Every paid lead, answered before the next contractor calls.

You pay Angi, Thumbtack or Google for a lead, and so do three other contractors. The job usually goes to whoever gets a real answer in front of the homeowner first. The TradesWork lead inbox is built around that one fact: get every lead into one place, reply in seconds, and measure how long it actually took.

Why seconds matter

The best-known study on lead response is old but still the one everybody quotes. Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review in 2011 audited 2,241 U.S. companies and found only 37% responded to a web lead within an hour, while 23% never responded at all.¹ In a companion analysis of more than a million leads, firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even an hour longer.¹

Home services is harsher than the study's B2B and B2C mix, because lead marketplaces often send the same request to several pros at once. The first one to text back with an actual time tends to book. That's what the inbox and the text agent are built for.

Getting each source in

There's no single way lead sites deliver leads, so each card shows the fastest path that works today and what the partner path would take.

Thumbtack lets pros create a lead webhook themselves from their account, no developer needed.² Angi sets up a webhook when the pro emails its CRM integrations team with the Angi ID, the webhook URL and a CRM key.³ Yelp's Leads API is limited to advertising partners, so forwarded email is the realistic path for most shops.⁴

Every card has Send a test lead. It runs a fictional customer with a 555 number through the real pipeline, so you can see exactly what a real lead will look like. Test leads never merge with real records, never get texted, and never count in the inbox, the nav badge or the per-source numbers.

Working the inbox

The inbox opens on Open leads. Four numbers sit across the top: leads waiting for a first reply, leads that need a person, median speed to lead for 30 days, and the 30-day booked rate. If there's no data yet, they show a dash rather than a misleading zero.

Each row shows when it arrived, the customer and what they asked for, the source (with a +2 if two more deliveries merged into it), the status, speed to lead (or a live timer if nobody has replied), and the text agent's state: replying, taken over by a person, needs a person, or done.

From a lead you can:

• Convert it to a job. The form is prefilled from the lead. Pick a job type and an open arrival window from the same capacity engine dispatch uses, or leave the job unscheduled.
• Mark it contacted if you called from your own phone, so speed to lead still counts.
• Mark it lost with a reason: never responded, price, booked someone else, outside our area, not work we do, spam, duplicate or other.
• Reopen it if the customer comes back.

Walk-ins and phone calls can be added by hand from the sidebar, with a checkbox for texting consent, so they're answered and measured like any other lead.

The text agent, and the limits on it

The agent is off until you turn it on in the agent settings, and AI must also be on for your company. Here's what you control, with the defaults.

The model never writes a time or a price into a text. It decides what to say and which action to take, and the server checks every decision. Windows are computed by the capacity engine and inserted by the server. A booking happens only when the customer explicitly picks one of the offered windows. Escalation words, opt-outs, hours, the per-source switch and the message cap are all checked in code before the model is asked anything. When someone from your office takes over a thread, the agent pauses, and the pause is re-checked right before every send and every booking.

Every step the agent takes is recorded on the lead: reply, offer windows, book, hand off, escalate, office task. Threads it hands off appear in Customers waiting for a person on the inbox sidebar.

Attribution: the part owners care about

Every lead gets a campaign: the one named by the source, else the website's UTM campaign, else one per source ("Angi", "Thumbtack") created on first use with the right channel (marketplace, local services ads, Meta ads, website, integration). Website leads with a Google click ID are tagged Google Ads; with a Facebook click ID, Meta ads. When you convert the lead, the job carries the same campaign.

That turns "is Angi worth it?" into arithmetic you can do in reports: spend on the source ÷ booked jobs from that campaign = cost per booked job. Compare it with revenue per job from the same campaign before you cut or raise a budget.

How it compares to ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan's leads integrations put leads from third-party sources on the booking screen, ready to accept and book, after a customer activates Marketing Integrations in settings. ServiceTitan also shares real-time availability with select lead sites so homeowners see bookable times.⁵ TradesWork doesn't push availability to lead sites; it answers the lead with real windows by text instead, and measures how quickly that happened per source.

Where it falls short

If most of your leads come from a source that only supports a partner API we don't have yet, you're on email forwarding, which adds about a minute. Shops that want an AI to phone every web lead will need a separate tool, since outbound AI calling isn't built. And the agent is only as good as your FAQs and job types: set those up before switching it on, then read its threads for the first week.