What a Moving Aggregator Lead Really Costs

You pay for the privilege of quoting a job. So do four or five other operators, people you’ve never met and can’t see bidding against you. You spend twenty minutes qualifying the customer, sometimes by phone at a time that suits them, then another twenty building a real quote with real numbers behind it. All of it goes into a blind auction. You can’t see the other bids. You don’t own the data the comparison runs on. The only thing that comes back is a result.

Lose, and you never learn why. Win, and you don’t learn much more than that you won. Nobody tells an operator why they were chosen over the other four or five names on that page. There’s nothing to optimize, because there’s nothing to point to. A result with no reason attached isn’t feedback. It’s a coin that happened to land your way.

Even a win isn’t the finish line it looks like. There’s no guarantee that quote turns into a truck at a door. Leads that look closed fall out more often than any operator would like, a customer who stops answering, or books with someone who was never part of the comparison at all. The invoice, however honestly priced, is the smallest and most honest number in the whole exchange.

The platform, meanwhile, is having a very different week. Every quote that runs through its page, win or lose, teaches it something: what wins, what a customer responds to, what price beats what price. That knowledge compounds. Its case for charging the next operator a little more gets a little stronger with every job that passes through it. Your business got a job, maybe. The platform got evidence, every time.

What moving lead providers are selling

Start with whose side of the market these platforms are built for. Their pitch to a consumer is simple: describe the move once, and four or five businesses will come asking for it. Their pitch to an operator sounds similar. It isn’t the same deal.

The pitch is genuinely appealing. Building a website that ranks, a marketing engine that reliably produces enquiries, and a sales process disciplined enough to convert them takes years and real money. An aggregator offers to skip all of that. Pay per lead, or per quote slot, and access demand that would otherwise take a decade of reputation and search visibility to build. For a smaller operator, or one expanding into a market where nobody knows the name yet, that’s not a bad trade to consider.

Then look at what “access to demand” means in practice. Moving.com puts one enquiry in front of up to four movers. Sirelo runs the same play at up to five competing offers, on a directory it says connected more than 26,000 movers to over 200,000 consumers in 2025. Relocately goes further still. It offers “up to 6 quotes for free,” pulled from a stated network of 600-plus partners across 40-plus countries.

Read those three numbers as what they are: proof of how well the model works for the platforms running it. Every one of Sirelo’s 200,000 consumers made its directory more valuable to the next consumer and more indispensable to the next mover deciding whether to list. That number belongs to Sirelo. It compounds whether Sirelo does anything else next year or not. A passing mention of “26,000 movers” usually skips the real question: what did the operator who won one of those quotes walk away with, beyond the job itself? Not a customer list. Not a larger footprint in Sirelo’s own database, which the platform owns regardless of who wins any individual quote. Not a repeat relationship, since a customer who books once through Sirelo has no particular reason to come back looking for that operator’s name rather than back to Sirelo’s own site. The operator bought a transaction. The platform banked an asset. It’s the position of a fulfilment partner without the fulfilment partner’s usual deal, since most referral relationships don’t charge the fulfiller just to name a price. This one does.

That asymmetry is the whole story of a two-sided market where only one side pays. Two participants sit on either end of the same comparison page, and their interests are not the same, even though the platform’s pitch to each of them implies they are. The consumer’s version of the product gets better every time the platform adds a competing quote: more comparison feels more thorough, which makes the platform’s own offering more attractive next to a competitor who only shows four. Four becomes five. Five becomes six. Every improvement to the consumer-facing pitch is paid for entirely on the supplier side, so nothing in the model suggests it stops there. The customer’s cost of asking for six quotes instead of four is a few extra minutes and a fuller inbox. The operator’s cost of being one of six instead of one of four is a fully-worked quote, a phone call, sometimes a site visit, for a smaller share of ever landing it. Moving from four-way to six-way competition doesn’t add a little to that cost. It multiplies the number of paid-for losses behind every win. That’s the actual mechanism behind why these platforms keep adding competing quotes rather than reducing them. Eight would work better than six the same way six worked better than four, right up until operators start declining to show up at all.

What moving leads really cost

A moving lead sold through 99calls is priced at $24.99, printed right in the product name. That’s the number on the invoice, and it’s also the smallest number in this section.

