I’ve built trade businesses that never spent a penny on either paid ads or lead platforms, and I’ve spoken to plenty of tradespeople who’ve spent thousands on Checkatrade over the years. Both experiences are real. The question isn’t which one is good or bad. It’s which one you’re using for the right reason, and for how long.

What each one actually costs

Checkatrade doesn’t publish a single headline price, but based on 2026 pricing data from members across the UK, most tradespeople end up paying somewhere between £60 and £150 a month in membership fees alone, rising to £100 to £300 a month once lead fees and featured placement are factored in. Over a year, that’s commonly £1,000 to £1,800, sometimes more, and it’s a fixed cost whether you get one enquiry or twenty.

Our own Done For You SEO sits at £347 a month with a £197 setup fee. On paper that’s a similar monthly figure to a mid-tier Checkatrade membership. The difference isn’t really the number. It’s what happens to that spend over time.

That math looks worse for SEO on the surface, SEO costs more over three years in this comparison. But the number that actually matters is what happens in year four, five, and ten. Cancel Checkatrade and your visibility disappears immediately. Cancel SEO maintenance and your rankings typically hold for a good while before slowly fading, because you built something that exists independently of the monthly payment, not a rented spot on someone else’s platform.

Where Checkatrade genuinely wins

It’s worth being honest about this, because most agency content on this topic pretends Checkatrade has no upside. It does, in specific situations.

Where SEO genuinely wins

And this is where it compounds, in ways a rented platform structurally can’t.

Factor	SEO	Checkatrade
Who you’re competing against	Just you, once you rank #1	Every other member in your category and area
Cost per lead once established	Effectively £0	Fixed monthly fee plus per-lead charges, forever
What happens if you stop paying	Rankings hold for a period, fade slowly	Visibility disappears immediately
Who owns the reviews and profile	You, on your own Google Business Profile	The platform. Leave, and they stay behind
Price pressure from comparison	Low, customers found you specifically	High, customers often quote 3–4 tradespeople at once

We’ve never spent a penny on ads. The diary stays full because we own our rankings, not because we’re renting a lead every month. Oven Craft, Cardiff

The sequencing most trade businesses get wrong

The mistake isn’t choosing Checkatrade. It’s staying on it for years without ever building the thing that replaces it. Plenty of tradespeople we talk to have been paying £150 a month for three or four years straight, essentially renting the exact visibility that consistent local SEO would have owned outright by year two.

The sequencing that actually makes sense for most trade businesses: use a lead platform if you need income now, while building your Google Business Profile, reviews, and local SEO in parallel. As your organic visibility grows, the platform becomes a smaller and smaller share of where your work comes from. Eventually, for many businesses, it becomes unnecessary entirely. That’s not a guess, it’s exactly the pattern behind every client we’ve built from a standing start to #1 without ever touching a lead platform.

We’ve written more on this shift from renting to owning your leads, if you want the fuller picture: The Digital Ownership Trap.

So which should you actually use?

If your diary is empty this month and you need work now, a lead platform is a legitimate short-term tool, not a mistake. But treat it as a bridge, not a destination. Every month you’re paying for rented leads is a month you could be building rankings that still work for you in year five. The businesses that get this right aren’t the ones who avoided Checkatrade entirely. They’re the ones who used it deliberately, for a defined period, while building the asset that eventually replaced it.