Who Owns the Trades Phone Line

Everyone Shouts "Never Miss a Call"; Nobody Owns the Trades Yet

The UK field splits into BT, the job-software incumbents, and a review-less startup crowd

The companies that actually compete for a UK plumber's phone line sort into tiers by who they are and how they reach the buyer, and the tiers behave very differently. The research notes tag each by origin because the brief asked where they sell from.

BT's launch is the single biggest fact in the UK market this autumn. The product answers calls, books appointments and captures enquiries 24/7 on any UK network while the customer keeps their number and provider, and BT backed it with a Censuswide survey of 1,500 SME decision-makers that produced the headline "67% miss at least one potentially valuable call on an average day" and "£3.7bn a year lost" (BT Newsroom; Mobile News).

The campaign, by Uncommon Creative Studio, is "a phone ringing in a busy pub while the stretched barman carries on serving pints" and spans television, VOD, radio, podcasts, out-of-home, social and in-pub activations (DecisionMarketing).

The inference from the ad library read is that BT is competing on brand trust and "keep your number", not on trades fit or price: no launch article carried a price, and its one TikTok ad reached 1 million to 10 million UK users with the generic line "AI from BT answers calls while you work so you'll never miss an opportunity for your business" (TikTok Commercial Content Library).

Moneypenny, the Wrexham incumbent founded in 2000, sells "The world's most experienced AI Receptionist" with human fallback and the claim it costs "Up to 65% less" than its own people-first service; its AI page offers demo lines for General Business, Automotive, Property, Hospitality and Legal, and none for trades (Moneypenny).

The human services alldayPA, Face For Business and Pocket Receptionist have not launched AI at all and now advertise against it: alldayPA's live Google ad reads "24/7 Call Handling £90+/mo - UK Based. 24/7. No Bots", and Pocket Receptionist's reads "Our Receptionists Live In The UK, Not Inside A Data Center. Real Voices, Real People." (Google Ads Transparency Center, alldaypa.co.uk; Google Ads Transparency Center, pocketreceptionist.co.uk).

Their £49 to £75 entry price for a fixed call allowance now overlaps the AI startups' all-you-can-answer price, which is the comparison the startups' copy is built on; the inference is that the incumbents treat AI as a down-market tier, and Moneypenny's own "65% less" line confirms it.

The job-software layer is the one that holds the tradesperson's diary, which makes it structurally the strongest competitor. Powered Now's Receptionist "launched in early 2026" with "over 27 paying customers within its first month" and shipped on iOS, Android and web on 7 September 2026, with a user reporting four of six intercepted calls becoming booked jobs (Powered Now blog; Electrical Times).

Its page prices it at £29 a month (Speech) or £39 (Speech + Text), unlimited calls, no setup fee (Powered Now). Gas Engineer Software, with "over 6,000 UK businesses" since 2012, announced its own receptionist as "coming soon" on 26 August 2026 with the pitch that "it'll book the job into the same system that already holds the customer, their job history, and their certificates" (Gas Engineer Software).

The large incumbents are marketing AI but not phone answering: BigChange Lightning (18 May 2026) ships back-office agents under "Cooper, AI operations director", Simpro's Supportiyo partner does the call answering, Commusoft's AI:den+ turns audio into job notes, and Joblogic is hiring to build "AI agents that work across email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and CRM channels", which signals voice is coming but not shipped (BigChange; Simpro marketplace; Joblogic job ad).

Checkatrade has moved into this space from the other side, giving away "TradeMore", a free AI-powered job management app, to all UK tradespeople from 1 September 2026 "giving tradespeople their evenings back" (Insight DIY).

The startup crowd shares one vocabulary and one price band. Whoza says "Every missed call is a job going to your competitor" and prices per job (Starter £59 for 10 jobs); Callout AI says "Never miss another lead to voicemail" at £79 for 300 minutes; TradeVoice says "Answers every call. Screens the rubbish.

Books the work." at £99; Answrd says "Every missed call is a job you've lost" at £49 and texts the caller a link to send job photos mid-call; Down To Earth AI is "built by a tradesman with 25 years in the trade" at £45 plus £299 setup (Whoza; Callout AI; TradeVoice; Answrd; Down To Earth AI).

What they lack is proof: Callout AI and Whoza both show zero Trustpilot reviews in the last twelve months, TradeVoice admits "We haven't got a decade of reviews", and Answrd says it "would rather show you a real tradesperson's numbers than invent praise" (Trustpilot, Whoza; TradeVoice; Answrd). Searches aimed at r/UKTrades, Screwfix Community, PlumbersForums and ElectriciansForums returned only vendor pages, so there is no established tradesperson opinion of any of these products yet.

The inference drawn in the notes, which this report shares, is that the field is differentiated by packaging (per-job pricing, photo capture, multi-channel) rather than by the voice stack, since the platform floor is $0.05 to $0.31 a minute on Vapi, Retell, Bland or Synthflow (Morphllm).

"Get Booked" and "Get Ranked" compete with Checkatrade's budget line, not with other bundles

No UK vendor sells RomanLogic's two bundles under those names or in that shape, but the pieces are bundled by three kinds of seller and the money they compete for is already spoken for. The "get found" budget in UK trades flows overwhelmingly to lead marketplaces.

Checkatrade's typical all-in cost is £100 to £300 a month with an estimated £80 to £200 per won job on a 12-month auto-renewing contract, per-lead fees of £5 to £15 for small jobs and £20 to £40 for large, and most members reporting £800 to £2,400 a year (Whito).

MyBuilder charges a £2 to £35 shortlist fee per job, Rated People roughly £15 plus VAT a lead shared with up to three trades, Bark £1.80 credits that expire, TrustATrader £600 to £1,000 a year unshared, and Which? Trusted Traders from about £62 a month plus assessment (Whito break-even). Checkatrade's 53,000 members and £131.5m 2025 revenue imply, by derivation, about £2,500 a member a year, an upper bound on what a UK trade already pays for leads (Wikipedia, Checkatrade).

The public argument against the marketplaces already exists in the market: Trade2Base writes "Checkatrade feels expensive. The leads seem thinner than they used to be", and Whito counted Checkatrade cited in 50 of 60 Google AI Mode answers for electricians, plumbers and roofers across 20 towns (Trade2Base; Whito).

Yell is the only national bundler of website plus SEO plus profile plus reviews, and it now ships a "30-page AI-ready website" inside Amplify and Accelerate at up to £699 a month, with its AI Receptionist "included as standard" rather than sold alone (TrustRadius; Yell Business). Its live Meta ads sell two things, neither of them the receptionist: a guarantee ("Want more local customers?

We get businesses like yours real leads from people nearby - or your money back.", Library ID 1767819931094115) and AI visibility ("Someone near you could be asking AI for a business like yours right now 👀 Make sure AI has the right signals to understand what you do. Get your FREE AI Visibility Report", Library ID 2108888653349818, with the on-image line "They asked AI. Who got the call?") (Meta Ad Library).

