Hipages review: is it worth it for builders?
Hipages is worth paying for when the jobs coming through match your trade, your suburbs and your spare capacity, and when the margin on the work you win covers the subscription plus the hours you spend quoting. For a custom home builder it usually does not stack up, because the enquiries arrive without the information you need to decide whether a fortnight of estimating is worth starting.
Two Brisbane builders can look at the same bathroom renovation lead and reach opposite conclusions. One is filling a six-week gap between bigger jobs and would take it happily. The other is trying to book two architect-designed homes for next year and has no estimating capacity spare. Same lead, same price, opposite answer. Work out which of those two businesses you are before you look at a single plan.
So write down your minimum job first: the work you want, the suburbs you cover, the timing you can meet, and what you need to know before driving out for a site visit. If you cannot describe that job in three lines, no lead supplier can be judged fairly. And do not widen your service categories to make a quiet subscription feel busier. That is how a custom builder ends up quoting carports.
How the credits work, and what hipages costs
Hipages sells a subscription. You buy credits, and credits are what you spend to accept a lead. Different leads cost different numbers of credits, and a job posted by a homeowner connects with up to three tradies to begin with, with a waitlist that can open it to more. The public business FAQs do not publish a single builder price, so the only number that means anything is the one on your own quote.
Put that quote next to your last invoice and get the details in writing: the committed term, the payment schedule, how many credits are included, what happens to credits you do not use, what extra credits cost, and how you dispute a lead that was never a real job. Ask the salesperson to point at the clause. A monthly figure tells you nothing about how long you are signed up for.
Then add your own labour, because that is where the real cost sits. Say a month costs $300 in fees and you spend ten hours answering and estimating. Value your time at $100 an hour and the month cost $1,300. Two won jobs makes that $650 a job before any other selling expense. Run your own figures and compare them with what is left after you deliver the work.
Lead quality: separate a bad fit from missing information
Online reviews will not settle this for you. A plumber in Logan doing changeovers and a builder in Bulimba quoting a second storey are having completely different experiences of the same product. Your own accepted-lead record is the only sample that describes your business.
Sort your last twenty accepted leads into five buckets: worth quoting, outside your scope, too early, never answered the phone, and won. Keep price mismatch separate, because it means something different. An owner still shopping for a block may be a good client in a year, but they should not be getting the same estimating hours as someone with a site, a brief and drawings.
Add a short qualification call before you offer any site visit. What are you thinking of building, do you own the site, who is designing it, and what do you believe that budget covers? Use the same four questions on every enquiry, whatever the source. If every conversation still comes down to beating a number the owner will not show you, the channel does not suit the way you sell.
Hipages vs Airtasker, Oneflare and ServiceSeeking
Comparing headline monthly fees across these four is misleading, because they charge in different ways. Read them as four different commercial arrangements, and check your own categories and postcodes before assuming any of them has your kind of work on it.
- Hipages: a subscription plus credits that buy access to selected leads. Judge it on committed cost against suitable conversations and won work, not against leads offered.
- Airtasker: taskers make offers on posted tasks, and its Australian support page lists a tasker service fee of 12.5% to 20% of the task price, plus tax, depending on tier. A percentage of every job is a very different sum from a flat subscription.
- Oneflare: paid credit-plan subscriptions, per its own referral terms. No complete public builder price list, so get the plan, the credit usage and the commitment in writing before assuming it is cheaper.
- ServiceSeeking: a membership that lets you quote on leads sent to you, priced by industry and location, with no commission on the job. Ask what that membership actually supplies in your categories.
When to keep paying, and when to build a channel you own
Keep a platform that produces profitable work you want, at a pace you can answer. A new builder with no name and no reviews has a decent reason to buy conversations while the portfolio fills up. Set a spending ceiling and a review date on the day you sign. If the results are patchy, narrowing your categories or your radius is a better test than either cancelling in frustration or buying more credits.
For custom work, what changes the economics is giving an owner somewhere to understand you before they ask anyone for a price. Flascon Construction Group, a Brisbane builder we work with, puts a free site feasibility check and a plain eight-step process page in front of that conversation. Fewer people fill it in than would tick a box on a marketplace. The ones who do arrive with a block, a budget and a start date.
A channel you own is not free either. A website rebuild is a one-off project priced in the thousands, decent photography costs money, and a monthly guide takes either your evenings or somebody’s fee. The difference is that it compounds. A platform lead is gone the moment you lose it. A page answering “what does a knock-down rebuild cost in Brisbane” keeps bringing people for years.
Frequently asked questions
Is hipages free for tradies? No. Homeowners post jobs for nothing, but the tradesperson side runs on a paid subscription with credits. If an introductory offer is on the table, confirm exactly what it covers and what the price becomes afterwards before you use it to forecast anything.
How much does hipages charge per lead? There is no single published figure that applies to every builder, because credit requirements vary by job and by category. Work yours out instead: total fees paid, divided by leads accepted, then divided again by the jobs you actually won. That last number is the one to argue about at renewal.
What is better than hipages? Whatever brings work you can deliver at a profit. For a specialist custom builder that is usually architect referrals plus a website that shows comparable projects and asks proper questions before a quote. For a business taking short, clearly scoped jobs, a marketplace can stay useful for years. Test both against your own minimum job, not against someone else’s review.
Where to start this month
Use a period that has finished, and leave open enquiries marked open. A custom build is rarely won in the month the first call comes in.
- Pull three months of accepted leads, total fees and hours spent, and mark each one suitable, unsuitable or still open.
- Ask for the renewal offer in writing and diarise the notice date now, not the week it falls due.
- Write the four-question qualification script and use it on every enquiry, whatever the source.
- Work out your cost per won job with your own hours costed at a real rate.
- Fix one thing you own: a project page, the enquiry form, or the page that explains how you work.