Work through what happens after the lead lands. Someone on your team reviews the enquiry, qualifies it by phone or message, builds a quote with real figures, and usually follows up at least once. Call that 30 to 45 minutes of a salesperson’s time on a straightforward local move, more on anything crossing state lines or needing special handling. At a fully loaded cost of $30 to $40 an hour for the person doing that work, labour alone runs $15 to $30 a quote, before the lead fee is added. That’s a modeled estimate, not a published industry figure; use your own numbers if you track them, which most operators don’t. A single quote attempt, fully loaded, runs $40 to $55.

Here’s where the original math on this problem usually goes wrong. Because a platform shows the customer up to six competing quotes, it’s tempting to assume any given operator’s odds of winning are a flat one in six. They aren’t. Some customers book nobody at all. Some operators are consistently faster or sharper on price and win well above their statistical share; others lose almost every attempt and never notice, because nobody’s tracking it. And the operator paying for this week’s lead isn’t necessarily the operator who wins the job it eventually produces, so a platform-wide average tells an individual business almost nothing useful. What matters is an operator’s own observed close rate on marketplace-sourced quotes, whatever that number actually is.

These are illustrative scenarios built from the $40 to $55 fully-loaded cost per attempt above, not a single published industry statistic; where you land on this table depends on your category, your response speed, and how competitive your pricing is against the operators you can’t see. A 20% close rate is plausible for a mid-tier operator on a busy category. It puts the real cost of one booked job at $200 to $275, eight to eleven times the number on the invoice. Even a strong 50% close rate still runs $80 to $110 fully loaded. Few operators see that rate consistently on a channel where they’re never the only quote in the room. No row on this table has an invoice price that matches the real price.

Scale it out. An operator running 100 marketplace-sourced jobs a year at a 20% close rate is looking at $20,000 to $27,500 in real acquisition cost, against $2,499 if the lead fee genuinely were the only cost. That gap, somewhere between $18,000 and $25,000, never appears on an invoice or a monthly statement. It gets absorbed a few hundred dollars at a time, in quoting hours nobody logs against a channel nobody audits.

The work may be yours. The customer isn’t.

Losing a quote costs money. What it costs beyond money is easier to miss. For a business trying to be worth something in ten years, it matters more.

An operator working a marketplace lead doesn’t own the channel that produced the enquiry. The homepage, the ad spend, the search ranking that brought the customer to the comparison page in the first place: all of it belongs to Sirelo, Moving.com, or Relocately, regardless of who eventually wins the job. The operator doesn’t own the first conversation either, since the customer’s actual first move was filling out someone else’s form, not calling a specific company. They don’t own the room the auction happens in: a page built by someone else, ranked by rules the operator never sees and can’t negotiate, with four or five competitors’ names sitting right next to theirs. And they don’t own what any of it would teach them. That’s the piece of this easiest to overlook, and, over a few years, the most expensive to have given away.

A direct enquiry an operator loses still teaches something, provided the operator controls the funnel end to end: where it came from, how the person behaved on the site, how fast the team responded, how the price landed, what specific objection killed the deal, whether a follow-up two weeks later would have changed anything. That’s real information, and it compounds. The next hundred enquiries get quoted a little smarter because of what the last hundred showed. A marketplace lead doesn’t come with most of that. The operator sees a name, a job, and a result. The behavior that produced the enquiry, the comparison the customer actually made, the reason a competitor’s quote won when it wasn’t the operator’s own, or just as often why the operator’s own quote won when someone else’s didn’t: the platform generates and keeps that data, because it’s the only party present for the whole interaction. Paying for marketplace leads isn’t just buying leads. It’s financing a learning system the operator never gets to use.

Moving isn’t the first service industry to run this experiment. Angi Inc. is the home-services aggregator built on the same connect-and-charge model. It put the mechanism in writing in its own 2024 annual report: its fee is earned “regardless of whether the professional ultimately provides the requested service.” Roughly 168,000 professionals paid Angi for consumer matches or ran jobs through its platforms in the final quarter of 2024 alone, across more than 500 categories. Plumbers, electricians, and contractors ran this exact trade years before moving aggregators existed. The pattern holds: useful for filling a slow week, especially for a business too new to have a name anyone searches for yet. But every operator who stays in the trade long enough eventually treats the aggregator as a capacity valve rather than a growth engine. Filling a job and building a business that’s worth something without its owner standing in front of it are different outcomes, and only one of them leaves anything behind once the job is finished.

Hospitality ran the identical experiment two decades earlier, at a scale that shows exactly where a channel like this can end up if nobody treats it as a capacity valve on purpose.

