What removal leads really cost, and how to stop paying for them

Bark sells credits, and you spend credits to contact a customer. The standard rate in its help centre is £1.80 a credit, and its terms say VAT goes on top. Packs cost less per credit the more you buy, but the pack prices are only shown inside your account.

The bit that matters is how many credits a removals lead costs, and Bark doesn’t publish it. Its help centre says the price moves with the type of job, the size, the area, and how ready the customer is to book, and you see it on each lead after you log in. So there is no honest public figure for a Bark removals lead. Anyone who quotes you one is quoting their own account on a given day.

Up to 5 firms can respond to the same customer, and Bark shows how many already have before you buy. Credits bought from 1 November 2025 expire after 3 months and aren’t refunded. You can ask for credits back on a bad lead within 14 days, at Bark’s discretion, but not because the customer hired someone else or never replied. Those two are most of the leads you lose.

The Starter Pack (Bark says it covers roughly 10 customers) comes with a one-off Get Hired Guarantee: if you use it and aren’t hired, you get the credits you used back as credits, not money. Removals and man and van are still on credits in the UK. Bark’s monthly subscription only covers cleaning trades so far.

Compare My Move sells leads one at a time, pay as you go, or on a bonus account that adds 10% free leads to every top-up. Its partner price sheet lists three prices, all before VAT: £5 for a small move anywhere in the UK, £8 for a 2-bed or bigger outside London, and £11 for the same in London.

One catch on those figures. The price sheet is a PDF on Compare My Move’s own site, last updated 1 October 2025, and its current page for removal firms shows no prices, just an enquiry button. Treat the three prices as a guide and ask for today’s before you sign up.

Each customer is matched with up to 6 removal companies, and the customer is told so: “compare up to 6 local matches for free”. The lead itself is a first name, email, phone number, both addresses, the number of bedrooms and the type of property. No list of what’s moving, so you’re pricing from a phone call.

In its favour: no joining fee, no contract, and you can pause your account or change the areas you cover from its app. No refund or bad-lead policy is published on its current site, so ask how that works before you top up.

Removly is the most open of the five about money. Every price is on its partners page, and it says it isn’t VAT registered, so the price is what you pay. A UK 1-bed lead is £6, a 2-bed £8, and a 3-bed, 4-bed or office £10. International leads are £10, or £15 for an office.

No subscription, no minimum spend, no contract and no commission on the job. You choose which sizes you buy, so you can skip the 1-beds and only take the bigger moves. New firms get 15 free leads: 5 when approved and 10 more once they put a Removly badge on their own website.

Each lead goes to 5 firms at most, often fewer, and the count is shown on the lead itself. That’s more honest than most, but it’s still a shared lead. If 5 firms got it, 4 of them paid and didn’t get the job.

What isn’t published: any refund or bad-lead policy. Removly says its terms for firms are shared when you register, so read them then.

Getamover doesn’t put a price per lead anywhere public. Its FAQ for removal firms says to email its team for current rates. Its terms say the rate per lead moves with demand, supply and the time of year, and can be changed at any time without notice unless you’ve agreed a fixed rate in writing.

You get a monthly bill in arrears for the leads you were sent the month before, in pounds and before VAT. There’s no subscription, no minimum term and a 7-day free trial, and you can set a monthly cap on how many leads you get. The terms say you pay for every lead sent to your email address.

Each lead goes to up to 6 firms, and Getamover’s own advice to firms is that speed is key because competitors might get the same lead. You can claim a lead back within 10 days for listed reasons, like dead contact details, the wrong area, or a move date less than 5 working days away. Getamover decides how much credit you get, and it may send a replacement lead instead.

Two lines worth reading before you sign. Pass a lead on to another firm and the terms fine you £500 for each one. And Getamover is a trading name of Skydreams B.V., a Dutch company, with disputes going to a court in the Netherlands.

AnyVan works differently. It doesn’t sell leads. On its Instant Price jobs the customer pays AnyVan a fixed price, AnyVan sets what you’re paid and shows it before you accept, and you claim the job with a click. Signing up is free. AnyVan keeps the difference between what the customer paid and what you’re paid, and it doesn’t say how big that difference is.

For its reserved slots, AnyVan’s FAQ gives a standard rate of £15 an hour for one person, £25 an hour for two and 30p a mile for fuel, before VAT. It also says reserved-slot jobs pay less than a normal journey, because it drops the customer price to fill your empty miles. You’re usually paid within 10 days of the job.