Below Yell the "Get Booked" shape is mostly a GoHighLevel resale: Softomate Solutions in Stanmore sells a GHL receptionist bundle at £2,000 setup plus £99 a month plus usage, and Fiverr gigs sell "GHL missed call text back, GHL AI receptionist" setups (Softomate; Fiverr). The productised flat-price position is held by TradGo (£59 a month, "One missed job pays for the whole year") and TextBack Pro (£47) (TradGo; Capterra UK).

One brand fact matters here: an Irish/UK startup already trades as "GetBooked" selling missed-call recovery plus WhatsApp and CRM, so the name needs a trademark check before any ad leans on it (PeerPush).

For "Get Ranked", no UK vendor was found selling an SEO site plus Google Business Profile plus blog subscription to trades at a published price below Yell; the gap is filled by £30-a-month template sites and freelancers, and in the US the agencies have already renamed the product "SEO + AEO" with "25+ ChatGPT prompts, tracked and reported on monthly" (Hook Agency).

The inference is that RomanLogic's "Get Ranked" language is a year behind the US agencies but a year ahead of any UK rival at a trades price point.

In the US the money chases consolidators, the FSMs bundle the receptionist, and Sameday is the analogue

The US market has formed three tiers by customer size, and none of the venture money is visibly chasing the one-van operator. At the top, Avoca raised $125m at a $1bn valuation (April 2026) and sells "The AI Front Office for Service Businesses" to PE-backed platforms (Apex Service Partners, TurnPoint, Authority Brands); its homepage proof is H.L.

Bowman running "a $100M business with 9 CSRs because Avoca handles 70% of our entire call volume" (Avoca blog; avoca.ai). Yelp bought Hatch for about $270m (closed 2 February 2026); Hatch is "The AI communications platform for the trades" with "2,000+ service brands" and named AI agents (BusinessWire; usehatchapp.com). Netic took $23m from Founders Fund at about $450m and tells the story of handling 600 calls in 90 minutes during a St. Louis tornado (Insurance Journal).

Podium passed $150m in AI-agent ARR on 26 October 2026 and in August launched an "AI Operating System" meant to replace field-service software outright, with CEO Eric Rea's line "I have never met a contractor who loves their FSM" (Pulse2; PR Newswire). All four hide price behind a demo.

The field-service platforms all now ship a native receptionist, which is the one thing a standalone vendor cannot copy: Workiz launched "Jessica" on 4 December 2024, Jobber's Receptionist went to general availability in August 2025 and is listed as a $29 a month add-on on the pricing page, Housecall Pro sells CSR AI "sold separately" with the claim "Pros using CSR AI earn 2x more revenue on average", and ServiceTitan's Contact Center Pro is in early access with a Bonney Plumbing case of 60% fewer missed calls (ACHR News; getjobber.com/pricing; housecallpro.com; servicetitan.com).

Jobber's $29 is the lowest public anchor in the segment; the inference in the notes is that everyone else hides price because the usage economics do not compare well. The horizontal low-cost tier (Rosie $49 for 250 minutes, Goodcall $79, Dialzara $29) mentions trades among many verticals; Goodcall's price-anchoring line is "13 cents a minute" against answering services at "$1.50 to $1.90 a minute" (heyrosie.com/pricing; goodcall.com/pricing).

Sameday (Lehi, Utah) is the closest US analogue to RomanLogic's position: trades-only, flat-priced (Launch $449 for 500 minutes, Scale $789), founded in 2022 by two ex-operators with under $1m raised, and marketed through podcasts and SEO comparison content with the hooks "Answer every call. Book more jobs. Run a tighter office." and "most contractors recover the cost from a single recaptured job" (sameday.ai/pricing; Y Combinator).

The US growth-bundle agencies price far above anything a UK sole trader would pay: Hook Agency publishes Local SEO + AEO from $3,750 a month and Meta ads from $3,000 with "Professional video shoots", and says "Most Hook clients invest $5,000 to $8,000 a month"; Contractor Dynamics sells "You own the system, so you never have to start over again" as an anti-agency hook (Hook Agency; Contractor Dynamics).

US vendors market through contractor podcasts (Avoca sponsors "Owned and Operated"), trade shows (Avoca title-sponsored RoofCON 26), FSM marketplaces and webinars rather than TikTok; the paid libraries could not be read for the US from the research environment, so no US ad creative is quoted (avoca.ai/events/roofcon). One US pattern worth importing is the live demo line as creative: Workiz's "Call Jessica now" and Avoca's "Talk to our AI" (fsm.workiz.com).

Meta is video and trades-cast, Google is price and "no bots", TikTok is empty except BT

The ad libraries were read logged out with a headless browser on 9 November 2026, which is the only reliable way to read them: plain fetches return 403 or an empty shell. The read gives the channel map below for UK-active ads.

Source for every row: Meta Ad Library, GB, Google Ads Transparency Center, GB, TikTok Commercial Content Library, GB.

The pattern is clean. Meta is where the trades-software brands spend and where video dominates; the human answering services and the enterprise job software are search-only; and only BT is on all three channels. TikTok in this category is effectively empty apart from BT's one film and content-farm "receptionist" rows, so there is no incumbent to out-create there.

On Meta, the longest-running still-active creatives are evergreen job-software messages (ServiceM8's trial video from 18 May 2020, Library ID 2509293095997625; Checkatrade's trade app ads from 2 March 2026; Tradify's quoting and Scan to Pay images from 11 May 2026; Powered Now's admin set from 22 June 2026), while every AI-receptionist creative on UK Meta is under six weeks old, launched in a burst between 6 October and 8 November 2026 (Meta Ad Library).

On Google the long runners are Checkatrade's consumer search (10 July 2022), Yell's "Add your business to Yell.com" (18 August 2022), Jobber's "#1 App for Contractors" set (18 April 2023) and Moneypenny's "Capture Every Opportunity" (5 July 2023) (Google Ads Transparency Center, moneypenny.com). A caution from the notes: Meta shows a start date only, with no delivery volume, so a 2020 start proves survival, not spend.

The hooks in rotation reduce to six, and the verbatim copy shows how each brand plays them. The dominant one is "you are busy, so the next customer calls someone else". BT's 15 October set reads "Your next customer could be calling while you're busy with this one.

AI Receptionist helps keep your business responsive." with headline "50% Off For 6 Months" (Library ID 1646552963671972), and its on-image lines are "NEVER MISS A CUSTOMER CALL, EVEN WHEN YOU'RE BUSY" and "ANSWER EVERY CALL, EVEN WHEN YOU CAN'T" (Meta Ad Library). Powered Now's version is trade-cast: "You're not ignoring customers. You're busy doing the job they're paying you for.

But while your phone is in your pocket, the next customer could be calling somebody else." with headline "Stop Sending Customers To Voicemail" (Library ID 1650106116647805), and its best-written card is "Not every call is a £2,500 boiler replacement. The problem is, until someone answers, you don't know which one is." with headline "Missed Calls Cost You Money" and the footer "Avg. 66% Enquiry To Booked Job Rate" (Library ID 2615962322167898) (Meta Ad Library).

