Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Bark: are they worth it in 2026?

I build websites for UK tradespeople, so you might expect this article to say "cancel Checkatrade, buy a website". It doesn't. I've sat with enough builders, plumbers and electricians going through their platform invoices to know the honest answer is more boring: the platforms work, for some people, at some stages, at a price. The problem is almost nobody sits down and does the actual maths on that price. So let's do it properly: what each platform costs in 2026, how the lead model really works, when paying is genuinely the right call, and what the same money buys if you point it at your own online presence instead.

One thing before we start. None of this is a dig at the companies themselves. Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Bark are legitimate businesses that connect real homeowners with real trades every day. My issue is never with them; it's with the model of renting your visibility forever, and with tradespeople paying four figures a year without ever checking what it costs them per job won.

01What each platform actually costs in 2026

Exact pricing on all three is quoted individually, varies by trade and postcode, and changes over time, so treat everything below as a well-researched guide rather than a rate card. But the shape of each model matters more than the exact pounds.

Checkatrade: membership first

Checkatrade is a directory model. You pay a monthly membership to be listed, vetted and reviewable. The entry tier starts from around £30 + VAT a month, but most trades I speak to report paying somewhere in the £70 to £120 a month range once they're on a plan that actually gets seen in their area. Call it roughly £850 to £1,400 a year, before optional extras like featured placement. Some plans involve a commitment period, so check the terms before you sign anything.

MyBuilder: pay per shortlist

MyBuilder flips it round: no membership fee, but you pay when a homeowner shortlists you to quote for a job. The shortlist fee scales with the estimated job value, from a few pounds on small jobs up to tens of pounds on big ones. The crucial detail: you pay the fee whether or not you win the work, and several trades are usually shortlisted for the same job. Quote for jobs regularly and it's entirely normal to spend £100 to £300 in fees before landing one.

Bark: buy credits, spend them on leads

Bark sells credits, typically around £1.20 to £1.80 + VAT each depending on the pack size, and a single lead costs roughly 5 to 20 credits, so about £7 to £40+ per lead depending on the trade and job size. Two things to know: the same lead is generally sold to several professionals at once, and since late 2025 newly purchased credits expire three months after purchase, so you can't stockpile them for a quiet patch.

The others: Trustatrader and Rated People

For completeness: Trustatrader runs a monthly membership on a rolling contract, with reported figures ranging from around £30 to over £100 a month depending on trade and source, and Rated People runs a hybrid of monthly fee plus per-lead charges, with pricing only available by phone. Same models, different labels.

Whichever platform you pick, an active user is realistically spending somewhere around £1,000 to £2,000 a year. Some spend far more. That's the number to hold onto for the rest of this article.

02How the lead model actually works

The pricing is only half the story. The structure of the model is what quietly decides whether that spend is good value, and there are three things about it worth understanding before you judge any platform.

You're paying for enquiries, not jobs

Every model above charges you at the enquiry stage: the listing, the shortlist, the lead. None of them charge you when you actually win work. That's not sneaky, it's just how marketplaces price, but it means the number on the invoice tells you nothing about value. A £30 lead that becomes a £4,000 bathroom is fantastic. A £30 lead that never answers the phone is £30 gone. Most trades I ask have never worked out their real figure: total platform spend divided by jobs actually won from it. Work that out for the last twelve months before you decide anything.

Shared leads mean shared odds

On the lead-selling models, the same homeowner enquiry typically goes to three, four or five professionals. Everyone pays; one wins; often nobody does, because a chunk of homeowners are just price-checking or go quiet. If a lead is shared five ways, your starting odds are 20% before skill, price or speed of response come into it. Trades regularly report converting somewhere between one in five and one in ten paid leads. At £20 a lead and one win in seven, you're paying about £140 in lead fees per job won, and that's before your time spent quoting.

Competing in a list pushes prices down

When a homeowner is holding five quotes from five strangers, the easiest way to compare them is price. That's not the platforms' fault, it's just what happens when trades are presented side by side in a list. The result is a quiet race to the bottom: the job often goes to whoever quoted cheapest, which is exactly the game an established, well-reviewed trade doesn't want to be playing. Compare that with a customer who found you by name, or through your own site, and rang you: no list, no five rivals, far less pressure on price.

03When the platforms genuinely make sense

Here's the part a web designer is supposed to skip. There are at least three situations where paying a platform is not just defensible but clearly the right move, and I'd tell you so even though it earns me nothing.

• You're brand new with zero reputation. No reviews, no word of mouth, no old customers to call. A platform gives you vetting, a place for your first reviews to live and enquiries from week one. A new website can't do that; it takes months to rank. For a first-year trade, platform fees are often the fastest bridge from "nobody knows me" to "phone rings".
• You've got gaps in the diary. Even established trades hit quiet patches: January, a cancelled project, a subcontract that fell through. Being able to switch on paid leads for a few weeks to fill holes is genuinely useful, especially on the pay-as-you-go models where you can spend nothing in busy months.
• You've moved to a new area. Your reputation in Reading doesn't follow you to Newcastle. A platform gets you in front of local homeowners while your local presence, reviews and word of mouth rebuild from scratch.

Notice what these three have in common: they're all short-term bridges. The platform is doing a job your own reputation can't do yet. The trouble starts when the bridge quietly becomes a permanent toll, and a trade with 15 years of happy customers and 200 five-star reviews is still paying £100 a month for the privilege of being compared on price with whoever joined last week.

04Rented visibility vs owned visibility

This is the heart of it, so let me put it as plainly as I can.

