Checkatrade vs MyBuilder: which is better for builders?

How Checkatrade works

Checkatrade is the vetted-directory model. You pay an annual membership, priced per trade and area so you'll need to ask for current rates, pass their checks, and get a profile with reviews that homeowners can browse. Enquiries come through the profile directly or through job matching, and a matched job is typically visible to several members at once.

Its strength is the brand: homeowners recognise the name and trust the vetting badge. Its weakness is that the fee runs every month whether the enquiries that month were good, shared, or missing.

How MyBuilder works

MyBuilder flips it. There's no membership: homeowners post a job, interested trades put themselves forward, and you pay a fee, scaled to job size, when the homeowner shortlists you. It's genuinely low-commitment: quiet month, spend nothing.

The shortlist is the catch. The homeowner usually shortlists several trades, each of you pays to make contact, and then you're bidding against each other. The format rewards whoever quotes fastest and cheapest.

Which suits which builder

• Pick Checkatrade if you do a steady flow of small-to-mid jobs, want a review profile homeowners recognise, and can quote quickly enough that shared enquiries don't drain you. The membership only makes sense when the volume is there. We've done the full cost breakdown in Is Checkatrade worth it?
• Pick MyBuilder if your workload is patchy and you'd rather pay per opportunity than carry an annual fee. Just budget for shortlist fees on jobs you won't win. That's the cost of the format.
• Think twice about both if your core work is extensions, lofts or renovations. That's where the shared-lead flaw bites hardest.

The honest verdict for extension builders

For high-ticket work, the differences between these two platforms matter less than what they have in common: your enquiry isn't yours. A £50k extension quote takes a site visit and hours of pricing. Do that against four other builders, whichever platform introduced you, and most of those evenings end in a polite no, usually because someone quoted cheaper.

The winning builder often takes the job at a margin that barely justifies it. That's not either platform being dishonest. It's a model built for small jobs being applied to big ones.

"Other platforms sell the same lead to five or ten builders, sparking a race to the bottom on price. We only take on one client per area, so every lead is exclusively yours and you're never undercut by a cowboy quoting half your price for worse work." Lewis Ford, founder of Unlimitely

The third option: exclusive leads

Unlimitely exists for exactly this gap. Instead of a marketplace, you buy a revenue system, the North Star Framework: Meta ad campaigns aimed at homeowners planning an extension in your area, every enquiry qualified on your criteria (budget, job type, timeframe), and an AI that texts each enquiry the moment it lands, keeps following up, and books the serious ones into a phone call with you. Every enquiry goes to one builder only. You just take the call.

One builder per 30-mile radius, a fixed price per lead agreed before anything goes live, month to month, pause whenever. AREION took 11 leads in his first 4 days and paused his ads because the diary was full.

If extension work is your bread and butter, start with house extension leads, or see how every option stacks up in the best Checkatrade alternatives for builders.