Fast answer
HomeStars is worth it for a contractor when the shortlist fees it takes to win a job add up to less than you would happily pay to land that job — and that is now the whole question, because on January 21, 2025 HomeStars dropped its memberships. Pros join free and pay a fee each time they are shortlisted for a job, whether or not they are hired. HomeStars publishes no price list: each fee is shown before you respond and is set by the job's likely size, value, category and location. So the number that decides it is your cost per won job — total shortlist fees divided by jobs actually won — not your cost per lead. And whatever you decide, a homeowner who finds you there will often look you up before they call, so your own website and Google profile decide how many of those paid shortlists turn into work.
A HomeStars alert lands on your phone: a ductless heat pump in Dartmouth, a homeowner who wants quotes, and a fee printed beside the button. Tap Shortlist Me and you're on the list and charged for it, whether or not you get the job. Most of what you'll find when you search "is HomeStars worth it" was written before that button existed.
HomeStars is worth it for a contractor when the shortlist fees it takes to win a job add up to less than you'd happily pay to land that job. Since January 21, 2025 that is the whole question, because HomeStars dropped its memberships: pros join free and pay a fee each time they're shortlisted, hired or not. So the number that decides it is your cost per won job, not your cost per lead.
Fast answer. HomeStars now charges per shortlist, with no membership and no published prices. Divide what you paid in shortlist fees by the jobs you actually won from them. If that cost per won job is a small share of what the job earns you, it's worth it.
I build websites for contractors, so read this with that in mind. I'm not going to tell you to quit HomeStars. Under the new model it costs little to try and nothing to leave, and for some trades it's a cheap source of work. The point of this article is to give you the arithmetic to decide for yourself, plus the part most comparisons leave out.
HomeStars Changed in January 2025, and Most Advice About It Didn't
HomeStars is owned by Angi Inc., the American home-services company. In January 2025 Angi moved the Canadian business onto the platform it runs in Europe. Its annual report describes the aim as a "self-serve platform" that needs fewer manual sales. For contractors, that changed nearly everything the old forum threads complain about.
| Before January 21, 2025 | Since January 21, 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Monthly membership | Free to express interest in a job; a fee only when you are shortlisted |
| Commitment | 12-month minimum, then 60 days' written notice to cancel | Ends when either side gives notice; no minimum without a subscription |
| Your rating | Star Score out of 100 (rating, recency, reputation, responsiveness) | The plain average of your homeowner reviews |
| Prices | Set by the membership plan you signed | Shown on each job before you respond; no public price list |
From HomeStars' Professional User Agreement (January 2025), its help centre, and its archived pre-2025 terms for service professionals. Read October 2026.
If you signed up before 2025, check what you're actually paying. Existing subscribers weren't switched to pay-as-you-go. HomeStars moved them to a monthly lead-fee credit budget based on the old plan's value, with 50% extra credit on top, and those credits expire after 30 days. If you're still paying the old monthly amount and not using the credit, you're paying a membership fee for nothing.
Paid extras still exist. The agreement offers a monthly Discount Package, which buys credits applied against fees, and Featured Ads, a monthly fee to be "featured (on rotation with other Professionals) at the top position of our rankings" for your services. Neither is required.
What Affects Whether HomeStars Pays Off
Under pay-per-shortlist, the platform's cost is entirely in your hands: how many shortlists you take on, and how many you turn into work. Five things decide that.
How many shortlists you win. Once you're shortlisted, the agreement says the fee is "immediately… due and payable," and HomeStars' help centre says it "cannot guarantee you will always make contact, get to quote or get hired for the job." Losing to another pro is not a reason for a credit. Every shortlist you lose is part of the price of the ones you win.
How fast you respond. HomeStars ranks pros partly on activity: the agreement says it counts "how many replies you sent in the week before a Job was created." Its credit rules also expect speed. To claim a credit for a homeowner who never answers, you must have contacted them within 48 hours and sent at least one message through HomeStars. A crew lead who checks the app at 9 p.m. is paying the same fee as one who calls within the hour, and winning less.
The size of the job. Fees are "calculated based on the likely size, value, category, and location of the Job." Bigger jobs cost more to shortlist on. That's reasonable, but it means one lost roof or kitchen costs more than a string of lost small repairs.
Your reviews on the platform. After relevance and distance, HomeStars ranks pros by "Ratings and Reviews," and the agreement says your position can't be "influenced directly or indirectly by the payment of any Fees." Featured Ads are the exception you can pay for: rotating ad slots at the top. Your organic place in the list is earned with reviews.
Your market. On October 5, 2026, HomeStars' Halifax HVAC page listed 24 pros against 1,009 in Toronto. For plumbing it was 141 against 4,069, and for roofing 71 against 1,790. Those counts include general contractors who list a trade, so read them as rough. They mean fewer pros chasing each Halifax job. But HomeStars doesn't publish how many jobs are posted per city, so only your own numbers can tell you whether there's enough work here to bother.
