I'm not sure how I feel about this quite yet. I do pay them a grip of money every month for exposure/ranking, so I will stay connected to the topic.

On the plus side, I now have a FREE personal AL account to find great contractors in my area!! :) :) :) :) :) (yup, I've been Finsing it a bit)

Curious on others' thoughts....

I used AL a couple years ago to find someone to do the tile work at the beach house. Big damn mistake. I ended up doing most of the work myself, as this idiot was so damn unreliable and unskilled.

Come to find out the he was a multi purpose sub contractor for Home Depot. Installing cabinets, laying tile, basically whatever.

My poor rating didn't even show up. I guess due to the fact that e was one that paid the monthly fees.


I don't care if AL IS free. There's no way I would ever use the service again, and I bet thousands and thousands have the same opinion and that's why it's now free.

Around here the general guys that do good work at good prices are so dam busy they don't need to use anything but word of mouth to have more work than they can do.

Exactly.

Damn, that must mean that I suck -- 'cause I could use more work.

A previous company I worked for was all about Angie's List...unfortunately, it had at least a 20 to 1 ratio of people looking for the cheapest hangnbang they could find to people that were even in the ballpark of our target client. On the upside, I did learn how to interview prospects on the phone to weed those out.

^^ This is kind of more of what I'm getting at. From a business perspective, how will/does free Angie's List affect us. As a whole in previous years, I've always gotten the best leads from AL, but of course any lead generation business is a crapshoot.

kgossen and rmalbers I'm glad you have too much work to deal. So that means you guys pay ZERO dollars for marketing? After doing good work, how do you fill the pipeline?

Actually, I was talking about general contractor types like post 1 and 2 were talking about, not A/V guys. Post 6 brought up the A/V guy thing.

Bottom line on AL?

You cannot trust the ratings since they are bought and paid for. It is not run in an honest manner.

Just another Yelp, but advertised on TV.

Making it free will be great for angies list because they will have more traffic. Users now have to deal with the fact that the reviews are about as valuable as yelp or any other free review site. Hint...not usually valuable at all.

Those of you that pay to be on Angie's List, has it been good for you? Do you feel the money you pay each month is worth it?

These fudge packers have been calling me every single day. I gave them a year and 5 grand to produce some results and got absolutely no return on my investment. It was a total loss. Now that they are not double dipping and charging for membership, they are harassing contractors. Stay away from these clowns.

I just noticed value at Yelp...Looking for places to eat in another city i realized i could order from many right from Yelp. Delivery time is always an hour + but they warn you before you order.

Hoping they have this at home because no other delivery services operate in my area. Boy do i miss Chicago.

I always thought that Angies List was WAY better than Service Magic/Home Advisor. The quality of the customer was generally much better. With SM/HA customers were always looking to see who could do the job the cheapest. Most AL customers are willing to pay extra for the job to be done the right way.

We were very conscientious of the rating system on Angies list and we always tried to do the job right and do extra things to make sure that we got good ratings. That being said some customers would give less than an A rating because of minor things, such as "they were there on time, but they said that they would call 15 minutes before coming".

Now I am worried that the same customers that were using SM/HA will now start shopping for estimates on Angies List.

We use Yelp to find places to eat in big cities all the time, in this regard it has great value.