 customers in his Xero. Real customers, real boilers, real recurring annual services. Checkatrade was selling him the same kitchen-tap job four times to himself, his brother-in-law, and two unrelated competitors. By the time he ran the math, he'd lost two years of margin chasing leads he could've had direct. So we built the opposite: your booking page, your domain, your list, your Xero. £599 a month flat. No annual contract. No per-lead. Data exports on cancellation in one click. That's the pledge, in writing in your contract.
If you're sick of paying for your own leads, book the 20-minute call. No sales script, no card needed. If we're not the right fit I'll tell you on the call and point you at someone who is. Talk soon.
Book the 20-minute call →More for UK trade owners.
OptitechAutomation home →
What the platform actually does, in plain English.
Pricing →
Three GBP tiers. First in your county pays no setup.
Plumber booking software →
Specific to plumbing — boilers, leaks, Gas Safe, Xero.
Electrician scheduling →
EICR, NICEIC, offline site mode, GBP flat.
Gas engineer software →
CP12, LGSR, landlord auto-reminders.
Drainage booking →
CCTV reports, jetting logs, emergency dispatch.
Twenty minutes. No sales script.
Tell us what you're paying Checkatrade. We'll show you what the same money buys on a real booking platform. If we're not a fit we'll say so.