The Only Number That Answers It: Cost per Won Job
Cost per lead flatters HomeStars, because a lead you lost cost you the same as one you won. The honest measure takes one line:
Cost per won job = shortlist fees paid ÷ jobs actually won from those shortlists
Here's how quickly the win rate moves it. The fee below is for illustration only; HomeStars prices each job separately and publishes no list. Two contractors who posted their fees publicly in 2025–26 reported shortlists of about $30 and $79.52.
| Shortlists in 3 months | Fee each (illustrative) | Jobs won | Cost per won job |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | $40 | 6 (1 in 2) | $80 |
| 12 | $40 | 3 (1 in 4) | $160 |
| 12 | $40 | 1 (1 in 12) | $480 |
| 12 | $40 | 0 | $480 spent, nothing to show for it |
Then hold that figure against one question: what would you pay a salesperson for handing you a signed job of that size? If your average job leaves you $2,000 after materials and labour, $160 per win is a good deal. If you're doing $300 service calls, $160 per win eats half the job.
Note for anyone who doesn't keep shortlist records: your card statement already has the fees. Pull three months of HomeStars charges, match each one to the job and mark it won or lost from your own invoices, and you'll have the real number in an evening. That beats any figure in this article, mine included.
Every HomeStars Lead Looks You Up Before It Calls
This is the part most HomeStars-versus-website comparisons miss, and it changes the question.
A homeowner who shortlists you on HomeStars doesn't stop there. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that the average consumer uses six different review sites when choosing a business. After reading positive reviews, 54% go on to check the business's website, up from 32% when BrightLocal last asked in 2019. And 47% won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. That panel is American and covers all kinds of local businesses, not only contractors, but the pattern holds for anyone weighing who to let into their home.
So the shortlist fee doesn't buy a job. It buys you a place on a shortlist, and the homeowner decides who gets the job somewhere else: your Google profile, your reviews there, and your website. If they search your company name and find nothing, a Facebook page with one post, or a site that doesn't mention the work they need, you paid for a lead and lost it at the second look.
Why this matters: your website isn't really competing with HomeStars. It's part of what decides whether your HomeStars fees pay off. HomeStars itself says the homeowner shortlists you after reviewing your profile and previous work. A contractor with a strong site and a well-reviewed Google profile gives that homeowner more reasons to pick them. One without pays the same fees and gives them fewer.
What Your Own Website Does That HomeStars Can't
HomeStars and a website both produce enquiries, but they don't produce the same kind.
The enquiry is yours alone. Someone who finds your site searched for the job and the town, chose you from the results, and wrote to you. Nobody else gets that enquiry, and there's no fee attached to it beyond what the site costs to run.
It ranks for the job, not just the trade. A HomeStars profile competes inside HomeStars. A well-built site can rank in Google for the specific work you want in the specific places you serve. TrueFlow HVAC, a sheet-metal and ductwork company in the Halifax area that I built for, ranks for furnace-conversion searches in Bedford, Dartmouth and Lower Sackville. Three months after launch its site had produced more than $75,000 in quoted work, including five leads in a single week, all from organic search through the site's own form. That's quoted work, not money in the bank, and it's an HVAC result, not a roofing or plumbing one. The full case study shows the figures and says what they don't prove.
You keep the record. The HomeStars agreement says that when you leave, you have 30 days to download your jobs and data, and you're "solely responsible" for backing them up. Enquiries that come through your own site can be stored somewhere you control for as long as you're in business. I make that case in why your website should store every lead in a database.
The honest trade-off. HomeStars can put you on a shortlist this week. A new site takes months to build up rankings, and if yours isn't showing up yet, why your construction business isn't showing up on Google explains what Google is looking at. That's why running HomeStars while a site builds up is a reasonable plan, as long as you measure both.
How to Decide Before You Spend Another Dollar
You don't need a marketing plan for this. You need three months of honest numbers and a few habits.
Tip 1: Work out your cost per won job. Pull your shortlist history, mark every one won or lost, and divide. Do it per trade or job type if you do several, because a fee that pays on installs can lose money on repairs.
Tip 2: Ask every caller how they found you, and write it down. Do it for 60 days. Some HomeStars homeowners will phone you after finding your website or Google profile, and some website visitors read your HomeStars reviews first. Without a note per lead, you'll credit the wrong channel. A one-line log in a notebook is enough.
Tip 3: Shortlist yourself only on jobs you'd really take. Expressing interest in a job is free; the fee comes when you're shortlisted, and Shortlist Me shortlists you, and charges you, straight away. Reaching for every job in the category is the fastest way to a bad cost per won job.
Tip 4: Answer within hours, and message through HomeStars first. It helps you win, and it's what makes an unreachable homeowner eligible for a credit: contact within 48 hours, at least one HomeStars message, then a request between day 7 and day 20.
Tip 5: Ask every customer for a Google review, including the ones who came through HomeStars. HomeStars reviews stay on HomeStars. Google says that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking," and Google is still the review site people use most: 71% in BrightLocal's 2026 survey. Ask everyone, not only the people you expect to be pleased; Google's review policy forbids selectively asking for positive reviews.
