Free tools for contractors who'd rather not guess.
Advertising is confusing when it isn't your job. These four tools replace the guessing with arithmetic: what you can afford per lead, whether your website is helping or hurting, and which channel actually produced last month's work. All free. No email wall, no unlock step, no drip sequence waiting for you.
Which tool do you need first?
Work through them in order if you're starting cold. The plan builder tells you what you can afford and what to do in what order. The scorecard tells you whether your website can hold up its end. The tracker keeps you honest about what's actually working once money is moving. The break-even worksheet is the short version of the plan builder's first calculation, for when you only want the number.
Marketing Plan Builder
Seven questions about your trade and your numbers. You get a twelve-month plan — your break-even cost per lead, which channels can clear it, how to split the budget, and phased actions for months one through twelve. Benchmarked against real 2026 lead costs for your specific trade, or clearly labelled blended figures if your trade has none published.
Build my plan Tool 02 · Most important assetWebsite Scorecard
Twenty-five plain-English checks across speed, conversion path, trust, local search and AI readiness. Weighted score out of 100, a letter grade, and a fix list ordered by impact — with the free fixes separated from the ones worth paying for.
Score my website Tool 03 · Keep it honestLead & Job Tracker
A real four-tab Excel workbook, branded and formatted, with dropdowns and the formulas already written. Log leads by source and date; the Dashboard calculates cost per lead, close rate, cost per booked job and revenue by channel, then turns each channel green or red against your own break-even. Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice.
Download the tracker Tool 04 · The short versionBreak-Even Lead Cost Worksheet
Three numbers — average job value, gross margin, close rate — and you have the most you can pay for a lead before the first job stops making money. It compares that ceiling live against 2026 costs for six real channels. Thirty seconds, on the homepage.
Run the numbersWhich one answers the question you actually have?
Each tool answers a different question. If you already know which question is bothering you, go straight to the one that answers it rather than working through all four.
| Tool | The question it answers | Use it when | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Break-Even Worksheet | What is the most I can pay for a lead? | Someone quoted you a cost per lead and you have no idea whether it is good or terrible. | 30 seconds |
| Plan Builder | What should I actually do, and in what order? | You are starting from scratch, or restarting after an agency that did not work out. | 4 minutes |
| Website Scorecard | Is my website losing the leads I already paid for? | Traffic looks fine but the phone is quiet, or you are about to buy more traffic. | 10–15 minutes |
| Lead & Job Tracker | Which channel produced last month's customers? | Money is already going out and you cannot prove what it bought. | 30 seconds a day |
Which channel produced last month's customers?
Most contractors genuinely cannot answer that. Not because they're careless — because nobody handed them a way to track it that takes less than a minute a day. This spreadsheet is that. Log each lead as it comes in and the math handles itself.
It calculates cost per lead, close rate, cost per booked job and revenue by channel, then flags each channel against your break-even. After sixty days you'll know which channel to scale and which to cut, which is the whole argument most contractors never get to have with their agency.
Build your tracker
Fill these in and the spreadsheet arrives pre-configured with your numbers already in the formulas.
Downloads as a formatted four-tab .xlsx workbook that opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored — the whole file is assembled in your browser.
What's inside
A proper four-tab Excel workbook in AFC colours — frozen header rows, dropdown menus so sources always match, currency and percent formatting, and a Dashboard that colours each channel green or red against your break-even as you type. Built in your browser, not on a server.
One row per lead. Date, source, service, contact, estimate value, booked yes or no, and the invoiced amount. Source and Booked are dropdowns so the Dashboard formulas never break on a typo. 250 rows, banded, with the header frozen and filters on.
What you spent per channel per month, with the same source dropdown and currency formatting. This is the half most contractors skip, and it's the half that makes cost per booked job possible at all.
Your break-even in a large panel across the top, then live cross-sheet formulas for every channel: leads, booked jobs, close rate, spend, cost per lead, cost per booked job and revenue. Conditional formatting turns each row green when it is under your ceiling and red when it is losing money.
Five numbered steps, your own numbers restated, and the 2026 cost-per-lead benchmark table with its sources and dates — so you can compare against the trade rather than against nothing.
The question that ends every argument.
"Which channel produced last month's customers?" A contractor who can answer that can cut what isn't working and double down on what is. A contractor who can't is negotiating blind with whoever sends the prettiest report. Sixty days of logging leads changes which of those two you are.
Build my trackerWhat four numbers does every contractor need to know?
Average job value, gross profit margin, lead-to-job close rate and monthly marketing spend. Those four produce every other figure that matters — your break-even cost per lead, your cost per booked job, and whether any given channel can work for you at all. Every tool on this page is built on them, and most contractors can only answer two of the four off the top of their head.
Average job value
What a typical completed job invoices at. Not your largest ever and not the small repairs — the middle of the range you actually run. If your work splits into two very different bands, run the numbers twice rather than averaging them into a figure that describes neither.
Gross profit margin
What's left after materials and labour, before overhead. Most trades land between 25% and 45%. Contractors consistently overestimate this because they forget to load labour fully, and an overestimate here inflates every downstream number in your favour, which is the dangerous direction.
Lead-to-job close rate
Out of ten real leads, how many become signed work? This is the number with the most leverage and the one contractors guess at most. It is also the cheapest to improve — a better first phone call costs nothing and moves your ceiling more than any change to an ad budget.
What you can actually fund
Published 2026 guidance puts healthy home-services marketing spend at 6–12% of revenue. Budget against the revenue you are trying to reach rather than last year's, but be realistic — a plan you cannot fund for six straight months is not a plan.