So there’s no cost per lead to work out. What you give up is the price and the customer. You don’t set the number, the customer pays AnyVan not you, and the older auction terms still on its site ban sharing your contact details with customers. Cancel an accepted job inside 48 hours and there may be a fee.

Honest bit: if the van is coming back empty from Leeds on Thursday, a ready-priced job that fills it is better than nothing. Just don’t count on it to build a business with your name on it.

The price per lead is the number on the website. The number that hits your bank is the price per lead times however many leads it takes to win one job. Nobody publishes that second number, because it depends on you: how fast you answer, how good your price is, and who else got the same customer that hour.

So the box uses an example: win 1 in 4. Change it to your own. If you win 1 in 6 (Compare My Move and Getamover both send a lead to up to 6 firms), the £8 lead is £48 a job. On a small move at £5 a lead, winning 1 in 4 is £20 a job, which is a fifth of a job if it’s the £100 that Bark’s own price guide gives as the average man and van job. What a job leaves you once the van and the diesel are paid is in how much a man with a van makes.

Then the monthly view. Buy 20 Compare My Move leads at £8 and that’s £160 plus VAT before you’ve won anything. Win 5 of them and each job carried £32 of lead cost. Quote 20 enquiries of your own on Kwotly Starter and it’s £39 for the month, so win 5 and that’s under £8 a job. On the Free plan, 10 quotes a month cost nothing.

Honest bit: that isn’t a straight fight. The lead site found the customer, and Kwotly doesn’t find customers for you. The sum shows what each enquiry costs once it’s yours. If you’ve not got enough of your own yet, that’s the next two sections.

They’re not a scam, and they do bring work. A new firm with no reviews and no Google listing has to get jobs from somewhere, and paying for a few enquiries while the free stuff builds up is a fair trade. So is filling a dead Tuesday, or testing a town you’ve not worked before.

Bigger moves make the sums easier. £32 of lead cost on a 3-bed is a small slice. The same £32 on a single sofa is most of the profit. Removly lets you buy only the sizes you want, and Compare My Move prices small moves lower, so pick the jobs where the lead is worth it.

Speed decides most of it. Up to five or six firms ring the same customer, and the first one with a believable price usually gets the job. If you’re stuck up three flights with a wardrobe until five, you’ve paid for a lead you never really got to answer. Our guide to getting work says the same in its lead sites section.

Where it goes wrong is when it becomes the whole week. Stop paying and the phone stops, because none of those customers ever had your number before the lead site sold it to you. Use them to fill gaps, keep a cap on the spend, and put the rest of your effort into enquiries that come to you.

An enquiry that comes to your own Facebook page, Google listing or website wasn’t sold to five other firms. You’re the only one quoting, so you can price it properly instead of racing four vans to the bottom.

The free ones first. Set the Facebook page up like a business, claim your free Google listing and ask every customer for a review the day after. Get the van signwritten, and walk into the letting agents and charity shops near you with a card and a page of prices.

Then a page of your own, so that when someone searches “man and van” and your town, there’s a chance it’s you they find. Build it yourself over a weekend, or we build it for £500 and £25 a month. All of it is in how to get man and van work without paying for leads, with what works this week and what takes months.

Honest bit: it’s slower than topping up a lead site. The first month feels like nothing is happening. But every review and every customer who saves your number is still there next year, and you didn’t pay anyone for it.

Ours, then. You’re on our website, it’d be odd to pretend otherwise. Kwotly doesn’t sell leads and doesn’t charge per enquiry. You get your own quote page, a link you put on your Facebook page, your Google listing and the back doors of the van. An enquiry comes in, arrives priced up on your own rates from the customer’s list or their photos, and you check it and send it. Enquiry in, priced quote out, and you’re the one pressing send.

It works for the enquiries you already get by phone and Facebook too: price the job up in Kwotly and send it to their WhatsApp. And if you do still buy the odd lead, you can price that one up the same way, so you’re first back with a proper number.

Plans are simple. Free is 10 quotes a month, no card, and it doesn’t run out. Starter is £39 a month for 100 quotes. Pro is £79 a month for 300 and adds the quote form on your own website. No contract, cancel any time, and the pricing page has the full list.

What it won’t do is find customers for you. If your phone isn’t ringing at all, start with the section above. Kwotly is for the part after: making sure every enquiry you get turns into a priced quote before somebody else’s does.