Mistakes to Avoid With HomeStars
Judging it on leads instead of wins. Ten shortlists sounds busy. Ten shortlists and one job, at $40 a shortlist, is $400 for that one job.
Letting a legacy subscription run on autopilot. If you joined before 2025, your old monthly fee may still be buying credit that expires every 30 days. Check your billing before anything else in this article.
Making HomeStars the only place your reviews live. Your rating there helps you rank inside HomeStars. It isn't the Google rating most homeowners see first, and you can't carry those reviews over to Google.
Signing without reading how disputes work. The agreement sends disputes to confidential arbitration in Toronto and waives the right to join a class action. Fees are non-refundable, and refunds come as credit. None of that is unusual for a platform, but it's better to know before a billing disagreement than during one.
Sources: HomeStars Professional User Agreement, January 2025 (sections 4.14–4.18, 5.1–5.2, 6.2–6.6, 16, 17); HomeStars help centre: What are the fees?, How has my subscription changed?, How are Star Reviews changing?, Can I request a credit for a lead fee?, Why should I pay a lead fee when I wasn’t hired?; HomeStars' pre-2025 terms for service professionals (archived January 2025); HomeStars Halifax HVAC listings and the matching Toronto, plumbing and roofing pages, read October 5, 2026; HomeStars — About us; Angi Inc. 2025 annual report (Form 10-K); BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (panel of 1,002 US adults); Google Business Profile Help — tips to improve your local ranking; Google Maps user-contributed content policy. Observations through October 2026.
Where Lightly Coded Fits
I build owned websites for contractors in Halifax and across Nova Scotia. A coded contractor site is $1,950, and a service-area build covering several towns is $2,950, one-time, live in 3–4 weeks. You own the code, the domain and every lead it produces. There's no fee per enquiry, and nothing stops if you stop working with me. If you're comparing that against a monthly website plan rather than HomeStars, monthly subscription vs. owning it runs the numbers.
You don't have to choose between us and HomeStars. Plenty of contractors should keep taking the shortlists that pay while their own site builds up, then decide on the numbers.
See what three of our builds actually produced, or read how we approach web design in Halifax. If your Google profile is the weak link, Google Business Profile vs. your website explains what each one does. The same rent-or-own question comes up with the other platform most contractors lean on; do contractors need a website if they have a Facebook page? works through it. And if you'd rather talk it through, get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
- Is HomeStars worth it for contractors in 2026?
- It can be, if you measure it the right way. Since January 21, 2025 HomeStars charges a fee each time you are shortlisted for a job, with no joining or membership fee, so trying it costs little and leaving is simple. Whether it pays depends on your cost per won job: add up the shortlist fees over two or three months and divide by the jobs you actually won from them. If that figure is a small share of what one of those jobs earns you, keep going. If you are paying for shortlists that rarely turn into work, the fix is usually faster responses and choosier shortlisting, not more spend.
- How much does HomeStars charge contractors?
- HomeStars does not publish a price list. Its January 2025 Professional User Agreement says you are charged per lead, with each fee 'calculated based on the likely size, value, category, and location of the Job', and the fee is shown before you respond. There are no joining or membership fees. Two contractors posting publicly in 2025 and 2026 reported single shortlists of about $30 and about $80. Optional paid extras still exist: a monthly Discount Package that buys credits, and Featured Ads that rotate you into the top position for your services.
- Do you pay HomeStars if you don't get the job?
- Yes. Once you are shortlisted, the fee is due immediately, and HomeStars says it cannot guarantee you will make contact, get to quote or be hired. Losing the job to another pro is not one of the reasons HomeStars gives for a credit. That is why cost per lead is the wrong measure and cost per won job is the right one.
- Can I get a refund for a bad HomeStars lead?
- Not as money. Under the agreement, fees are non-refundable and any refund is given as credit. HomeStars' credit policy, for shortlists from July 25, 2026, covers wrong or out-of-service contact details, the wrong type of work, being shortlisted twice for the same job, and someone looking for work rather than posting a job. For a homeowner who never answers, you must have contacted them within 48 hours, sent at least one message through HomeStars, and filed between 7 and 20 days after the shortlist.
- Does HomeStars still have a 12-month contract?
- Not on the pay-per-shortlist plan. The current agreement runs until either side ends it, and a pro without a subscription can end it at any time. The old 12-month minimum term with 60 days' written notice applied to memberships before January 21, 2025. If you subscribed before then, check your account: existing subscribers were moved to a monthly lead-credit budget based on their old fee, and those credits expire after 30 days.
- Should I use HomeStars or build my own website?
- They do different jobs, so it is rarely one or the other. HomeStars rents you a seat in front of homeowners who post a job there, at a fee per shortlist, starting this week. Your own website ranks for the job and the town, sends enquiries to you alone, and keeps the lead history in your hands — but it takes months to build up. Many homeowners check a business before they call, so a contractor with a solid site and Google profile tends to win more of the HomeStars shortlists they pay for, too.
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