Checkatrade vs your own website: which actually wins?

If you’re a UK plumber, electrician, builder or any other trade, Checkatrade is probably either taking your money already or trying to. They’re the biggest trade-directory brand in the country, with the eight-minute TV adverts to prove it.

But are they worth £50–£140+ a month of your money? We’ve crunched the numbers, spoken to a dozen tradespeople using them, and compared them honestly against running your own £30/month website. Here’s the verdict.

What Checkatrade actually charges

Pricing isn’t on their website — you have to talk to a sales rep — but here’s what real tradespeople have told us they pay in 2026:

Standard listing — roughly £60–£90/month for most one-person trades businesses. You appear in search results, you can collect reviews from your customers (which Checkatrade owns), and you get a basic profile page.
Standard + Featured / Profile Pro — £100–£140/month. Higher placement in search results, some profile bling, “trusted trader” badge.
Multi-trade or larger business — £200+/month. They scale by claimed turnover and number of trades.
Setup fee — frequently around £199 one-off, sometimes waived during the sales conversation.

The catch nobody mentions: contracts are typically 12 months minimum, billed monthly, and the cancellation process is notoriously sticky. Multiple tradespeople we spoke to had to send certified letters to get out.

What you get for that money

To be fair, the offering isn’t nothing:

A listing on a brand customers already trust. Checkatrade has done the brand-trust work for you — when a customer searches for an electrician, your Checkatrade profile carries the “vetted by Checkatrade” implicit endorsement.
Reviews collected and displayed. Customers can review you via the platform; you build up a star rating that’s visible to other prospects.
Vetting (their compliance check — public liability insurance, ID, trade qualifications).
A handful of leads per month. Checkatrade’s value-prop is “customers searching for trades on the platform get matched to you”. Realistically, this varies wildly by trade and area.

The problems nobody mentions in the sales call

Three big ones:

1. The reviews belong to Checkatrade, not you

If you stop paying, your reviews go with them. You can’t export them to your own site, your Google Business Profile, or anywhere else. After three years of building up 47 five-star reviews on Checkatrade, you cancel — and you walk away with nothing. Compare with Google reviews, which live on your Google Business Profile and follow you forever.

2. You’re competing with 30 other plumbers on the same page

Customers searching “plumber in Brighton” on Checkatrade see a list. You’re one of many. Even when you pay for “Featured” placement, the next plumber down is one tap away. On your own website, when someone lands there, they’re not comparing — they’re already half-sold.

3. The economics don’t always work

Let’s say you pay £90/month for a standard listing and get 3 leads/month from Checkatrade. That’s £30 per lead before you’ve even won the work. Convert at 30% (one of three becomes a job, which is generous), and each won job has cost you £90 in acquisition before your time, materials, or fuel.

For a £180 callout to fix a leaky tap, that’s half the margin gone before you turn the van engine on.

What your own website costs — and earns

Compare with running your own website at, say, £30/month (including hosting, domain, SSL, support — see our breakdown of what websites actually cost for the honest range).

A decent website paired with a properly-filled-in Google Business Profile (still free — see why GBP isn’t enough on its own) typically gets a UK trades business between 20 and 80 enquiries a month from organic Google search — i.e. people searching “plumber in [town]” and finding you, not a directory.

At even the low end — 20 enquiries/month at £30 cost — that’s £1.50 per enquiry. About 1/20th of the Checkatrade lead cost.

And the kicker: those enquiries are yours. No platform takes 30%. No competing 29 listings on the same page. The customer searched for a plumber and found you.

When Checkatrade actually does make sense

We’re not saying it’s worthless. There are scenarios where it earns its keep:

You’re brand new and have no Google Business Profile yet. Checkatrade’s brand-trust gives you a credibility shortcut while you build your own.
You’re in a saturated area with strong Checkatrade penetration. In some London postcodes and parts of the South East, customers genuinely search Checkatrade first.
You’re a high-value, low-volume trade where each won job is worth £2,000+. The maths changes when one lead becomes one £5,000 job.

For most one-person trade businesses outside those cases, the same money goes 10–20× further on a managed website plus an optimised Google Business Profile.

The honest summary

	Checkatrade Standard	Your own website + GBP
Monthly cost	£60–£90	£29.99 (+ free GBP)
Annual cost	£720–£1,080 + setup	£359.88
Reviews you own	No (live on Checkatrade)	Yes (live on Google)
Listed alongside competitors?	Yes — on the same page	No — your customers land on you
Effort to set up	A sales call	A few hours, or get it built for you
Cancellation friction	12-month minimum, certified letter	One click
Cost per enquiry (typical)	£30	£1.50

If you’re currently paying Checkatrade and getting fewer than 5–6 leads a month from them, the maths is hard to defend.

What to do tomorrow

Pull out your last Checkatrade invoice and check exactly what you’re paying.
Open your Checkatrade dashboard and count the actual leads attributable to it in the last three months.
Divide cost ÷ leads. That’s your real cost per lead.
If it’s over £25, it’s worth thinking about an alternative.

See what we’d build for your trade business →

— webfascia