Take it if you already own a website. Do not take it as your website. The page a lead company hands you sits at an address they control, runs under their terms, and the photos and reviews on it are licensed to them for good.
What you are getting is a profile on their site
It is not a website in the way you mean the word. It is a page on their domain, sitting next to a page for every other contractor in your zip code.
HomeAdvisor says as much in its own Terms and Conditions, version 29.0, effective January 29, 2024. Section 11 says HomeAdvisor “allows Service Professionals to post profiles about themselves and their business.” You post a profile. They host it.
The same document tells you what that profile feeds. Section 2, the part covering ProFinder, tells the homeowner that HomeAdvisor “will attempt to match you with up to four Service Professionals in your area, who may be interested in fulfilling your service need.” Four. Your profile is one of the four. Go read that line for yourself before you sign anything.
None of that makes it a bad deal. It makes it a listing, and a listing is worth having. It is just not the thing your truck lettering should point at. What the leads cost is a different question, and this page does not try to answer it.
The web address is theirs, and you cannot move it later
This is the part that costs people real money three years in.
Your profile lives at an address with their name in it, not yours. When you leave, that address stays theirs. Every place you printed it stops working.
Normally you fix that with a redirect, which sends anyone who visits the old address over to the new one. Google’s own page on redirects, last updated April 14, 2026, is blunt about what that takes: “Setting up server-side redirects requires access to the server configuration files.”
You do not have access to their server configuration files. You never did. So there is no redirect for you to set up.
Google’s guide to moving a site, last updated August 20, 2026, says to “Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year” so the old address keeps working while search engines catch up. A year of redirects needs a server you hold for a year. A profile page gives you neither the server nor the address.
Before you worry about the free one, check what you have now. Run the five checks in how to find out who owns your website and see whose name is really on your domain.
What the terms say about your photos and your reviews
Angi’s Terms of Use, version 4.2, effective August 13, 2026, covers anything you upload. You grant Angi “a royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, nonexclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license” over that content.
Read those words one at a time. Perpetual means forever. Irrevocable means you cannot take it back. Transferable means they can hand it to somebody else.
The same document goes further on reviews. You also grant Angi “all rights necessary to prohibit the subsequent aggregation, display, copying, duplication, reproduction, distribution, or exploitation of your Content by any other party.”
In plain English, the reviews you earned stay on their page. Lifting them onto a site of your own later is not something those terms hand you, and reviews on a site of your own carry their own rules anyway.
HomeAdvisor’s wording, in section 10 of the same Terms and Conditions, runs close to it. You grant “a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, assignable, sub-licensable, worldwide license.”
Angi’s terms also say the text, graphics, logos, icons and images on its sites “are the exclusive property of Angi and/or its licensors.”
This is not legal advice, and nobody here is your attorney. Contract terms are read differently from state to state, so have your own lawyer read yours before you rely on any of it. Who owns the words and pictures on a site you paid somebody to build is its own separate fight, covered in who owns the code and the words on your website.
The honest gap in all of this
Neither document says what happens to your profile page on the day you stop paying. Angi’s terms cover the other direction instead. Section 11 says Angi “may terminate your privilege to use or access the Sites and Services immediately and without notice for any reason whatsoever.”
That silence is the finding. What happens to the page is not written down, so it is not owed to you. It is their call, and their call can change in the next version of the terms.
You can watch that happen. Angi’s legal center lists the version before this one, 4.1, as in effect from August 5, 2021 until August 13, 2026. Terms a contractor agreed to five years back were swapped out this month, and none of it needed a signature from him.
So do not plan around that page still being there, and do not plan around it vanishing either. Ask them in writing what happens to the profile and to the reviews when the advertising stops. If nobody will put the answer in writing, you have your answer. The same question about a site a marketing company built for you is a different one, answered in what happens if you stop paying.
When to take it, and when to be careful
Take it when:
- You already own your domain and have a real site on it.
- The profile is simply one more place your name shows up.
- Leaving it standing costs you nothing.
Be careful when:
- It is the only web address you have.
- Your ads, your cards and your truck all point at it.
- You are counting on the reviews there as your proof.
Nobody needs to buy anything today over this. If a lead account is feeding you steady work, this page is not a reason to cancel it. Keep it, and build something of your own next to it.
What to do this week
Four steps, in order:
- Register a domain in your business name. Not the marketing company’s name, and not the lead company’s.
- Change what your printed material points at. Trucks, cards, yard signs, ad copy.
- Keep the original photos. Full size, off your phone, in a folder you hold. The copy sitting on their page is licensed to them, and the original file on your phone is still yours.
- Send one email asking what happens to the profile and to the reviews when you stop advertising. Save the reply.
A site at your own address is the only version of this that survives you switching vendors, which is the whole point of a build where the domain goes in your name. If you want to see what customers are told about your trade right now, the free scan asks the AI assistants what a homeowner in your area asks and writes down which companies get named. It reads what is already public, and it will not tell you what to buy.