ReadyTrade does not charge a tradie to see a job, contact a customer, or compete for work. There are no credits, no per-lead fee, and no way to pay for a better position in a customer’s results.
What is wrong with paying for a lead?
The usual arrangement in this industry is that a customer posts a job, the job becomes a “lead”, and tradies pay — in cash or in credits — for the right to contact that customer. Several tradies buy the same lead. One of them, at most, gets the work.
So the arithmetic for a tradie looks like this. You pay a subscription. You spend credits on a job. You ring the customer, quote it, follow it up — and you may end up with nothing but the bill. You did not buy a job. You bought a chance at one, alongside everybody else who bought the same chance.
That is a real cost, and it is paid whether or not the platform did anything useful for you.
What ReadyTrade does instead
A customer describes their job. ReadyTrade scores tradies against that specific job and shows the customer a ranked list with the reasons behind the order. The customer chooses who to contact. Nobody paid to be on that list, and nobody can pay to move up it.
A tradie is never charged for a job they did not ask for, and never charged for one they did not win.
The actual difference from a lead-generation platform
A lead-generation platform sells access — it takes your money for the chance to contact a customer, before either side knows anything about the other. What happens after that sale is not its problem. It has already been paid.
ReadyTrade sells nothing at the point of contact. A tradie is shown a specific job because they were scored as a genuine fit for it, a customer sees why each tradie is there, and the customer — not a queue of paying tradies — decides who gets contacted. Nobody is buying a chance. They are being matched to work they were actually suited for.
That is the whole difference: one model is paid for access regardless of outcome, the other exists only to produce a good match.