Is Checkatrade worth it for tradesmen? An honest answer from someone who sells the alternative

Let me get the conflict of interest out of the way in the first sentence: I build and look after websites for tradespeople for a monthly fee. If you decide Checkatrade is a waste of money, I stand to gain. Read everything below knowing that.

Which is exactly why I am not going to tell you Checkatrade is a scam. It isn’t. It is a real business doing a real job, and for some trades it is the best money they spend all year. It is also, for other trades, a four-figure annual bill for work they would have got anyway. The difference between those two people is not luck. It is predictable, and this post is about how to tell which one you are before you sign rather than in month nine.

The short answer

Checkatrade is worth it when you are buying something you do not yet have. If you have no reviews, no website, no Google presence and no reputation beyond the last street you worked on, Checkatrade rents you all four on the day you join. That is genuinely valuable and it is genuinely worth paying for.

It stops being worth it when you start paying for work you would have won anyway. Once your own name, your own site and your own Google listing are pulling their weight, a chunk of what you pay the directory is buying you customers who were already looking for you. That is the point to do the maths, not before.

Most of the arguments online skip that distinction entirely, because most of them are written by people selling either the directory or the alternative.

What it actually costs, and why nobody can tell you

Here is the honest position: Checkatrade does not publish a price list. I checked the join page on 31 July 2026. Before it shows you anything it asks for your trade and your postcode, and it says plans are “tailored to your postcode and trade”. There is no rate card to link you to.

That is not sinister (plenty of businesses price by segment), but it has two consequences worth knowing:

1. Any specific monthly figure you read online, including on this page, is second-hand. I have seen serious-looking articles quoting anywhere from about £30 a month to several hundred. Some of those are describing an introductory offer, some a full-price plan for a high-demand trade in a dense postcode, and some are simply guessing. The spread is so wide that quoting a single number would be dishonest, so I am not going to.
2. You cannot compare it to anything until you have your own quote. Ring them, get your trade and your postcode priced, and write the number down. That number is the only one that matters to you.

What I can point at is Checkatrade’s own published terms. Its promotional offer terms describe “a 12-month Fixed Plan membership”, with a discount applied to “the membership price excluding VAT”. So:

• Assume twelve months, not a rolling month.
• Assume plus VAT on top of whatever monthly figure you are quoted.
• Assume the introductory offer is an introduction to a price you have not been shown yet. Ask what months three to twelve cost, in writing, before you agree to anything.

And ask specifically about lead charges on top of the membership, because the membership fee and the cost-per-enquiry are two different things and they are not always presented together.

What you actually get for it

This is the part the “directories are a rip-off” crowd skips, and skipping it makes them untrustworthy.

You get vetting you cannot easily buy elsewhere. Checkatrade says it runs up to twelve checks on each member and monitors them on an ongoing basis: identity, address, unresolved county court judgments owed to customers, and trade accreditations where the category needs them. For a homeowner who has been burned once, a badge that means somebody actually looked is worth something real.

You get a reviews platform on day one. Reviews are the single hardest thing for a new trade business to accumulate, because you need customers to get reviews and reviews to get customers. A directory breaks that loop for you. That is a genuine service.

You get demand you did not have to create. Somebody types a plumbing emergency into Google, lands on Checkatrade, and you are in front of them. You did not build that traffic and you are renting access to it. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy.

You get it working the day you switch it on. This is the one people underrate, and it is the one I cannot compete with. A website does not work on day one. It works in month four. If your van needs feeding this month, a directory is a faster answer than anything I sell, which is precisely why the slow thing should already be running underneath it.

When it is genuinely worth it

• You are brand new. No reviews, no site, no listing. Buy the shortcut. It is the correct decision.
• You have just moved area or added a trade. Same problem, same answer: you have a reputation, it is just in the wrong postcode or the wrong category.
• Your work is high-value and infrequent. If one bathroom refit covers the whole year’s membership, the maths stops being close. Do it.
• Your quiet season has a shape you can predict. Some trades run it hard for four months and pause. If your plan lets you do that, it is a sensible tool rather than a subscription.

When it stops being worth it

• When you cannot say where your work came from. If you are not asking every caller how they found you, you cannot tell what the directory is actually producing, and you will renew on a feeling. Ask. Write it on the job sheet. It takes four seconds.
• When the same lead goes to several of you. A shared enquiry means you are paying to race two or three other trades to the phone. Sometimes you win that race. You are still paying to be in it.
• When you are being quoted a rise. Renewal is the moment to reprice, not rubber-stamp. If the number goes up and the enquiries do not, that is your answer.
• When it is your only channel. This is the real risk and it has nothing to do with price. If every job you get comes through one platform, that platform sets your margin, owns the customer relationship and can change the terms whenever it likes. You do not have a customer list. You have a supplier.

That last one is the argument I actually believe, and it is not “directories are expensive”. It is concentration. A directory is a fine channel. It is a dangerous only-channel.

The bit that catches people out

The twelve-month term is not hidden. It is in Checkatrade’s own published offer terms, in plain English. But it does mean the decision you are making is not “shall I try this for a month”. It is “shall I commit to a year of this at a price I should get in writing first”.

So before you sign anything, get all of these on paper:

If whoever is selling it to you will not put those five things in an email, that tells you something on its own, and it would tell you the same thing about me.

What I would actually do

Declared bias, again: I sell the alternative. Here is the version I would give a mate in the pub.

A directory rents you leads, and rented is the important word. The enquiry is not yours. The same job often goes to two or three of you, so you are paying to race someone to the phone; the platform holds the relationship with the customer; and the terms of that arrangement are set by somebody who is not you. Your own site and your own Google listing produce a different kind of enquiry entirely — one person, your name on the screen, your phone ringing, nobody else in the race.

The catch is the clock. The side that ends up yours takes months to start working. Google has to find you and decide you are real, and no one (not me, not an agency, not Checkatrade) can shortcut that. Google says so itself, in about as flat a sentence as it ever writes: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”

That is an argument for starting now, not for waiting. Six months of tallying is six months the slow half has not begun.

So the order I would actually put it in:

1. Start the thing you own this month. Your own site, your own Google Business Profile, reviews going up under your own name. It is one job rather than four, and it is the only one that keeps working after you stop paying for it.
2. Let the directory bridge the gap while that beds in, if you need the work today. Bridging a gap is the thing it is genuinely good at.
3. Ask every caller how they found you and write it on the job sheet. Four seconds a job. It turns next year’s renewal into arithmetic instead of a hunch.
4. Reprice the directory at renewal, against that tally rather than against a feeling.

The goal is not to escape Checkatrade. It is to stop being in a position where cancelling it would end your business, and you get there by starting the slow half early, not by waiting until the directory has annoyed you enough.

Every price I charge is on my pricing page rather than behind a phone call. Setting the profile up is on every plan I sell, because handing a working trade the list and wishing them luck does not get it done.

I am in Croydon and I mostly work with trades across South London. Message me with your trade, your town and what the directory is costing you, and I will send back what I would build and what it would cost, usually the same day. It arrives on my WhatsApp and I answer it myself.