I’ve seen the ads and briefly looked at the web site. Any useful info is behind he pay wall.
I’d love to hear experiences of people that used the service. Were the referrals helpful/accurate? Mostly I’m interested in service work like carpenters, plumbers, electricians. Car mechanic, etc. Perhaps a referral on a good place to eat.
How does Angies list compare to Consumer Reports for thoroughness and research? Does Angie have as good a reputation?
Whats the deal with their magazine? Any reason to get it?
My initial issue is the subscription. I don’t need referrals that often. Maybe three times a year at most.
Can you sign up for only a month and get a referral? Then cancel the automatic resubscribe? Is it a PITA to do?
Been a member since 2005 when I bought my house. Used it to find my carpenter, my electrician, my tree guy and my landscapers. I let my parents and friends use my login too.
Pros:
I utterly trust anyone I hire from there. The reviews speak for themselves.
I feel like if I ask around in a group of people for recommendations, the only answers I get are “I have a relative who…” and never actual info on actual service providers people have hired. Or people are not knowledgeable about whether or not they had good service. With Angie’s List I avoid all of the nepotism and have more than a couple opinions.
No paid ads on the site. If someone is on the site it’s because someone who had work done by them put them on the site.
They do ratings based on current reviews and also overall reviews. So if someone has been doing shitty work lately, that would stand out from old grades that might inflate an overall score.
They’re pretty good about nailing down service areas for providers, so you don’t have to waste your time trying to figure out if a provider will come out to your place or not.
They ask reviewers to say right up front how much they paid for a job (and then describe the job) so it’s way easy to get a feel for how much your own project might cost.
They have a complaint service so if something does go wrong they can mediate the situation.
If you don’t know exactly who you’re looking for (a plumber or an excavator?) they will help figure it out for you.
There’s a ton of stuff on there, not just carpenters and plumbers. They do doctors now.
Service providers will give discounts to list members
I find it to be the perfect way to gather up a 3+ estimates list.
The magazine is good for bathroom reading. Very short. It’s not an extra charge, it comes with the subscription.
Cons:
The quality of info is based on the number of people in your area. If you are in a sparsely-populated area there won’t be as many reviews.
They were bugging me on the phone WAY too much to write reviews. They track your views and if you view companies and don’t write about them, Angie’s List calls you up and tries to get an oral review. I am not pleased about this AT ALL (I browse a lot more than I hire) and I let them know, and it seems to have slowed down but it may be because I haven’t had a reason to visit the site.
They also send you a lot of emails asking you to review. Not cool. But then again, the site revolves around reviews so if it helps OTHERS write reviews then you can’t be TOO pissed…
They have a groupon-like service called Angie’s Big Deal. I’m not very impressed with these deals but then again I’m not usually impressed with groupon deals. I’m sure you can opt out of getting these emails, I just never bothered (just in case!)
It’s kind of expensive for how much the average person ends up using it but I’m at a point in my life where my dad can’t do much of anything around my house and neither can I, so I need service people for everything. So for me it’s worth it. It’s good insurance. And if I let others use it I feel like I get a better deal.
Anyway, I dig it. YMMV. I pay for it every year. I’ve never tried cancelling.
If you want to save some money go through all the motions of signing up but then quit when they start asking for money. Ever since I did that they’ve been sending me an email every week with a coupon for 40% off new membership. I haven’t joined because I’ve been busy with other stuff.
My sister used Angie’s for her kitchen remodel and she was satisfied with the results.
I needed a roofing company and I was new to the area, so I signed up. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I know they hit me with a second monthly charge and I was pissed, and cancelling required a long phone call. I may have called earlier and they wouldn’t cancel me until a certain amount of time had passed, I can’t quite remember. Anyway, requiring a phone call to cancel a service is a huge pet peeve of mine; it’s about 100x easier to let me cancel a recurring service over the internet than it is to take all my information in the first place, so the only reason to require a phone call is to intentionally make it a PITA. Like you, I figured I’d use it 1-3 times a year and didn’t see the point in signing up for a recurring service. I’d pay $20 a pop to look up a company when I need to, but I wasn’t about to shell out however much a year just to have the option available. And they know it, which is why the only way you can access their content is to sign up for the recurring plan and then make it hard to cancel. So fuck Angie’s List, I’ll get my reviews from Yelp or whatever.