Its 27 October video opens "Every engineer knows the feeling - you surface from a job and there's a missed call. No voicemail. No name. That was a booked job. Gone." (Library ID 2205269043360065), and its Google search copy asks "Up A Ladder Or Mid Job? Your AI Receptionist Answers, Captures Details, Texts You." (Meta Ad Library; Google Ads Transparency Center, powerednow.com).

The second hook is "voicemail loses the job": Powered Now's split card "VOICEMAIL TAKES MESSAGES. POWERED NOW BOOKS JOBS." (Library ID 1118579280552671) and Jodie's "📞 Missed calls = lost jobs. Jodie answers when you can't. 7-day free trial. No card." (Library ID 4649211985363072) (Meta Ad Library).

The third is "paperwork steals your evenings", which is the evergreen one: Powered Now's "You didn't start working in the trade to do paperwork" with headline "Get Your Evenings Back" (Library ID 1488121079168783), Tradify's "In the trades, the first one to quote usually gets the job. Don't let a 'I'll do it tonight' attitude cost you your next contract." (Library ID 2114188976165697), Checkatrade's "Less faff.

More graft." (Library ID 1968675967398464) and Gas Engineer Software's "Invoice on site, get paid 64% faster" (Meta Ad Library). The fourth is cost-anchoring against a human: Cyberstaff's "💷 Receptionist: £2,000+/mo. Cyberstaff: £30/mo." (Library ID 27331226803242243) and Jodie's "A receptionist £25,000/ year. Mine costs £49/month" (Library ID 2136145033984889) (Meta Ad Library).

The fifth is the trust objection, played both ways: the human services' "No Bots" on Google, Reception HQ's "Your next client deserves a human answer" (Library ID 1025086830627823), against Jodie's street-interview video "Would your customers be happy talking to AI?" (Library ID 2292008518228353) and Cyberstaff's "🤖 Do AI Receptionists Sound Human? Don't take our word for it. Call 020 3148 8805 and talk to one now." (Library ID 1629394905531680) (Meta Ad Library).

The sixth is seasonal urgency, used only by Elyos: "Missing a call after hours means missing a job. Prepare for the busiest season of work with Elyos." with headline "Never miss a call again with Elyos" (Library ID 4426412957689364) and a fake-inbox creative whose email says "our overpriced answering service is constantly missing calls... It answers every call and books the job straight into Simpro, for less than we're paying now." (Meta Ad Library).

Formats split by brand type. BT bought cinematic brand film (dark pub, pint being pulled, florist, mechanic under a car, an animated card "HANDS FULL [toggle] BOOKING HANDLED") and zero talking heads (Meta Ad Library).

The trades-native brands bought real tradespeople: Tradify runs a creator series ("Hear why John from @thecrownpainter and 50,000+ trade businesses trust Tradify") with discount codes MADDEN30, JIMBO30, ERRIOC30 and CROWNPAINTER30, and 32 of its ads run as partnership posts from customer pages such as Madden Builders and The Bald Builders (Meta Ad Library). Powered Now runs a customer-story series ("Running a gas, heating or plumbing business?

Hear Peaky Plumber discuss cost saving with Powered Now") plus a shouting-man card "MISSED CALLS = MISSED JOBS", and on 8 November added "Who's answering your calls? Pick the voice that sounds like your business." (Library ID 1880715676631490) (Meta Ad Library). Checkatrade's trade recruitment uses a vertical hi-vis talking head subtitled "My evening used to be full of admin, but not anymore" (Library ID 786564954014630) (Meta Ad Library).

Cyberstaff is UGC-style, including a hi-vis man beside a yellow supercar captioned "THIS AI TOOL GOT ME THIS LAMBO!". The answering and marketing brands (Yell, Moneypenny, FFB, Reception HQ) are entirely static.

Two more findings bound the field. Outside paid media, the brands that actually appear in UK trades' feeds are merchants running micro-influencer programmes: Toolstation paid 12 genuine tradesmen £4.4k for a month and reported 1.2M organic impressions, 13:1 ROAS and 1.3K purchases, and Tradify offers creators "£50 in Tradify credit for filming 30-45 seconds on site" (Disrupt Marketing; Tradify blog).

The disclosed sponsor rosters of UK plumbing creators (Pete Gilbert @beaplumber, Luke Thomson @luke_the_plumber, Dan Goulding @centralheatking and others) are tools, workwear, heating brands and merchants; no call-answering or AI brand appears on any of them (Refresh PR).

Offline, the Fix Radio gazebo tour (Checkatrade and Fix Radio touring merchant car parks with a merch pack "worth over £100" for trades who quote Fix Radio) is the closest thing to merchant-counter marketing for a non-product brand, and Fix Radio itself reaches 833,545 weekly listeners (Professional Electrician; RCI Magazine).

Price appears in nearly every Google ad in the category (£29, £49, £90+) and in several Meta ads, so RomanLogic's no-prices rule is a deliberate departure from the category norm; the inference drawn in the notes is that a measured, de-identified client number would stand out precisely because the live stat vocabulary is thin and vendor-made.

Tradespeople are 846,000 solo firms doing admin at 9pm and barely using AI

The buyer is a sole trader with nobody to answer the phone, and that is the statistical norm rather than the exception. Construction is the UK's largest sector by business count, 846,000 SMEs at the start of 2026, 15% of all SMEs, inside a private sector where 74% of businesses have no employees (DBT, Business population estimates 2026).

The named registers give the addressable sub-markets: Gas Safe lists "More than 150,000 engineers" across businesses that grew "from 35,000 to 80,000" over the register's life, and NICEIC and NAPIT together cover roughly 50,000 electrical businesses with overlap, though those two counts come from secondary blogs and are unverified against the schemes' own pages (Logic4training; Trade2Base).

How they get work has not moved far from word of mouth. ElectricalDirect's 2022 survey found 87% of UK electricians say they don't know how to market effectively, 70% rely mainly or exclusively on word of mouth, 69% have no website and 55% are on no social media; the companion plumber survey put word-of-mouth reliance at 58% (Construction View Online; HVP Magazine).

Consumer-side, Checkatrade's Focaldata survey of 3,000 adults (September 2024) found 72% hired a trade in the last year "relying primarily on word-of-mouth (69%)", only 52% trust the trades they hired and just 37% received an itemised written quote (Fix Radio). The honest pairing for an ad, inferred from these two datasets, is that most homeowners ask a friend and then check the recommendation on Google, so the trade's profile and reviews are what a referral gets checked against.

The pain that is best documented is not missed calls but admin after hours.

Three independent 2026 UK surveys converge: the NOW Report (Powered Now and Installer, 140 tradespeople) puts admin at 5 hours 20 minutes a week "much of it done in the evenings or at weekends", with 93% experiencing stress from running the business and 52% having taken no week off in a year; HeyBRB's Admin Drain Report (167 owners) finds 8 hours a week lost, 77% of trades businesses doing admin after hours and nearly half at weekends, 54% spending under £50 a month on software, 46% wanting a free trial before committing and 44% wanting worked examples from their own industry; Simply Business (408 tradespeople) finds 92% asked to do unpaid "whilst you're here" extras averaging 1.8 hours a week (Electrical Times, NOW Report; Electrical Times, Admin Drain; Simply Business).

