Most installers have bought enquiries from a portal at some point, and very few have been shown how the machine works. It is worth understanding, because once you have seen it the alternative is obvious.
They own a website you have never heard of
A lead portal does not find customers by knocking on doors. It builds a consumer-facing website — a grant checker, an eligibility quiz, a savings calculator — on a domain that sounds official and has nothing to do with any installer. A homeowner searching “am I eligible for the heat pump grant” lands on it, answers a handful of questions, and hands over their name and number believing they are talking to the trade.
That checker is the asset. It is the thing the portal built, the thing it owns, and the thing it keeps. What it sells you is the output.
They buy the traffic
The portal bids on the searches your customers are already making and pays Google for the click. That cost is real, and it is one of the two things your fee covers. The other is margin.
This matters because it tells you what you are actually paying for: not a customer, but an advert you did not place, on a keyword you could bid on yourself, landing on a page you do not own.
They qualify, lightly
Qualification is usually a postcode, a tenure question and a tick box. It is enough to filter out the obviously hopeless and not much more. The harder questions — the ones that decide whether the job is real — are left for you to ask on the doorstep, because asking them would shrink the portal's inventory.
They sell the same name more than once
This is the part that costs you, and it is why every portal's homepage leads on the word “exclusive”. Read the definitions carefully. Exclusive sometimes means exclusive forever. It often means exclusive for thirty days, after which the same name is sold again. Shared means three, four or five installers get it at once, usually within the same hour.
When a name is shared, you are not being introduced to a customer. You are being entered into an auction you did not agree to, against installers who are all ringing the same number that morning. Whoever gets through first sets the price everyone else has to beat, and being better at fitting heat pumps does not help you win it.
What you are actually buying
Add it up honestly and the fee is rarely the expensive part. Take your own price per enquiry, your own close rate on bought enquiries, and the number you buy a month, and work out what each won job costs you in fees. Then count the visits. At a one-in-five close rate you drove out five times for one job, and four of those trips were unpaid.
The fee is visible. The diesel, the Saturday mornings and the quotes written for people who were never going to buy are not, and they are usually the larger number. There is a calculator on each trade page that does this sum with your figures rather than ours.
What changes when the checker is yours
Nothing about the mechanism is secret or difficult. The checker, the traffic, the qualification and the capture are four ordinary things, and a portal is simply a business that owns all four and rents you the last one.
Put the same checker on your own website and the arrangement inverts:
- The homeowner knows who they are talking to. Your name is on the answer, your logo is on the page, and the conversation starts warm instead of starting with “who is this?”
- Nobody else is called. An enquiry that arrives through your own site cannot structurally be sold to another installer. There is no exclusivity clause to read, because exclusivity is not a policy — it is a property of where the form lives.
- The visitors you already have start converting. Most installer websites answer none of the questions people arrive with, so most visitors leave. That traffic is already paid for.
- You can run the same adverts. The portal's keywords are not proprietary. You can bid on “heat pump grant” and send the click to your own page, paying Google directly rather than paying someone else's margin on top.
- Stop paying and you keep the asset. Cancel a portal and the enquiries stop that day, with nothing to show for what you spent.
The honest limit
A checker on a website nobody visits earns nothing. If your site gets a handful of visitors a month, the checker will convert a handful better and that is all it will do — the traffic is the other half of the job, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. We would rather say that here than three months into a subscription.
What a portal genuinely has going for it is volume from a standing start, with no website required. If you need enquiries next week and have nothing to build on, that is a real answer. It is just an expensive one to still be paying for in three years.
Where to look next
The checker itself is GrantCheck, and there is a working one on every trade page — heat pumps, solar, air conditioning, insulation and EV charging — that you can put a real postcode into. Pricing is published rather than held back for a call.
Grant figures on this page were checked against gov.uk on 22 September 2026 and are indicative — the binding figure is the one from the official application. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.