In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t that big of a deal to cancel, I’m just salty.
I love it and use it a lot. I like that the reviewers often say how much they paid for the service, and give really detailed reviews. It’s a very worthwhile service.
When I signed up, I used one of my junk mail only email addresses, and gave my fax number for the phone number, so no one ever bugs me for anything. I never give out my main email address or my cell phone number to any site that I think may put me on a mail/call list.
I used Angie’s list three times. The first was for a kitchen demo and remodel about seven years ago, then a whole interior house repainting about four years ago, then re-carpeting and a re-tile of the upstairs. I was very satisfied with the results, read the reviews, and called references considering the amount of money spent.
That said, I cancelled immediately after the first two jobs because unless it’s a major job, I would usually rely on Yelp for small job recommendations, which is free. I wish there was a cheaper ‘one time use’ fee. Instead, I go scrambling for someone in my area who has an account to use theirs now so I don’t have to waste the money in between jobs when it would otherwise site idle.
My only issue with Angie’s List is that the businesses themselves often subcontract, and it’s not always clear that just because the business is good, that the subcontractors will be too. If you’re getting carpet or tile, it’s a good bet that all the people at the store may be the same, but the crew of rotating laborers you get may be very experienced, or brand new depending on when you get them. If you aren’t an expert in the thing you’re having done (which you probably aren’t if you hiring someone else to do it), then you could get shoddy or subpar work and not realize it. The challenge is that it might not be apparent until someone who knows good work from bad tells you, or when stuff goes wrong years later after you’ve written a good review.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, while businesses cannot pay to be on Angie’s list, some business owners have reported Angie’s List offering a higher rating for money.
Did you know that 69% of Angie’s list revenue comes from paid advertising from the contractors? I’ve got a cite, but I’m on my phone, I’ll try to find it tomorrow.
They can provide a valuable service, but I think they’re very disingenuous.
Why the fact that businesses pay for advertising should be a problem to anyone is a mystery to me. Businesses pay for advertising EVERYWHERE, from the now-practically-extinct Yellow Pages to bus stop benches. AL is so much more informative than the Yellow Pages ever were, and there are coupons and discounts, etc. The companies who sign up on AL really want your business and they will compete for it. What’s wrong with that?
The fact is, I read the user reviews to make my choices about whom to hire. And yeah, there are other similar services like Yelp and Service Magic, but AL has the biggest POOL of providers in my city. And the fact that AL doesn’t accept unsigned reviews means that the business owner can’t have his mom and 200 cousins write in.
I do not understand the antagonism toward this service. I’m completely baffled.
ETA: You just log in and search. Anyone can log in using your user name and password. I do let other people use it sometimes. You can’t search all over the country, but you can add a couple of cities, like I can also look where I have a vacation home.
"I’m with this house painting crew & the clients want the room painted red. On the first day, one of our guys stepped right into the red paint. We teased him & he got mad & walked out, leaving red prints all the way to his car.
"Even with one man short & that mess to clean up, we still finished on time & on budget. Then later, we see a TV commercial for Angie’s List DESCRIBING THE WHOLE THING- even commenting on the time & budget factor, and THEN concluding ‘but they are far from true professionals.’
“Jerks!”
Really- that commercial has always bugged me because I’d actually pick that paint service based on them overcoming that problem.
I used Angie’s List to find the contractor which is currently doing a gut reno of my whole kitchen (and significant work on the adjacent laundry room and dining room.) They are doing a phenomenal job.
ETA: That reminds me: I need to post some updated pics in my renovation bragging thread.
