Every plumber, sparky and joiner I speak to eventually asks me the same thing: is Checkatrade actually worth it, or should I just pack that money into my own website?
Honest answer? Both work. Neither is a scam. But they're doing completely different jobs — and if you don't understand which is which, you'll end up paying for one while expecting the other.
Here's the straight comparison. Real numbers. No directory-bashing. No website-worship. Just what each actually delivers you in 2026.
What Checkatrade Actually Costs Per Year
Checkatrade's public pricing sits somewhere between "you'll have to ring us" and "we'll email the numbers once you fill this form in", so most tradesmen only see the full picture after they've already signed the contract.
Rough current UK pricing looks like this:
- Standard membership: roughly £70–£110/month depending on your trade and area, billed annually. That's £840–£1,320 upfront just to appear.
- Setup / joining fees: often £100–£200 on top in year one.
- Boosted listings, homepage placement, category upgrades: another £30–£100/month if you want to show above the free-tier members in your postcode.
- Per-lead charges on some newer packages — typically £5–£30 every time a homeowner enquires through the platform.
- Insurance and vetting add-ons: some tiers bundle DBS checks and insurance verification, some don't.
Best case, if you're an established tradesman on a standard tier you'll spend £900–£1,400 in year one. Add the boosted placement most competitive trades end up buying and you're closer to £1,600–£2,200/year.
The important bit: that cost never stops. It's a subscription, and the price scales with how competitive your postcode is. In Cardiff, Manchester or Leeds you're bidding against 6–15 other members for the same jobs.
None of that's dishonest — the platform does deliver leads. But it's rent, not equity.
What You Get (And Don't Own)
Read this bit twice. Checkatrade is a rental. A good rental — but a rental.
Here's what you're actually paying for:
Leads that aren't exclusive. When a homeowner enquires through Checkatrade, they usually get contacted by 2–4 tradesmen the same afternoon. You're not their tradesman — you're one of a shortlist. Fastest response wins, and prices get compared before anyone's even picked up the phone.
Reviews that live on Checkatrade's platform. Every 5-star review a customer leaves you belongs to the directory, not you. If you leave, they don't come with you. And they don't show up on your Google Business Profile — which is what actually drives the map pack in local search.
No domain or brand ownership. Your Checkatrade page lives at checkatrade.com/trades/yourname. You don't own that URL, you don't rank on it independently, and you can't build long-term SEO equity on it. Google sees traffic going to Checkatrade — not to you.
No customer data. When a lead comes through, you get the customer's number for that specific job. You don't get an email list, a CRM record, or a database you can market to later. The customer belongs to the platform.
Restricted branding. You're one listing in a sea of listings, styled the same as everyone else. You can't design your page or tell your story the way you would on your own website.
Again — none of this makes Checkatrade a bad product. It just means you're renting shelf space in someone else's shop. The moment you stop paying, the shelf empties.
What A Website Costs vs What It's Worth Long-Term
Now flip it. Your own website is an asset. You either build it and own it outright, or you subscribe to a done-for-you setup — but either way, the leads aren't shared, the reviews land on your Google, and the SEO builds in your name every single month.
The rough numbers:
- One-off custom build: £1,500–£5,000 upfront, £15–£30/month hosting, plus whatever you spend on ongoing SEO, review generation and updates.
- Done-for-you subscription (like the Kopa Growth Engine): £197/month, covering website, missed-call text-back, review requests, follow-up automation and local SEO.
- Checkatrade at competitive tiers: £1,600–£2,200/year with no compounding SEO, no owned reviews, no owned customer data.
Year on year, the website gets better. Every Google review you generate sits on your Google Business Profile. Every blog post or service page adds SEO surface area. Every customer's data stays in your CRM. After 18–24 months, a properly-marketed website out-performs the directory on cost per lead — often 2–3× cheaper per booked job.
For a full breakdown of the website side of the maths, I've written the pillar guide here: how much should a trade website cost in 2026. It walks through the four price bands and what's actually included at each one.