Only 6% of builders pay anyone to do day-to-day admin (Fix Radio guest article). All three samples are small and none is nationally representative, but the direction is the same in each.

On AI itself the buyer is curious and barely using it. Logic4training's August 2025 survey of plumbers, gas engineers and electricians found only 4.8% actively use AI tools in their work, with diagnostics and admin the wanted uses and "reduced customer trust", cost and over-reliance the named fears (Logic4training).

Gas Engineer Software's August 2026 survey of about 500 users gives a higher 57% using AI at least occasionally (boiler fault codes 58%, quotes and invoices 33%), but when asked what they would hand to AI only 12% chose "booking, scheduling & calls" against 28% for invoicing and payments, and one respondent put the objection plainly: "I don't want it to take jobs off me.

I want it to inform me so I can do the jobs better." (Gas Engineer Software). Checkatrade's Gen Z research (August 2025, no sample size given) adds a different angle: 45% of Gen Z find calls to tradespeople "especially difficult" and 29% have put off jobs because they do not want to phone a trade, which argues for an answering layer that also takes text, WhatsApp and web enquiries (InsightDIY).

The inference from the Logic4training and HeyBRB data together is that an AI receptionist pitch to UK trades has to show the customer's experience of the call (the trust objection), offer a trial, and use a same-trade demo (a plumber hearing a plumber's call) rather than lead with the owner's time saving alone.

For reach, Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 puts YouTube at 94% of UK online adults, Facebook and Messenger at 93% and TikTok at 56%, On The Tools is the largest UK trades community with "more than 1.5 million" Facebook followers, and the 55% of electricians on no social media sits against that 93% Facebook reach: they use it personally, they do not run a page (ISPreview on Ofcom; Off The Job podcast).

Only two UK missed-call statistics survive a provenance check

The missed-call numbers that circulate in UK trades marketing were traced to source, and most of them are US-origin, vendor arithmetic or untraceable. The table records the verdict and the evidence; the rule the notes apply, and this report adopts, is that a figure is quotable as a UK fact only when a named UK survey with a date and a sample stands behind it.

Two independent checks support the table. The open Ringzel dataset lists only ten verified UK stats (the BT/Censuswide set and the Fix Radio set), notes that BT "commissioned its own research while selling competing AI receptionist services", and states it found "no independent, verifiable sources" for per-trade missed-call rates because "Ofcom, ONS and the FSB don't publish them" (Ringzel).

And Powered Now, a UK trade-software company with its own survey programme, chose to reuse Moneypenny's 2016 numbers for its 2026 launch; the inference is that no newer UK trade-specific missed-call dataset exists publicly, or they would have used it.

The safest UK-quotable line is therefore "7 in 10 callers who reach voicemail don't leave a message, and a third of small businesses let calls ring out (Moneypenny, 2016)", said with its age, and the freshest is BT's 67%, said with its sponsor.

Notably, nobody in the live UK ads quotes BT's figures, not even BT: the live stat vocabulary is product metrics (Powered Now's 66% enquiry-to-booked-job, Gas Engineer Software's "get paid 64% faster", Tradify's "10+ hours weekly") and social-proof counts (Meta Ad Library).

What the research could not close

The gaps fall into four groups.

On ads, the libraries were readable only by headless browser and only logged out: Meta shows no spend, reach or targeting for non-political UK ads, so "running" is binary and "trades-specific" is read from copy and casting, not audience settings; Meta "See more" truncation cut about a dozen long primary texts; video soundtracks were not transcribed, so descriptions come from poster frames; TikTok Creative Center refused any industry filter behind its login wall; and no US ad creative at all could be read, so US advertising is reconstructed from landing pages, press and podcast sponsor credits.

No vendor in either market publishes a cost per lead, CAC or conversion figure for its own acquisition advertising, and the only end-to-end paid-media economics in the niche is Toolstation's creator campaign.

On competitors, BT's price, minute allowance and trial are the single most important missing numbers; six launch articles carried none, and the BT product page returned 429 and 403.

Powered Now's Receptionist price appears on its page but not in press; Yell's plan sheet was read only through third parties (yell.com returned 403); Jobber's UK availability for its Receptionist could not be confirmed (community thread 403, product page lists only US and Canada demo numbers); Simpro's THUNDER announcement and Commusoft's 2026 roadmap were unread; and founders, funding and customer counts for every UK trades AI startup are unpublished, with Companies House not fetched.

Whoza, Callout AI, TradeVoice, Answrd, Softomate and TradGo returned nothing in any ad library, which can mean no ads or a different trading name. GetBooked's trading status and UK presence could not be established.

On the market, no 2024 to 2026 UK survey splits tradespeople's lead sources across Checkatrade, Google, Facebook and word of mouth; no UK survey gives the share of trades with a Google Business Profile; no UK study measures the share of calls to tradespeople that go unanswered; no UK survey asks tradespeople how they feel about an AI answering their phone or about "sounding robotic"; and nothing was found on how UK tradespeople respond to B2B cold calls, texts, postcards or leaflets.

The NICEIC and NAPIT counts are unverified against the schemes' own pages, the Fix Radio original is unlocated, and Checkatrade's own blog, IronmongeryDirect's research page and the HSE tender notice all returned 403, so their figures come from trade-press republications.

On creators, the only sourced follower table for UK trade creators is from June 2021; no current verified league table of UK plumber, electrician or roofer creators exists, and the Screwfix Community forum, PlumbersForums and ElectriciansForums were never read directly, so the finding that tradespeople have no public opinion of these products is an absence in search results, not a confirmed silence.

Conclusion

The competitive picture that emerges is of a category that has agreed on its sentence before it has found its proof. Eleven UK vendors say some version of "never miss a job", the five hooks in rotation are interchangeable between brands, and the statistics underneath them are either a decade old, borrowed from a US vendor, or arithmetic dressed as a survey.

BT has bought the generic version of the story with film-grade production and a national offer, and Powered Now holds the trade-cast version on Meta with seven weeks of history; everyone else is either search-only, review-less, or absent from paid media altogether.

What nobody holds is the middle that Rachel's content is already built for: a founder-led, trade-specific piece with a UK voice, the agent actually answering a call on screen, a de-identified client number instead of a vendor model, and the format (a skit, a talking head, a creator with a tracking code) that the merchants have proved works on this audience and the software vendors have not tried.

The implication for advertising is to steal the grammar and refuse the numbers.

The grammar that works here is Powered Now's "Not every call is a £2,500 boiler replacement" (a concrete job, a stake, no statistic), Jodie's "Would your customers be happy talking to AI?" (the trust objection asked out loud, which Logic4training's data says is the real one), Cyberstaff's "Call this number and talk to one now" (the demo as the ad), and Tradify's named-creator discount codes (a real tradesperson's face with a measurable return).