Platform spend is rent. The listing, the profile, the placement in search results: you're renting a spot in someone else's building. The rent never ends, it tends to go up, and the day you stop paying, you vanish from that building completely. Nothing you paid last year carries forward. Year five costs the same as year one and buys you exactly the same thing.

Your own website plus your Google Business Profile is property. Every month of it compounds. The site gets older and more trusted by Google. The reviews stack up and never reset. The town-and-trade pages you add keep ranking. A customer who finds you this way costs you nothing at the moment they enquire, and the enquiry is exclusive: no shortlist, no four rivals, no race to the bottom. If you want the detail on how that ranking process actually plays out, I've written honestly about how long SEO takes, and the free half of it is covered in my Google Business Profile guide.

Neither is morally better. Rent is sometimes exactly what you need; nobody buys a house for a six-month stay. But if you're planning to be trading in the same area in five years, paying rent forever on visibility you could own is the expensive option, even when the monthly numbers look small.

The worked example

Take a fairly typical case: a plumber spending £100 a month, £1,200 a year across platform membership and leads. Now put my own pricing next to it, because it's the comparison I can vouch for: a Pixel Heaven site is £100 once, then £20 a month for hosting, domain and maintenance. That's £340 in year one and £240 a year after that, roughly a fifth of the platform spend, for something you own.

And that's the basic tier. The version of the route that actually replaces a platform is the town-and-trade SEO approach: dedicated pages targeting the exact searches homeowners type, like "plumber in Abingdon", the sort of page I build as standard (here's a live example of the format: web designer for Abingdon plumbers). Ranking for even two or three of those terms in a decent-sized town brings in exclusive enquiries every month, at a marginal cost of zero, for years. That's the difference between the two columns that the table can't fully show: the left column buys this year's leads, the right column builds next decade's.

05The review portability problem

One more structural issue that deserves its own section, because almost nobody thinks about it until it bites: reviews earned on a platform are stuck on that platform.

Say you've spent six years on a directory and collected 180 five-star reviews there. That's a genuinely valuable reputation. Now try to leave. The reviews don't come with you. You can screenshot them, quote them on your own site as testimonials, but Google gives them no weight, customers can't verify them, and the moment your membership lapses, the profile they live on stops working for you. Six years of reputation, and the platform holds the deeds.

This is the quiet lock-in of every directory model, and again, it's not malice, it's just the structure. But it has an obvious practical consequence: whatever platforms you use, send every happy customer to your Google Business Profile as well. Google reviews are attached to your business, not to any subscription. They boost your map ranking, they show in search results, and they're still yours in ten years whatever platforms come and go. If you don't have a system for asking, start with my guide on how to get more Google reviews; a simple link sent after every job is most of the battle.

06The hybrid strategy most trades should actually run

So, given all that, what would I actually do? For most established trades the answer isn't "platform" or "own site". It's both, in the right order, with a planned handover. Something like this:

1. Keep the platform running. Don't cancel anything yet. It's your current pipeline, and cutting it before the replacement works is how you get a quiet month you didn't need to have.
2. Build the owned asset. A fast website with real town-and-trade pages, a fully filled-out Google Business Profile, and a review-collection habit. This is a few weeks of work, not months. (If you're still wondering whether a trade needs a website at all when the platforms exist, I've answered that honestly in do tradespeople actually need a website?)
3. Track both sources. Just ask every new enquiry "how did you find me?" and keep a tally. Platform vs Google/website. Takes five seconds per call.
4. Let the numbers make the call. Once your own enquiries are arriving consistently, usually somewhere in the three to six month window, compare cost per job from each column. Most trades then drop the platform to its cheapest tier, keep it purely as a diary-gap filler, or cancel it entirely. Some find their platform figure still stacks up and keep paying. All three are rational once you have the data.

The hybrid also fixes the timing trap in both directions. Platform-only forever means paying rent forever. Website-only from day one means a lean few months while rankings build. Platform now, asset in parallel, taper later gets you continuous work and a falling cost per job. This is the exact playbook I walk through in more detail in how to get more work as a tradesperson, where the platforms are one channel among several rather than the whole plan.

07Bottom line

Are Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Bark worth it in 2026? Honestly: sometimes, for a while. Worth it for the new trade with no reputation. Worth it for filling diary gaps. Worth it in a new town. Rarely worth it as the permanent, only marketing channel of an established business with a strong local reputation, because at £1,000 to £2,000 a year of rent, the same money builds an asset that would eventually make most of that spend unnecessary.

So no, don't cancel Checkatrade tomorrow. That's not the move, and anyone who tells you to torch your current lead source before the replacement exists is selling something too hard. The move is quieter: build the asset first, keep tally of where the work really comes from, and in six months let the subscription argue for itself. In my experience, once a trade's own site and Google profile are producing exclusive enquiries at zero marginal cost, that argument gets very short.

Common questions I get

"Can't I just rely on word of mouth instead of all this?"

Word of mouth is the best lead source there is, but it's not controllable and it doesn't scale. The website and Google profile are really just word of mouth's landing pad: when someone's given your name at a barbecue, the first thing that person does is search for you. What they find decides whether the recommendation converts.

"Which single platform is best if I only pick one?"

It genuinely varies by trade and area, which is why I won't pretend there's one answer. The honest method: ask two or three local trades in your line what their cost per job won is on the platform they use. Real local numbers beat any national review, including this article.

"What does the owned route cost with Pixel Heaven?"

A coded site is £100 once plus £20 a month for domain, hosting and maintenance. The full Local Growth Programme, which is the platform-replacing version with town-and-trade SEO pages, Google Business Profile setup and ongoing SEO, is £500 upfront plus £60 a month. If you're not ranking better within 90 days, we keep working for free until you are. Details on the services page.