What happened to hotels

In July 2005, priceline.com quietly paid €109 million for a Dutch company called Bookings B.V., about $132 million at the time. The filing itself runs three dry paragraphs. Nobody reading it that week would have called it the moment hotels lost the customer relationship, and for years afterward, nothing about the arrangement looked like it. Individual hotels signed up for the same reason movers sign up for a marketplace today: real guests, filling rooms that would otherwise sit empty, for a commission that seemed reasonable against the alternative.

Ben Thompson named the underlying mechanism a decade later, in the essay that coined Aggregation Theory. Once a platform can reach consumers directly at close to zero cost, he argued, businesses that once needed to own the customer relationship to compete lose that necessity, and lose the negotiating power that owning it used to buy them. Hotels were one of his named examples: “brand trust integrated with vacant rooms,” in his own phrasing. “Suppliers can be commoditized,” he wrote, “leaving consumers/users as a first order priority.” The best distributor wins the most consumers, which attracts the most suppliers, which makes the distributor’s own product better still. Every additional hotel listing strengthens the platform. No individual hotel’s listing strengthens anything beyond that week’s occupancy.

Twenty years on, priceline.com had become Booking Holdings. The company reported $186.1 billion in gross travel bookings for 2025, across roughly 4.7 million properties, at a 20.1% net income margin. That scale is the direct output of the mechanism Thompson described: an asset that compounds with every booking, entirely owned by the platform. No individual hotel gets a share of it, no matter how many rooms it fills through the channel.

The bill on the other side of that arrangement is real and published, which is more than moving aggregators can currently say about their own commission structures. A widely cited 2023 estimate covers everything hotels paid to OTAs, bed banks, and other intermediaries. It put the total at roughly $75 billion for that year, with about $50 billion of it going specifically to commissions and markups from the largest booking sites and bed banks alone. Hotels didn’t accept that bill quietly. They’ve spent the better part of two decades running direct-booking campaigns, loyalty programs, and lower direct rates. All of it aims to win back a conversation OTAs now sit in front of by default. Here’s where that fight stood as of 2024: $262 billion booked direct against $266 billion flowing through the online travel agencies, a genuine coin flip after twenty years and enormous marketing budgets spent trying to tip it decisively one way.

The size of those numbers isn’t the point worth keeping. The shape of the timeline is. A moving aggregator charging $24.99 a lead today isn’t Booking Holdings, and nothing here claims today’s marketplaces are building toward that scale on purpose. What transfers is the mechanism, not the size of it. An aggregator like this improves its consumer product by adding competing options, gets paid only from the supplier side, and keeps every data point the transaction produces. That kind of aggregator doesn’t stay small and easy to leave by default. It stays that way only if the operators using it decide, deliberately, to treat it as one channel among several rather than the whole of their acquisition strategy, the same choice hotels are still trying to make good on, two decades after the fact. We’ve told the fuller version of that hotel timeline elsewhere, including how rate-parity contracts kept hoteliers locked in until regulators dismantled them.

Moving leads are a channel, not a strategy

Sirelo, Moving.com, and Relocately are doing exactly what a marketplace is supposed to do: gather scattered supply and make it easier for a customer to compare it. That’s a legitimate service, and it’s genuinely useful to an operator sitting on spare capacity, particularly early, before a business has a name anyone searches for on its own.

The problem was never that the model is dishonest. It’s that what’s economically rational for the aggregator isn’t automatically rational for the operator paying to hold a seat in that comparison: more competing quotes, more consumers, more data. Its directory also gets a little more valuable every single year. Nothing in the arrangement forces the two to line up. Filling a slow week with marketplace leads is a reasonable decision, sometimes a smart one. Building a business around them by default is a different decision entirely. It’s usually made by accident rather than on purpose, without ever running the numbers on its own close rate.

Run the table above against your own numbers before deciding how much of your acquisition should keep running through somebody else’s platform. Use the channel where the economics hold up. Just don’t mistake what you’re renting for something you own. Every dollar and every hour spent quoting through an aggregator improves that aggregator’s demand position, its database, and its case for charging the next operator more, whether you win the job or not. It doesn’t improve yours, unless you’re also, separately, building something of your own that does.

Trade routes across the ancient world worked on the same split long before anyone called it a platform. A caravan operator who ran the same road season after season learned which wells still held water, which passes flooded, and which buyers actually paid on delivery, knowledge that compounded with every trip. A merchant who used that same road once, for a single shipment, learned almost nothing beyond whether that one deal went well. The blind auction running through a moving platform today sorts people into the same two roles, and only one of them gets to keep what the trip taught.