The numbers to refuse are every missed-call percentage except Moneypenny's 2016 and BT's 2026, each quoted with its date and its sponsor. And the lane to take first is the one with no incumbent: TikTok, where in this category the only UK ad in the last thirty days is BT's pub.

Competitors Buy Bursts, Not Campaigns, and Hide the Bill

Meta discloses spend only for political ads, so every figure below is derived

Meta's own API reference is unambiguous: the spend and impressions fields on an archived ad are "Available only for POLITICAL_AND_ISSUE_ADS", and for a commercial ad delivered in the EU the library exposes an estimated EU total reach and a UK and EU breakdown of reach by country, age and gender, but no money (Meta ArchivedAd reference).

Several agency blogs claim an "EU spend band" exists for commercial ads; it does not, and where a blog says the figure is "derived from CPM and frequency data" it is describing a model, not a disclosure (Brandsearch; Admapix).

The 9 to 10 November read of the libraries confirmed the practical consequence: of 1,164 Powered Now ads loaded, 0 carry an EU panel; of 1,720 Checkatrade ads, 0; of 632 BT Business ads, 16, and only 3 of those could be opened. A UK-only ad has no reach number anywhere (video_ads_and_library_data note, this repo).

Two methods are therefore used, and each estimate names which one. Method A (reach-based) applies where a reach figure exists: impressions = reach x assumed frequency (1.5 to 3.0 over the life of a prospecting ad), spend = impressions / 1,000 x CPM.

The CPM anchor is Superads' UK median series for July 2025 to July 2026, a monthly median of roughly £13 to £26 across thousands of mostly e-commerce accounts, with UK CPC at about £1.18 and UK CTR at 1.59% (Superads UK CPM; Superads UK CPC).

Meta itself reported average price per ad up 14% worldwide and 10% in Europe in the quarter to 30 September 2026, so any 2024 benchmark needs inflating by a quarter to a third (Meta 8-K, Q3 2026). Method B (structural) applies where there is no reach: count the creative clusters that share a start date (the practical proxy for an ad set, since one Dynamic Creative ad set spawns many library entries), assume a daily budget per cluster, multiply by days active, and report both ends.

The small-account anchor is a UK trades agency's "£10 to £20 per day" starting budget; a multi-cluster account is assumed at £50 to £200 per cluster per day, and a national brand with a media agency at more (Trade2Base). Where the two methods overlap, the overlap is the figure quoted; where they do not, both are shown.

There is one piece of unexpected calibration. A minority of commercial ads in the search JSON do carry an impressions band and, for a very few, a spend band, and Meta does not say why.

Two BT ads from April 2022 show spend of £1,500 to £2,000 against 700,000 to 800,000 impressions, and £3,000 to £3,500 against 500,000 to 600,000, which is an observed CPM of £2 to £7 for a reach-style brand buy; six Jobber carousels from September to December 2019 show CA$700 to CA$7,000 each against 30,000 to 300,000 impressions, an observed CPM of about CA$20 to CA$40 for conversion-objective ads (Meta Ad Library, BT Business; Meta Ad Library, Jobber US).

These are old and few, but they bracket the honest truth about CPM: a brand video buy by a telco pays a fraction of what a lead-form campaign by a software vendor pays, and the median benchmark sits between them. For BT the lower band is used; for the software vendors the UK median, lifted to £15 to £30 for a niche B2B audience, is the planning figure, and the lift is this report's construction rather than a published number.

Run length is the other signal the libraries give away. Across 24,650 ads on six platforms, the median observable Meta run was 4.0 days, 54% of ads were killed within a week and only 9.4% survived 90 days, so a creative still live after 60 days is in roughly the top fifth by longevity and after 90 the top tenth (AdSpyder). The agency rule that "an ad still running after 60 or 90 days is profitable" has no controlled study behind it and the same agencies admit half the ads meeting the bar flopped, so longevity below is read as advertiser conviction, not as proof of return (Brandsearch).

Powered Now has spent a decade flat and a year flooding Meta

Powered Now Ltd (company 07647786, Teignmouth) was incorporated in May 2011, launched in April 2013 and has grown its team almost not at all: 12 employees in the 2016 Startups 100 listing, an average of 13 in FY2023, 16 in FY2024 and 15 in FY2025, every set of accounts filed without a profit and loss account (Startups.co.uk; FY2024 accounts). What has grown is the equity put in.

Two Crowdcube rounds raised £585,580 (closed August 2014, "overfunded by 167%") and £574,770 (September 2015, 353 investors, 16.5% equity, implying a post-money of about £3.5 million), both with the stated use of funds "marketing and app development" and no split (Business Matters; UKTN).

Peter Hargreaves then funded the company directly: an SH01 of 28 November 2023 allots 10,071,741 A shares at £0.201117, about £2.03 million, and an allotment of 22 August 2025 adds 15,738,482 shares at the identical price, about £3.17 million, a flat round that values the company at roughly £12 million to £14 million fully diluted (SH01, Nov 2023; SH01, Oct 2025).

The balance sheets show where it goes: net assets rose by about £1.01 million in FY2024 while £2.03 million came in, and fell by £1.14 million in FY2025 with no new equity inside the year, so the company is losing roughly £1.0 million to £1.1 million a year, about £85,000 to £90,000 a month, with revenue not derivable from any filing (FY2025 accounts).

The customer numbers stopped in 2015. The second Crowdcube pitch said "over 30,000 users worldwide have downloaded and registered", with "over 10%" of paying customers in the US and pricing of £4.16 a month for a sole trader; since then the company says only "thousands", and the live ads say "Join thousands of trades" (Just Entrepreneurs; powerednow.com/llm-info).

The proxies point to a paying base in the low thousands: Google Play shows 89,000+ installs with about 13,000 monthly actives (a third-party estimate), the App Store 4.1 stars from 244 ratings, Trustpilot 571 reviews at 4.7, and SimilarWeb about 34,500 visits a month, 94% from the UK (AppGoblin; Trustpilot; SimilarWeb). Its owned channels are libraries rather than audiences: 230 YouTube videos for 445 subscribers since 2014, 231 TikToks for 772 followers since October 2022 (YouTube; TikTok).

The Meta account's shape is the useful fact.

Of the 1,168 ads, 790 are Dynamic Creative, 220 plain video, 110 image and 43 carousel; 614 land on a Facebook lead form, 316 on the app stores, 80 on the poweredpipeline.com demo-booking site; the CTA split (Learn more 280, Install now 227, Get in touch 222, Sign up 159) says this is a direct-response account testing app installs against lead forms against demo bookings, not a brand account (Meta Ad Library). 206 ads never got past "<100" impressions and had a median run of 0 days, which is what a Dynamic Creative ad set looks like from the outside: many variants minted, a few served.

The longest run of any ad is 195 days; the two live evergreens are app-install testimonials from 22 and 23 June 2026 at 139 to 140 days. Everything about the Receptionist is younger than five months and most of it younger than seven weeks.

The spend estimate, Method B, is as follows. Forty-two live ads with version counts mostly between 2 and 12 collapse to roughly 6 to 12 concurrent creative clusters. At £50 to £200 a cluster a day that is £300 to £2,400 a day, or £9,000 to £72,000 a month from the structure alone, which over the 417 days of library history would be £125,000 to £1 million.

