Your feedback in action: We’re removing all Instant Bookings.

DustiO

We’ve built this Community (along with you), because we understand the importance of connecting with other business owners — to share ideas, exchange best practices, get advice and celebrate wins, together. It’s also a space where you are able to offer real time feedback on how Thumbtack is working for you and your businesses, which provides us with insight on how we can improve the product. 

We’re happy to share that based on the feedback you’ve shared, we’ll be removing instant bookings from Thumbtack on November 4th. We launched the Instant Book product to help pros get hired more quickly and more efficiently. While the experience worked well for customers, we heard that it wasn’t working as intended for pros like you.

Here are the changes coming November 4th:

• You’ll no longer get instant bookings from customers.
• Your max lead pricing tables will be updated to only display the cost of direct leads.

Our goal is to bring you new and better ways to connect with customers and help you do business. That’s why we’re currently testing a new booking experience inspired by your feedback — one that allows you to discuss job details, scheduling, and pricing with customers before they book, giving you the confidence to move forward.

We’re always looking for the best way to bring you high-intent customers with ready-to-hire projects. Your feedback continues to help us improve our product to best meet your business needs. So, please continue to share your experiences with us.

Thank you again for all of the thoughtful feedback that you’ve shared with us. We’ll have more updates to share in the coming months. Learn more here and if you have any questions, please drop them in the comments.

Be sure to join us for CommuniTEA (our bi-weekly virtual networking events) to meet other Thumbtack pros and share ideas and experiences.

Styles

It only took a year and hundreds of negative comments.

yvelinemarie

I support this decision 100%. I never book potential customers without a prelim. conversation or short site visit to determine if it is a good match for both parties. The Lead function is perfectly suitable, simplifying and restoring the human to human contact that is essential to a better business dynamic.

Fix_Fitness

I think this might be worth a celebration. This is Huge!

luxor

I have been patiently waiting since last year. Thought you guys would get on it in just a couple of months. If lead prices are the same as before IB, it should bring in profits like before. But if lead costs gp up, it might be the same situation for pros.

KW_CleaningCo2024

so they got rid of instant book, but they also got rid of custom weekly budget. Did they really help us?

DustiO

@KW_CleaningCo2024 Custom budgets aren't going away, there is now just a limitation on the number of custom budgets you can set once you exhaust your initial budget for the week. This article will tell you more. Hope this helps clear it up! I'd recommend just playing around with your budget to see what works for you — maybe look back at what you have typically spent and keep it in that range. You can make as many changes to your budget as you'd like until you max out your budget for the week, at that point you can only set one additional custom budget. Exhausting your budget multiple times a week puts you at risk of missing out on customers, since when your budget is exhausted you don't show up in search results. As always, appreciate feedback so let us know how it goes — you can always drop feedback here in the Community, but I also recommend sending to support@thumbtack.com to ensure it gets logged and tracked. Thank you!

You can also attend our bi-weekly CommuniTEA sessions if you'd like to chat with other pros and get their thoughts/insights/ideas, we would love to have you there.

KW_CleaningCo2024

I understand what you mean but it’s s forcing pro’s to take on budgets that we otherwise would not take on. Half of our leads are not legitimate, so pro’s use custom weekly budget as a filter. Now we are forces to take the budget Thumbtack gives us or choose unlimited budget.

I definitely believe Thumbtack will see how negatively this will effect its relationship with pro’s.

luxor

@DustiO thanks for your involvement. It took a good while for Thumbtack to understand that IB didn't work for pros and although it was a long journey and I'm sure a lot of larger businesses on here lost employees and I can only imagine so much more problems the new integrations caused for businesses, I am glad you all came to your senses. I must say I am pretty pleased with the current updates- those such as setting minimums (!) And i have also noticed through the booking process that clients must enter a valid phone number to proceed. Am I correct about this? If so, these things will significantly increase the quality of leads. I look forward to testing the new system and by the looks of previous success rates, it should be a great thing.

luxor

I will like to mention- if they can extend the character length for the saved reply templates it would be AMAZING. I have auto templates on my phone that I hace to copy and paste with each lead because the templates dont allow all the verbage. The process would be so much more seamless if they did that. Thank you

luxor

I also must say- (and this is a whole different subject)... Prices are ran down by pros on here who dont have proper insurances, exploiting people and not legally compliant. Pros like us who are fully compliant, pay insurances, taxes, worker comp, payroll etc are then viewed as "too expensive" and it affects the perspective customers have on the industry. I hope in the future you guys will fully vet pros and verify insurances etc and give those of us who are compliant a special stamp of approval. Customers and industry workers are all running legal risks and liabilities when working while non compliant.

DustiO

@luxor yes you are correct about the phone numbers! And thank you for the feedback!