The lead model charges you before you earn anything
On the big lead marketplaces, the flow is familiar: you pay for a lead, the same lead is commonly offered to several other pros, and you race to be the first call back. Win the job and the lead fee was the cost of getting it. Lose it — or find a tire-kicker, a wrong number, or a job that was never real — and the fee is gone anyway. Your marketing cost lands before a single dollar of revenue does, every time.
The honest number is cost per won job, not cost per lead
A lead price only looks small until you divide by results. Take what you actually spent on leads last month and divide it by the number of jobs you actually won from them. That figure — your real cost per won job — is the one to compare against any other way of getting work. For most pros who run it honestly, the number is a surprise, because the leads that went nowhere are easy to forget and they all had a price.
The CRS model: 20% of a finished job, and nothing before it
Coastal Repair Squad sells no leads. A pro pays a 20% commission on a completed, paid job — calculated on the pre-tax job price — and nothing at any other point. There is no per-lead charge, no monthly fee to receive requests, and no charge for a job that falls through. On a $350 job, the commission is $70 and the pro keeps $280. Before accepting any job, the pro sees the exact net, so the math is decided with real numbers, not hope.
What changes when payment is secured before you roll
On CRS, the customer's payment is secured inside the platform before work starts, and the job closes with check-in and before photos, check-out with after photos, and customer approval (or the 48-hour auto-approval window). That removes two silent costs of the lead model: chasing payment after the work is done, and the free-estimate circuit — driving out to quote jobs that were never going to happen. You arrive at jobs that are booked, scoped, and funded.
Run your own comparison in five minutes
Pull last month's numbers: total spent on leads, jobs won from them, and what those jobs paid. Now price the same won jobs under the CRS model — 20% of the completed price, nothing for the rest. Whichever model leaves more in your pocket on your own real numbers is the right answer for your business. If you want to see the model from the inside, joining the founding crew costs nothing — the first commission you ever pay is on the first job you finish.
