The question usually arrives in a particular form: not "what else is there?" but "I am paying this every month and I am no longer sure what it is doing." That is the right question, and the answer is not a single replacement. It is a handful of routes that do different parts of the same job, and they differ most in what happens when you stop.
The five routes, honestly
1. Another directory
MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark are the obvious moves sideways. They mostly sell leads rather than memberships, which removes the fixed annual cost and replaces it with a cost per opportunity to quote. That suits some trades and punishes others: you are typically one of several quoting the same job, which puts downward pressure on price. We have written up what tradespeople report about MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark individually.
2. A Google Business Profile
Free, and the single highest-return thing on this page. Most "plumber near me" searches resolve in Google’s local results, not in a directory, and a complete profile with genuine reviews is what appears there. If you take one thing from this guide, take this one — and see how to set it up properly, because the common mistakes cost more than the setup.
3. Your own website
Costs less per year than most directory subscriptions, and the enquiries arrive with no competitor on the page. Slower to start — reckon on three to six months — and it does not stop the day you stop paying. That asymmetry is the entire argument.
4. Referral relationships
Builders, kitchen fitters, letting agents, estate agents, and the trades who meet your customer just before you would. Free, fast, and dependent on you actually maintaining the relationships. Reliably the best source of work for established trades, and reliably the one nobody systematises.
5. Your existing customers
The cheapest work you will ever win. A text to last year’s customers before the season turns, and asking properly for a review while you are packing up, costs nothing and consistently outperforms paid leads.
The difference that actually matters
Directory spend is rented. It works while you pay and stops when you stop, and the relationship the customer forms is with the directory rather than with you. A Google profile, a website and a referral network are owned: slower to build, and they keep producing.
That is not an argument for cancelling anything tomorrow. It is an argument about sequence.
How to move without a gap
- Set up the Google Business Profile this week. An afternoon, free, and it can be producing enquiries within a fortnight.
- Start asking every happy customer for a review. In person, at the end of the job, with a link texted before you drive away.
- Get the website up while the directory is still running. It needs months, and those months should overlap with something that is already working.
- Ask every caller how they found you, and write it down. Three months of that turns the cancellation decision from a gamble into arithmetic.
- Then decide. With numbers. Our page on switching from Checkatrade sets out what changes and, just as importantly, what does not.
If the website is the piece you have been putting off, we’ll build your homepage free in 48 hours so you can see what you would be moving to before you decide anything about what you are moving from.