Groundwork vs Thumbtack
Thumbtack bills you for each lead, so your busiest month is your most expensive one. This is $39 a month, flat, for permits with no contractor named on them.
$39/mo flat/No per-lead charge/Cancel in one click
Thumbtack — per-lead pricing, no membership fee
- Priced per lead, and priced dynamically. Thumbtack publishes no rate card, so your cost per job is not knowable before you start
- A busy month costs more than a slow one — the bill follows the work
- 921 BBB complaints in three years, 244 of them closed in the last twelve months
- One of those complaints describes being charged $47 for a lead that had already sat on the marketplace for two days
- It is a form fill, not a filing — there is nothing in it you can check against a public record before you pay
Groundwork — $39/mo
- $39/mo flat, whatever the week looks like — a busy week or a slow one, the bill is the same
- Every qualifying job for your trade, every Monday, across San Diego County
- One Angi lead runs $29.07. A whole month here is $39
- Sourced from the City of San Diego permit file, refreshed daily by the City
- Address, scope, valuation, permit number, map and street view on every one
Thumbtack quotes no per-lead price here because Thumbtack publishes no rate card and prices dynamically — any range we printed would be invented. The complaint counts are from Thumbtack's BBB profile, read 12 August 2026.
$39/mo is flat: a busy week or a slow one, the bill is the same and there is no membership fee under it. On a per-lead marketplace the good months cost the most, and the price of the next lead is set by someone else.
Fair to them: Thumbtack covers every trade in every metro and works the day you sign up, we cover four trades in a handful of San Diego jurisdictions — and their phone number belongs to somebody who asked to be contacted, which is warmer than ours. We do put a number on most paid leads, but it is the owner on the assessment roll, DNC-flagged and yours to call one at a time. Ours is that no contractor is named on the permit and the price does not move.
What you get here for $39 a month.
One trade, the whole county, every qualifying job every Monday — every job that qualifies, and the bill does not move when the week is busy.
- Every qualifying job for your trade, every Monday — usually a few dollars a lead.
- Address, scope, valuation, permit number, map, street view on each one.
- City of San Diego, Coronado, Vista, Oceanside and Unincorporated San Diego County leads are owner-pulled: an individual, one property, no contractor named on the permit.
- Carlsbad, Santee, El Cajon, Imperial Beach, Chula Vista, Del Mar, Solana Beach, Encinitas, Escondido, San Marcos, Huntington Beach, Brea, Aliso Viejo, Laguna Hills, Laguna Niguel, Lake Forest, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, La Habra, Tustin, Newport Beach, Westminster and Yorba Linda are all new permits — those cities do not publish who pulled the permit, so we never call them owner-pulled.
- 13 qualified job sites a week citywide as of 2026-09-16. Real count, 7-day window.
We publish one of these for every product a contractor asks us about, including the ones that are the better buy outside San Diego.
Chad Vasquez · Groundwork, a Prompt Flow LLC company · San Diego, CA
(760) 464-5105 · chad@promptflowbusiness.com
A small San Diego operation, not a lead-gen call centre. Day job's a fireman; this is the side business. You can phone the number above and I will pick up. Cancel anytime in one click — no retention script, no website upsell. Billing is Stripe; the Monday email goes out through Resend.