Quick answer
Building your own prospect list of local businesses costs somewhere between about $0.03 and $0.50 per business depending on the tool, and often nothing at all at low volume. Buying qualified inbound leads costs $15 to $150 each. The gap is enormous because they are not the same product: one is a contact, the other is someone who raised their hand.
The confusion worth clearing up first
The phrase "lead cost" means two completely different things depending on who is saying it, and this trips up almost every article on the subject.
- A contractor saying it means: what a platform charges to send me a homeowner who wants a quote.
- An agency saying it means: what it costs me to build a list of businesses I can pitch.
Those numbers differ by two orders of magnitude, and comparing them directly is meaningless. The rest of this is about the second one.
What building a list actually costs
| Approach | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Manual, Google Maps by hand | $0 plus your time | Accurate, painfully slow. Fine for the first 20 |
| Apify | Around $1.50 per 1,000 places | Raw data, developer setup required |
| Outscraper | First 500 free, then roughly $28.50 per 10,000 | Raw data, no subscription |
| Scrap.io | $49/mo for 10,000 credits | Filtered data, strong international coverage |
| ZipLead | Free tier, then $59/mo for 100 searches | Scored and sorted lists, verified emails on export |
Pricing is taken from each vendor's own public pages as of August 2026 and changes often. Check with them directly before deciding.
At the volumes most small agencies actually work at, the tool is not the expensive part. A few hundred prospects a month sits inside a free tier or costs less than a dinner.
The cost everyone forgets
Your time is the real line item. Pulling a list is minutes. Working out which businesses on it are worth contacting is hours, and it is hours you repeat for every new list.
If an hour of your time is worth $75 and you spend three hours a week filtering, that is $900 a month. Every tool on the table above costs less than that. This is the actual argument for tooling, and it has nothing to do with the per-record price.
What buying leads costs, for contrast
Worth knowing, because your clients are often paying these numbers and it explains a lot about their attitude to marketing spend.
| Platform | Typical cost per lead | Model |
|---|---|---|
| Thumbtack | $25 to $75 for most trades, $8 to $150+ overall | Pay per lead, no annual fee |
| Angi | $15 to $100+ | Per lead delivered, plus a $300 to $500 annual membership |
| HomeAdvisor | $15 to $100+ | Per lead, commonly shared with several pros |
Figures are commonly reported ranges from contractor-facing comparisons as of August 2026, not official rate cards. Actual pricing varies by trade, market, and job size.
A widely cited frustration with these platforms is that the same lead often goes to several contractors at once, so the effective cost per booked job is far higher than the sticker price.
The honest comparison
A bought lead is worth more per unit because someone has already expressed intent. A self-built list is far cheaper per unit and you own it, but every contact is cold and conversion is much lower.
For an agency selling services to local businesses, building your own list is almost always the right call, because nobody is running a marketplace of small businesses raising their hand asking to be sold web design. That market does not exist. You have to go find them.