The top of that range is implausible against a company losing about £1.1 million a year in total and describing word of mouth as "our most powerful growth driver", so the planning figure is £10,000 to £25,000 a month, or roughly £140,000 to £340,000 over the fourteen months, low confidence (Installer).

The Receptionist alone, 202 ads from 26 June, was one or two clusters until September and three to five from the 23 September burst: £4,500 to £36,000 for June to August plus £7,000 to £48,000 for late September to 9 November, so £12,000 to £84,000 in total with a central case of £20,000 to £40,000, low confidence.

Google is a side dish: 57 creatives since July 2025, 42 of them text, 11 video none of which is live, and a text ad running 356 days (Google Ads Transparency Center). TikTok is zero.

Fourteen months of weekly Meta bursts at that level have left the public customer count at "thousands", which is the single most important number for Rachel: this is what a continuous £10,000 to £25,000 a month of trade-cast direct response on Meta buys a 15-person UK job-software company, and it has not been enough to make the company state a figure.

BT buys the category's only national campaign and tells nobody the price

"AI from BT" launched on 1 October 2026 with a Censuswide survey (1,500 SME decision-makers, 2,000 adults, fieldwork 23 to 28 September) whose extrapolated headline is £3.7 billion a year lost to missed calls, and a 30-second pub spot by Uncommon Creative Studio (BT Newsroom).

The trade press lists the channels as TV, BVOD, online video, paid social (Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube), out-of-home, print, radio, digital audio including Spotify, named podcast sponsorships (Off Air with Jane and Fi, High Performance, Intelligence Squared), paid search and in-pub activations, and calls it "BT Business's largest push since its May rebrand" (DecisionMarketing).

No spend, end date, media agency or result has been published five weeks in; the last named media agency for BT Business was EssenceMediacomX (2024 roster), and the Google Ads Transparency Center shows 780 of bt.com's 1,285 GB creatives bought by Essence Digital Ltd, which is consistent with that agency still buying (Creative Salon; Google Ads Transparency Center).

BT Group's context is a £19.7 billion revenue year to March 2026, down 3%, so a business-division launch of this size is a rounding error at group level and a very large number in this category (Investegate).

BT's Meta rhythm is quarterly: the longest-running video set ran exactly 91 days (29 June to 28 September 2026) and burst days of 15 to 40 ads land roughly fortnightly, which is a media agency rotating a flight rather than a performance team testing creative (Meta Ad Library, BT Business). The spend estimate for the Meta component uses both methods.

Method A: the one BT ad whose GB reach could be read hit about 1.0 million people in ten days; if each of the AI campaign's five headline clusters delivers at that order over the 34 days to 9 November, that is about 17 million reached, 25 million to 51 million impressions at a frequency of 1.5 to 3, and at BT's observed brand-buy CPM of £2 to £7 inflated to £3 to £10, £77,000 to £510,000.

Method B: five clusters at a national brand's £500 to £2,000 a day for 34 days is £85,000 to £340,000. The overlap gives about £100,000 to £350,000 on Meta for the first five weeks, very low confidence, since the per-cluster reach is an assumption carried over from a single influencer ad.

TikTok, Method A: a 1 million to 10 million band at frequency 2 to 4 is 2 million to 40 million impressions, and at an illustrative UK TikTok CPM of £5 to £10 (no sourced UK TikTok CPM was found) that is £10,000 to £400,000; the 20x width of TikTok's band means this can only ever be an order of magnitude (TikTok Commercial Content Library).

The television, radio, podcast and out-of-home budget is unpublished and no Nielsen or AA/WARC figure for it surfaced; the honest statement is that it is in the millions and that paid social is a small slice of it. No result of any kind (brand lift, sign-ups, revenue) has been reported, and BT's earlier SME platforms ("BT Means Business", "We've Got Your Back") never had results published either.

Checkatrade spends against £106 million of revenue and recruits trades in seasons

Checkatrade (registered as Vetted Ltd, 04285394) is the only competitor whose revenue is on the public record, because HomeServe consolidated it until 3 July 2025: £105.9 million revenue for calendar 2024 on £104.9 million of operating costs (operating profit £1.0 million), then £65.8 million and £6.8 million of operating profit in the six months to disposal, when it moved to another Brookfield subsidiary at a £111.9 million dividend-in-specie value (HomeServe Ltd 2025 accounts, note 11).

A 10% stake sold to Richard Harpin in January 2024 for £20.1 million implies about £201 million for the whole (HomeServe Ltd 2025 accounts, note 30).

Growth has been in price more than members: 10,000 members in 2013, 19,000 in 2015, 47,000 paying trades in 2022 at an average revenue per trade of £1,229 (up 31% that year), and over 53,000 in 2026, so membership rose 13% between 2022 and 2026 while revenue roughly doubled from an implied £58 million to £106 million (Wikipedia; HomeServe Annual Report 2022). Wikipedia's £131.5 million for 2025 does not reconcile with the HomeServe half-year and is treated as unverified.

The leap in operating profit before the disposal suggests costs, possibly marketing, were trimmed in the first half of 2025; the accounts do not split marketing out, so that is a reading rather than a fact.

The Meta library holds 3,480 Checkatrade ads, of which 1,720 loaded before Meta's rate limit; among them 1,206 are Dynamic Creative, 822 carry video, and the consumer side dominates (593 "Get quote" and 432 "Apply now" lead-form CTAs, 138 ads headlined "£1,000 Guarantee for Peace of Mind") (Meta Ad Library, Checkatrade).

The trade-recruitment subset is what matters for RomanLogic and it is unmistakably seasonal: 2 ads in October 2025, 16 in November, almost nothing until June, then 108 in July, 20 in August, 50 in September and 203 in October 2026, each wave tied to an offer window ("2 months free", "There's still time").

The evergreen is not the offer but the testimonial: a trade-app install video from 2 March 2026 has run 252 days, the longest of any Checkatrade ad in any format.

Spend, Method B: 104 to 120 live ads across consumer lead forms, guarantee, app installs and recruitment collapse to perhaps 15 to 25 clusters; at £100 to £500 a cluster a day (a media-agency account on a £105 million business, this report's assumption) that is £45,000 to £375,000 a month, or £0.5 million to £4.5 million a year on Meta, low confidence, a low single-digit share of the £104.9 million cost base.

The October 2026 recruitment push alone (203 ads, 8 to 12 clusters, 31 days) works out at £25,000 to £190,000 for the month. The only efficiency numbers Checkatrade has ever let out are relative (the WPR case's 44% CPL improvement and doubled conversion), so no pounds-per-member figure can be backed out; the practical split is TV-led consumer demand bought by The Specialist Works and cost-per-lead trade recruitment through Fix Radio and social agencies, without pounds attached.

