How to buy leads

A purchased lead is a record of a person or business that asked to hear about a product and agreed to be contacted.

The record usually arrives by API into your CRM within seconds of the form being filled in, though calls and booked appointments are sold too.

Lead formats

Before comparing sellers, decide which of these you actually want, because the same word covers very different products.

• Web form lead: name, contact details and answers to a few qualifying questions.
• Pay-per-call or inbound call: a caller routed to your phone line, often billed only past a minimum duration.
• Live transfer: a screened caller handed over to your agent while still on the line.
• Booked appointment: a time on your calendar, common in solar and home services.
• Aged leads: older enquiries resold at a discount, with weaker consent and contact rates.

The lead chain

The FTC's 2016 staff report on lead generation describes a chain: publishers run the websites and forms, aggregators take in leads from many publishers and package them, and end-buyer merchants make the calls. Leads can pass between more than one aggregator before they reach you.

How much you can see

Where you buy in that chain decides how much you can see about where a lead came from. If you bid in a ping-post auction, you buy closer to the moment the form was filled in, but you still depend on the seller's records.

Named sellers by vertical

Phonexa's 2026 list of lead aggregators names, among others, EverQuote and MediaAlpha for insurance, LendingTree for financial services, Zillow for real estate and Service Direct for home services.

ActiveProspect's guide to home improvement leads lists HomeAdvisor (powered by Angi), which charges per lead and may add membership fees, and Thumbtack, which charges per lead with no subscription. These are examples from those sources, not recommendations.

Why the sources disagree

The sources disagree, sometimes widely: Phonexa's shared auto range tops out at $12 while ActiveProspect's starts near $10 and runs to $25. Both can be right, because one unfiltered shared form and one filtered for prior coverage are different goods. We left out legal, B2B and other verticals where we could not find a dated, checkable figure.

1. Write a lead spec: required fields, geography, product, age of the lead at delivery, and anything that disqualifies it.
2. Ask where the leads come from: which websites or campaigns, and whether sub-publishers or other aggregators sit in between.
3. Ask to see the live form and the exact consent wording a person sees, and whether your company is named in it.
4. Require a consent record per lead: timestamp, page URL, IP address and the wording shown.
5. Get exclusivity, or the maximum number of buyers per shared lead, in the contract.
6. Agree return reasons and a deadline: bad contact details, duplicates, out-of-area, wrong product.
7. Test delivery: speed into your CRM, field mapping, duplicate handling.
8. Start with a capped test order, and stop if contact rates are poor.
9. Track each source by cost per customer, not only cost per lead.

Buying a lead does not move the legal risk to the seller. In the US, autodialled or prerecorded marketing calls and texts need prior express written consent: a signed agreement, electronic signatures included, that authorises the seller to send those messages to that number.

The one-to-one rule

The FCC's 2023 one-to-one rule would have limited each consent to one named seller, but the Eleventh Circuit vacated it in January 2025, and the current definition in 47 CFR 64.1200 carries no one-to-one wording. Many buyers still ask for forms that name them, because vague 'marketing partners' wording is easy to challenge.

Warning signs

The FTC has warned that companies which ignore warning signs about the third parties they deal with may break the law themselves. Its 2022 case against ITMedia Solutions, which sold most of the loan applications it collected to non-lenders, ended with a $1.5 million civil penalty and an order to screen who gets the data.

A cheap lead that never answers costs more than an expensive one that buys. Work out cost per customer for each source: what you paid for its leads in a period, divided by the sales they produced. The cost per lead figure on an invoice is only the start of the sum.

We don't sell leads, lists or data feeds, and we have no arrangement with any seller named here. DataBroker is a paid course with tools for people who broker data and lead deals between companies. If you want to sit between generators and buyers yourself, read the lead broker guide next.