hipages vs Your Own Website: Which Actually Wins You Work?

Most Australian tradies have tried a lead platform at some point - hipages, ServiceSeeking, Airtasker, Oneflare. Some swear by them. Plenty have quit them. The honest answer is that they solve one problem well and create a different one, and the comparison worth making isn't "which is better" but "which jobs is each one good for".

What lead platforms genuinely do well

• Work from a standing start. No website, no reviews, no history - you can be quoting jobs the week you sign up.
• Fill quiet weeks. When the diary has holes, buying a few leads is a fast way to plug them.
• Test a new service or area. Cheap way to find out whether there's demand for bathroom renos two suburbs over.
• Demand already exists there. Plenty of homeowners start on those apps rather than Google.

If a platform is paying for itself, don't cancel it out of principle. The problem isn't that they don't work - it's what happens when they're the only thing you've got.

What they cost you that isn't on the invoice

• You pay per lead, forever. Every job starts with a cost, and that cost goes up over time. A website's cost doesn't rise with the number of enquiries.
• You're quoted against, side by side. The same lead often goes to several trades, so you're competing on price before anyone's seen your work.
• Paid leads aren't always ready leads. Some are tyre-kickers, some are price-shopping, some have already picked someone.
• The customer belongs to the platform. Your reviews, your job history and your reputation sit in their account, not yours. You can't take it with you.
• Nothing compounds. Stop paying and the enquiries stop the same day. Two years of spend leaves you exactly where you started.

What your own website does that a platform can't

• You're the only trade on the page. No side-by-side quotes, no race to the bottom on price.
• You show your actual work. Photos of finished jobs, your own reviews, your licences and your area - the things that win the better jobs.
• It answers searches with real intent. Someone typing "emergency electrician [suburb]" at 7pm wants a phone number now, not a quote form and a wait.
• It works while you sleep, at a fixed cost. Ten enquiries or a hundred - the price doesn't change.
• You own it. Your domain, your content, your customer list.

The real maths, plainly

Say a decent lead on a platform costs you $30 to $80 depending on the trade and the job size, and you win roughly one in four. That's $120 to $320 in lead cost per job won, every job, forever. Fifty jobs a year and you're spending thousands just for the right to quote.

A website is a fixed cost instead. Mine is $99 to get started, then $45/week once your site is live. The difference is that the fifth enquiry in a week costs the same as the first - nothing extra. See how tradie website pricing actually works if you want the different models compared.

The pattern that works best

The tradies who get this right rarely quit platforms cold. They build their own website first, get it ranking for their suburbs, then wind the paid leads back as their own enquiries grow - keeping the platform on hand for quiet stretches.

If you already run a Facebook page as well, it's worth reading website vs Facebook page for tradies - same logic, different platform. And if you want more ways to bring work in without paying per lead, there's how to get more work as a tradie.

That's exactly what the Tradie Website Design package is built to do - get you found for your own trade in your own suburbs, so the enquiries come to you instead of being bought one at a time.