The AI receptionist startups grow on different fuels, and Meta is the small one

Avoca (San Francisco, YC) went from 10 customers in 2024 to over 800 by April 2026, an "eight figure" ARR, and $125 million raised across three rounds at a $1 billion valuation (Series B led by Meritech and General Catalyst, 27 or 28 April 2026); every account names trade shows, industry associations and a customer ambassador network as the growth drivers, with pricing sales-quoted at an estimated $1,000 to $3,000 a month for operators above $3 million revenue (idlen.io; krasa.ai; ContractorToolStack).

Its Meta footprint is modest and recent: 124 ads across all countries, the 30 served first all live and all started between 11 September and 27 October 2026, 19 of them video, every one landing on avoca.ai/demo under "Boost Your Booking Rates by 70%" (Meta Ad Library, Avoca).

Method B for a demo-booking account of 5 to 10 clusters at $100 to $300 a day gives $15,000 to $90,000 a month, very low confidence, which beside a 41-creative Google presence and two Owned and Operated podcast appearances says paid social is a late addition to a sales-led machine, not its engine (Owned and Operated #173).

The trade-show economics it runs on are public: RoofCON booths at $5,000, $8,000 and $15,000; Service World Expo sponsorships "from $499 to $55,000"; niche contractor podcasts at $500 to $3,000 a month (RoofCON; Service World Expo; PipelineOn).

Rosie (heyrosie.com, Chicago) is the one measured growth curve at RomanLogic's stage.

Jordan Gal started building in May or June 2024 after a pivot that cut the team from 20 to 6, onboarded first customers in August, took first payment in September, launched self-serve onboarding in December (the "turning point"), and by March 2025 was "doubling every month for several months" and about to pass $1 million ARR, at $49 a month with nearly half of revenue on higher tiers (Startups for the Rest of Us ep. 764).

The acquisition sequence matters more than the figure: two months of cold email at 500 a day, a three-minute path to value before a card is asked for, a trial cut from seven days to 25 minutes of call time, and only then Meta and Google paid ads, which a compiled profile lists as the primary later source (Starter Story).

Rosie's Meta library could not be read (rate limit) and its spend is unknown; Google shows 40 US creatives (Google Ads Transparency Center). A Fundz entry for a $7 million "Rosie" seed in October 2026 is a different company (a Seattle childcare platform) and must not be attributed to it (Fundz).

Sameday (Lindon, Utah, founded 2022 by two former home-service owners) has disclosed a $500,000 round in April 2023 and nothing since; its marketing is testimonial ("0 to $6M in 1 year", 4,000 calls in four months) rather than paid media, and no customer count has ever been published (aVenture; sameday.ai/about). Goodcall (ex Google Area 120) raised a $4 million seed on 1 September 2021 with a Yelp data partnership, added Wix in July 2022, launched at free up to 500 minutes then $19 and $49, and now claims "42,000+ businesses" and "60.8 million voice agent interactions" on 10 staff and no later funding, at $79 to $249 a month: a freemium-plus-marketplace route whose "42,000" is registrations, not paying customers, and whose ads never appear in any library read (TechCrunch; getmacha; Tracxn).

The two UK startups in the brief are small accounts with big ad counts. Cyberstaff has 545 Meta ads across countries since 30 October 2025, 35 live in the UK on 9 November, a £30-a-month product, UGC-style creator videos that run 68 to 83 days (long for this set) and one Dynamic ad that ran 144 days; TikTok shows nothing despite the TikTok-native creative (Meta Ad Library, Cyberstaff).

Method B at 3 to 6 clusters and £30 to £100 a day gives £2,700 to £18,000 a month, very low confidence. Jodie has run 13 own ads and 16 partnership ads from garage and trade customer pages since 10 September 2026 at "from £49 per month"; at 2 to 4 clusters and £20 to £100 a day that is £40 to £400 a day, about £2,400 to £24,000 over its first two months, very low confidence (Meta Ad Library, Jodie).

Elyos (5 ads from 23 October, books into Simpro) is smaller still (Meta Ad Library, "never miss a call"). None of the three has published a customer count, funding or result; Companies House was not read for them.

Two UK incumbents frame the price of entry: Moneypenny (106 Meta ads since October 2025, 49 of them for its AI Receptionist, longest video 50 days, and a 15-second audio ad whose whole call to action is a phone number to ring the bot) and Yell (540 ads since July 2025, only 18 video, fortnightly image bursts that run two to three weeks) (Meta Ad Library, Moneypenny; Meta Ad Library, Yell).

The job-software giants ran one worldwide Meta campaign and grew on partners

Jobber (Edmonton, founded 2011) is the cleanest funding-to-scale history in the set: $500,000 seed in January 2013 at a $3 million valuation, $6 million Series A (November 2015), $16 million B (January 2018), $60 million C (January 2021, $350 million valuation), $100 million D from General Atlantic (February 2023), $183 million in all; revenue estimated at $60 million in 2021, $100 million in 2022 and $150 million in 2023 (multiples.vc; Sacra).

On 12 May 2026 it announced 100,000 customers, 400,000 daily professionals, 200,000+ AI Receptionist conversations and the claim that users of its newest AI features are "growing 90% faster" (its own data) (PR Newswire).

Its Meta history is 973 ads in the US view and 808 in the GB view, 805 of them the same ads: Jobber buys one worldwide campaign and the UK simply sees it, with 795 of the ads landing on a single page, 160 live in the US on 9 November and a 64-ad flight started 4 November (Meta Ad Library, Jobber US).

The six 2019 carousels with real bands add up to CA$11,600 to CA$14,300 across roughly three months, the only measured Jobber Meta spend that exists; the 2026 account, at 15 to 25 clusters and $100 to $500 a day, is $45,000 to $375,000 a month by Method B, low confidence. Nothing has run past 140 days.

The visible growth machinery is elsewhere: 23 sponsored Instagram creators with discount codes as of 13 October 2026, three partner tracks (Partner, Ambassador, Affiliate), a free virtual Summit in its fifth year drawing "tens of thousands", and nearly $2 million of grants (Modash; Jobber partners).

Tradify (Auckland, London office) raised NZ$10 million in March 2021 at a NZ$55 million valuation with 18,000 customers and about NZ$8.5 million of revenue, grew "50 per cent over a year", and sold to The Access Group on 1 to 2 October 2024 for a confidential sum above NZ$100 million (reported as "£50m+") with 20,000 customers and 107 staff; its site now says "25,000+ tradies" while its UK ads say "50,000+ trade businesses", a gap between the two that no source explains (NZ Herald; Access Group; Meta Ad Library).

In the UK it ran 34 own and 32 customer-page partnership ads on 9 November, the oldest from 11 May 2026 and the partner ads back to 7 November 2024, with named creators carrying 30%-off codes and a £50 credit offered to any tradesperson who films 30 to 45 seconds on site; a referral pays AU$250 of credit (Meta Ad Library, Tradify; Tradify partner programme).

At 6 to 10 clusters and £50 to £200 a day its UK Meta runs at £9,000 to £60,000 a month by Method B, low confidence; it has no Google presence and nothing on TikTok.