The other thing worth flagging — a badly-built website loses to Checkatrade every time. So if you're going the website route, read the common trade website mistakes that quietly cost you jobs first. This isn't just "get a site". It's "get one that actually converts".
The Honest Answer: Most Tradesmen Need Both, For Now
This is where I lose the pro-website purists and the pro-directory diehards at the same time — but it's the truth.
If you're an established UK tradesman, the sensible 2026 setup looks like this:
- Checkatrade (or Rated People, TrustATrader, MyBuilder) as a short-term lead-fill while your own SEO builds. Directory leads convert lower and cost more per job, but they arrive fast and fill quiet weeks.
- Your own website as the long-term asset. Slower to spin up, higher initial effort, but every month it compounds — more Google reviews, more ranked pages, more direct enquiries that don't cost per lead.
Run purely off Checkatrade and you're paying premium subscription fees forever with nothing that appreciates. Run purely off a brand-new website and you're waiting 4–8 months for SEO to kick in with no bridge to cover the gap.
The actual playbook: use the directory for the first 3–6 months to keep the diary full while your website climbs Google. Once your website starts producing 8–15 organic leads a month, downgrade Checkatrade to the cheapest tier. Once it's producing 20+, cancel entirely.
That's the honest answer. Not "drop Checkatrade today". Not "you'll never need a website". Both — in the right order, for the right length of time.
How To Make Your Website Good Enough That You Can Drop The Directory
If the long-term goal is to stop paying for someone else's shelf space, your website has to earn the right. A pretty homepage isn't enough. Here's the four things we build in at Kopa so our tradesmen actually cancel Checkatrade within 12–18 months:
- Real local SEO, per service, per area. Not a generic "we cover South Wales" line — actual pages for "boiler repair Cardiff", "bathroom fitter Newport", "electrician Pontypridd", and so on. Google ranks specific over generic every time. When your service pages start hitting page one for your bread-and-butter searches, you don't need to buy leads.
- Missed-call text-back and instant lead response. Checkatrade leads convert because the homeowner gets three quotes inside an hour. If your phone rings while you're up a ladder and you call back three hours later, you're already second in the queue. An automatic "sorry I missed you — what's the job?" SMS the second the call drops closes that gap.
- A proper review engine. Google reviews are the currency of local search. Every completed job needs to trigger an automatic request — SMS and email, follow-up if ignored, direct link to your Google page. Do this for six months and your Google Business Profile out-ranks half the Checkatrade traffic in your postcode.
- AI-search visibility. The newer one, and it matters more each month. Homeowners are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews things like "who's a good boiler engineer in Bristol?" — and the answer names a handful of businesses. You need the schema, the llms.txt, and the structured content to be one of those names. Full playbook here: how to get your trade business recommended by ChatGPT and Google AI.
£197/Month. Built To Replace The Directory.
Website + missed-call text-back + review engine + local SEO + AI-search visibility. Live in 7–10 working days. No contract. 30-day money-back guarantee.
Get StartedDo those four things for 12 months and the directory becomes optional. Not because Checkatrade stopped working — it still works — but because you're no longer dependent on it. That's the whole point of building an asset. If you want to see how that looks in practice, have a look at what we've built for other UK tradesmen.
The Bottom Line
Checkatrade isn't the enemy. It's a rental with real utility — fast leads, some vetting, a name homeowners recognise. If you're brand new, quiet this month, or you just need to fill next Tuesday, use it. It works.
But it's a subscription that never stops, on someone else's platform, under someone else's rules, feeding you leads you have to share.
Your own website is the opposite. Slower to start, cheaper per lead once mature, and every quid you spend on it appreciates. The smartest long-term play in 2026 is to run both — but build the website with the deliberate intention that within 18 months, you quietly cancel the directory.
If you want that setup done for you, have a look at what we do or get in touch with me. If it's not the right fit for your business, I'll tell you honestly.
