The Mabel blog
How Mabel is different from Checkatrade
Peter Nicholl, founder of Mabel4 min read
Checkatrade sells you the enquiry. Mabel books the enquiries you already get, including the ones that come from Checkatrade and ring out. Why they're not rivals, and why your customer list should live somewhere you own.
What does Checkatrade actually sell?
The enquiry. A customer searches, finds you on the list, reads your reviews and gets in touch. Depending on how you're set up you pay per lead, which LocalAdder's cost tracker puts at roughly £5 to £35 a lead across the big platforms, or you pay for a membership on a 12-month plan, which Checkatrade's own pricing page sets out. Whether that's worth it is your sum to do, and plenty of trades make it pay.
What Checkatrade doesn't sell is what happens after the enquiry. The customer rings the number on your profile. If you're on a job, the phone rings out. The lead you paid for is now a voicemail, and the customer is already looking at the next profile down.
What does Mabel sell?
The booking. Mabel doesn't find you customers and never will. It takes the calls you already get and can't answer, texts the caller back straight away, asks what the job is and where, offers a time that's free in your calendar and books it for you to confirm. It doesn't care where the call came from: your van, a friend's recommendation, Google, or your Checkatrade profile.
So the honest comparison is this. Checkatrade makes the phone ring. Mabel makes sure the ring becomes a booking. Those are two different jobs, and you can pay for one, both or neither.
Are they rivals?
No, and I'd be lying if I said otherwise. If anything Mabel works best for a trade who already pays for leads, because the cost of a missed call is written down on an invoice every month. A Checkatrade enquiry that rings your mobile while you're under a floor becomes a text, a few questions and a time in your calendar, instead of a message you return at eight o'clock to someone who's booked elsewhere.
Nothing about Mabel asks you to leave a lead platform. Nothing about it stops you either. It sits behind your mobile number, whoever gave the customer that number.
What about TradeMore?
Checkatrade has launched TradeMore, a free app with an inbox, diary booking and payments, as reported in Electrical Times. That's a serious piece of software from a big company at no charge, and it sets the price of job admin at nothing. From what's been reported, it doesn't text back a missed call and book from the conversation. If it adds that, Mabel will be competing with a free app from a company every trade has heard of. I'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
What I'd also say is that a free app from a lead platform is still a lead platform's app. Which brings me to the thing I actually care about in this post.
Where should your customer list live?
On 16 September 2026, Rated People closed. Every member's profile closed with it, overnight, as BookABuilderUK reported, and the reviews on those profiles went with them. Not because any trade did anything wrong, but because a platform's customers are the platform's.
That's the risk with any platform, Checkatrade included, and it's the reason Mabel is built the other way round. Your customers text your Mabel number and land in your calendar, under your business name. The promise on our site is this, word for word:
Your customers are yours. We never sell their details or share them with another trade, and you can download your customers, jobs and messages from Settings at any time.
Download is a button in Settings, and what you get is a plain spreadsheet file of your customers, jobs and messages. If Mabel closed tomorrow you'd still have your list, and I'd want you to.
What I'm not claiming
I'm not claiming any figure for how many Checkatrade leads go unanswered: I haven't got a sourced one, so I'm not using one. I'm not claiming anything about Checkatrade's prices beyond what its own page and LocalAdder's tracker say. And Mabel isn't a review platform, a directory or a way to get found. It's the bit after the phone rings, which is the bit that goes wrong when your hands are full.
Sources: LocalAdder, UK trade lead cost tracker; Checkatrade, membership pricing; Electrical Times, Checkatrade launches TradeMore; BookABuilderUK, Rated People news and the Checkatrade acquisition explained.