The two exits set the ceiling. Hatch (founded 2018) raised about $13.7 million (YC, then an $11 million Series A from Bessemer in 2021), reached roughly $25 million ARR by November 2025 growing 70% a year with more than 2,000 home-services customers, and was bought by Yelp for $270 million cash plus $30 million retention, closing 2 February 2026 (Yelp IR; Tracxn). Podium (Lehi, founded 2014) went from $12 million ARR in early 2017 to $100 million by the end of 2019 and $389 million in 2023, raised about $422 million including a $201 million Series D at $3 billion in November 2021, cut 12% of staff in December 2022, and on 22 October 2026 reported AI-agent ARR past $150 million (from $100 million in January) with 20,000 agents deployed and positive free cash flow (Sacra; dealroom). Neither publishes ad spend, and neither could be read in a library.

What the numbers add up to for a UK Meta campaign

Three things in this table should shape the plan. First, the ratio of ad count to disclosed growth is poor everywhere Meta is the main channel.

Powered Now's fourteen months of weekly bursts, Checkatrade's 203-ad October, Jobber's 973 ads: none of these companies attributes a customer number to Meta, and the one company that talks about its channels in order (Rosie) put Meta after outbound email and after a self-serve onboarding that converted on its own (Startups for the Rest of Us ep. 764).

Second, what survives on Meta is testimonial, not offer: the longest-running live creatives in the whole UK set are Checkatrade's trade-app testimonial (252 days), Powered Now's app-install testimonials (139 to 140 days) and its customer-story set (56 days and counting), while every offer-led burst ("2 months free", "50% off", "Offer Expires 20th November") is retired within weeks.

Third, the cost side has known anchors even if nobody publishes CAC: a UK trades agency expects £15 to £50 a lead when a tradesperson advertises to homeowners, North American lead-gen CPLs run $43 to $63 for home services and B2B SaaS, Sopro's B2B-wide Facebook CPL is $142, and this report's planning range for a UK SaaS selling to tradespeople is £40 to £120 per lead, with cost per trial above that by an unmeasured lead-to-trial rate (Trade2Base; Focus Digital; Sopro).

Set against that, the acquisition prices competitors state in public are small: Powered Now pays £50 for a converted referral on a £29 to £39 plan, Tradify AU$250 of credit, Housecall Pro $500 to an affiliate for an HVAC or plumbing customer on a top plan, which brackets what this market thinks a customer is worth to acquire at a few hundred pounds at most (Housecall Pro affiliate terms).

The reach pool is large and Instagram has nearly caught Facebook: Meta's tools report 38.8 million people reachable on Facebook in the UK and 35.5 million on Instagram (October 2025), the latter growing 9.2% a year against 2.6%, while a UK trades agency's workable audience for a local campaign is 20,000 to 200,000 and the floor it sets is 5,000 (DataReportal; Trade2Base).

Powered Now's platform rows (Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network on 643 ads, with Messenger and Threads on 218) show it buys the full placement set; BT buys no Audience Network at all.

For video, the 47 competitor ads downloaded and transcribed for the separate ad library page (18 BT, 17 Powered Now, 6 Checkatrade, 4 Jobber, 2 Moneypenny) are all real filmed people, none flagged as AI-generated; Powered Now's run 9 to 67 seconds, BT's produced spots 6 to 20 seconds, and the one creative device nobody but Moneypenny and Cyberstaff has used is a phone number to ring the agent itself.

What could not be found

The spend question has no primary answer for any competitor. Meta publishes spend only for political and issue ads, no UK-only ad shows reach, and the EU panels that do exist could be opened for three BT ads only before Meta's rate limit closed the single-ad view; the 436 Jobber ads flagged EU-eligible are the one place a country-by-country reach could still be read once the limit lifts (Meta ArchivedAd reference).

No Nielsen Ad Intel, AA/WARC or Pathmatics figure for "AI from BT", Checkatrade's three TV platforms or anyone else surfaced, and Pathmatics publishes no accuracy figure for its models (Sensor Tower Pathmatics).

No frequency benchmark for UK Meta prospecting was found, so the 1.5 to 3.0 assumption is this report's; no UK CPM, CPC or CPL exists for B2B, SMB software or business services audiences, no cost per trial for SMB software on Meta, no Ads Manager audience size for UK adults interested in plumbing, heating or construction (Rachel can read that in Ads Manager in minutes and should date it), and no sourced UK TikTok CPM, so the TikTok figures use placeholders.

TikTok's library would not return any window older than 30 days and has no US region, so BT's TikTok history before 10 October and every US brand's TikTok activity are unknown. Google's Transparency Center blocked 14 of the 17 domains after three were read in full.

On the companies: Powered Now has never filed turnover, never published a paying-customer count after 2015, never published CAC, churn or payback, and its 2016, 2020 and 2021 allotment prices were not read, so those rounds rest on a third-party estimate; the Crowdcube pitch documents are not public; no marketing lead or agency could be identified; Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn follower counts could not be read logged out.

BT has published no spend, end date, media agency, production credits or result for "AI from BT", nor results for its 2022 and 2024 SME platforms, and the brief's platform names "Business is personal" and "Nobody does business like you" appear in no source and should be dropped.

Checkatrade's own filed accounts (Vetted Ltd) were not retrievable, so its marketing line, the consumer-versus-recruitment split, app downloads, full-year 2025 revenue and any cost per acquired trade are missing, and the suggested ITV weather sponsorship was not found. Rosie's seed amount, Sameday's customer count, Goodcall's post-2021 funding, Jodie's and Cyberstaff's founders and funding, Tradify's creator-programme start date and participant count, Jobber's Summit registrations and ambassador payouts, and every company's CAC are unpublished.

The AdSpyder run-length study measures first-seen to last-seen and is a floor, and no study linking run length to measured return was found.

Conclusion

The category's advertising economics are visible in outline and invisible in detail, and the outline is more useful than a precise number would have been.

Every competitor that leans on Meta runs it as a churn machine, minting dozens of Dynamic Creative variants a week, retiring offer-led bursts within a month and keeping only filmed testimonials alive for a quarter or two; the money behind that (tens of thousands a month for the UK software vendors, low hundreds of thousands for BT's launch, perhaps millions a year for Checkatrade's consumer brand) has produced, on the public record, no stated customer growth for anyone except the companies whose growth came from somewhere else.

Avoca grew on shows and ambassadors, Rosie on outbound email and a 25-minute trial, Jobber and Tradify on creators with codes and partner commissions, Checkatrade on television and Fix Radio, and Powered Now, after fourteen months of the most trade-specific Meta programme in Britain, still says "thousands".

For Rachel's campaign the implication is to treat Powered Now's account as a map of what not to repeat rather than a bar to clear. Its evergreen ads are the ones with a real tradesperson talking about a real job; its disposable ones are the price cards and the "limited offer" copy; and its single proof point is one electrician's four bookings dressed as an average.

A campaign built from a small number of filmed, de-identified client stories, run long enough to pass the 60-day mark that only a tenth of Meta ads reach, priced in the plan at £40 to £120 a lead and measured against trials rather than form fills, would be doing the one thing the libraries show nobody in this category has yet done on Meta: holding a creative long enough to learn whether it works.