Multiply the first two and you have gross profit per job. Multiply that by your close rate and you have your break-even cost per lead — the most you can pay for one lead before the first job stops making money. On an $8,500 job at 30% margin with a 25% close rate, that ceiling is $638. Against it, a $57 plumbing lead on Local Services Ads is a rounding error and a $183 non-branded Google Ads lead still clears comfortably.
What actually shows up after sixty days of tracking?
Almost always something that contradicts what you assumed. The pattern repeats so reliably across contractor accounts that we can list the four most common findings before you start, and you will probably recognise at least two of them.
The cheap channel is not the cheap channel
Cost per lead and cost per booked job are different numbers, and contractors almost always optimise the wrong one. A channel producing leads at $40 that book at 15% costs $267 per job. A channel at $120 that books at 45% costs $267 as well — identical, despite a three-times difference in the headline figure. Once you can see both columns side by side, the conversation about which channel to cut changes completely.
Referrals are doing more work than anyone credits
Log every lead by source and the referral row usually turns out to be the biggest column on the sheet, with the highest close rate and effectively no acquisition cost. That is not an argument against advertising — it is an argument for making referrals systematic instead of accidental, and for protecting the review profile and response time that keep them coming.
The leak is in the follow-up, not the marketing
When the lead column is healthy and the booked column is not, the problem sits downstream of every channel on the sheet. That is a phone-answering and follow-up problem, and no amount of extra traffic fixes it. It is also the single most common reason a contractor concludes that marketing does not work for their trade.
One channel is quietly losing money every month
There is usually one. It looked reasonable when it started, nobody has checked it since, and it has been running above the break-even ceiling for months. The tracker's last column turns that row red the moment enough data exists to judge it, which is generally the first hard evidence a contractor has ever had for cancelling something.
Sixty days is roughly the minimum before the numbers mean anything. Under about thirty leads per channel, a single unusually large job distorts the whole picture. That is not a reason to wait before starting — it is a reason to start now so the data exists when you need to make the decision.
Which expensive mistakes do these tools prevent?
Five, and each one costs a contracting business real money every month it goes unnoticed. None of them require an agency to find. They require somebody to look, which is the part the tools make quick enough to actually happen.
What goes wrong
- Buying more traffic to fix a website that converts at 1%
- Splitting a small budget across five channels instead of winning one
- Judging channels on cost per lead and never on cost per booked job
- Paying marketplace fees for years without building anything you own
- Spending hardest in peak season when competitors bid costs up
What catches it
- The scorecard grades the conversion path before you spend a dollar more
- The plan builder allocates the budget and refuses to spread it thin
- The tracker shows both columns beside each other, monthly
- The plan sequences owned channels underneath the rented ones
- The plan flags seasonal trades and says to front-load instead
The first one is the most expensive by a distance. Take 500 visitors a month: at a 1% conversion rate that's five leads, at 4% it's twenty. Same traffic, same spend, four times the work. Buying visitors to solve a conversion problem is the costliest mistake in contractor marketing, and it is the one almost every agency is happy to sell you.
Where should you take the results?
Straight to whichever channel your break-even can actually support, and to the page that explains how that channel works in your trade. The tools tell you what is viable. These pages tell you what winning it involves.
Local SEO & Google Business Profile
If the plan came back saying paid cannot clear your ceiling yet, this is where a contractor with tight numbers genuinely competes. Map pack position, review velocity and profile completeness cost time rather than money.
Local SEO for contractors Needs work this monthGoogle Ads & Local Services Ads
The fastest route from nothing to booked work, and usually the first channel a viable plan recommends. Local Services Ads averaged about $53 per lead across trades in 2026 with a 43.9% book rate.
Google Ads for contractors Stop rentingLead generation systems
If your tracker shows marketplace fees as your largest spend row, this is the page that explains what owning the pipeline instead actually involves and how long the switch realistically takes.
Contractor lead generation CompoundingContractor SEO
The channel with no cost per lead once it ranks, and the reason month twelve costs less per job than month three. Four to eight months to competitive terms, so it starts underneath paid rather than instead of it.
SEO for contractors The new front doorAI search optimization
Research published in 2026 estimates only about 1.2% of local businesses surface in AI recommendations. The work overlaps almost entirely with local SEO, which makes it sequencing rather than a separate budget line.
AI search for contractors Second opinionFree marketing audit
If you would rather a person looked at your actual site, profile, reviews and the competitors beating you, that is the audit. You keep the findings whether you hire us or not, and there is no obligation attached.
Request a free auditTrade-specific numbers live on the trade pages — roofing, plumbing, HVAC, electrical and the rest each carry their own 2026 cost-per-lead benchmarks with sources. If your trade has no published benchmark, the plan builder says so rather than inventing one.
Why are these free with no email required?
Because gating them would defeat the point. A contractor who has been burned by a marketing company is not going to hand over an email address to find out whether their website is any good. If the tools are useful, some people will call. If they aren't, an email wall wouldn't have saved them.
There's also a self-interested reason and we'd rather say it than pretend. A contractor who has worked out their own break-even cost per lead is a far better client than one who hasn't. They ask better questions, they judge proposals on the right criteria, and they know when a channel is working. Some of them find out they don't need an agency at all, and that's a perfectly good outcome.
Our founder has run a bath remodeling company since 2012 and spent years buying marketing that never answered whether a job got booked. These tools are the thing he wanted and could never find. More on why AFC exists.
About these tools
Are these contractor tools actually free?
What format is the lead and job tracker?
Do I need to be technical to use these?
Which tool should I start with?
How long does each one take?
Will these work for a trade that is not on your list?
Can I use these with a screen reader or keyboard only?
Do you store the numbers I enter?
Rather have someone just look at it?
Free audit of your site, your profile, your reviews and the competitors beating you in the map pack. You keep the findings either way.