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Are these practices from the BBB still in effect as shown in the YouTube video?

I've never been a big fan of Home Advisor. I get some of my business from Thumbtack, didn't feel Porch was worth it to me, and after many phone calls and e-mails, I gave in and signed up for Home Advisor. After a little over a year with Home Advisor, I can give my solid opinion it is a blatant rip-off. The sales guy laid out how he was going to be there with me every step of the way to make sure I was successful on Home Advisor. He kept his word until he had my credit card number and until we raised a huge stink we couldn't get in touch with the guy again. If memory serves they wanted $1,000 just to sign up, but after haggling with them for a while I think I got that down to $300. After I was signed up roof cleaning requests started coming in, including several that I contacted the people and they were going to be out of town for the next few weeks, and never got back to me even after I followed up with them. I had one guy that wanted me to come take a look at his roof so I scheduled the visit following up after a small roof cleaning that someone had subcontracted to me. The guy wanted to come watch me clean that roof but since I'd never spoken to the home owner I obviously wasn't going to bring the potential customer onto someone else's property. I explained this to the customer and he got mad and stopped responding to me, so I'm assuming (but may be wrong) that this person was maybe trying to break into the roof cleaning business and wanted some free education. I'm not against helping new people in the business, even for free - I've done it a few times in the past and was happy to do so. Then I had a customer that said he got 7 quotes for roof cleaning and I was more than twice as high as everybody else. I found that hard to believe since the two story roof was <20 cents per sq. ft. The guy wanted to use me because he felt I was far better educated and experienced than the other 6 companies, so I asked the guy what price he would find acceptable. He wanted me to match the price that was about half my original quote so I countered, but I wasn't going to go to half my quote and he wouldn't budge on what he would pay so I wished him well and walked away. I finally landed my first Home Advisor job on a tiny rancher for $300. That was my only job that panned out on Home Advisor. There were also a several jobs where I was the only person that the customer was supposed to have access to, but they all went with "other companies". There was even one job that a local roof cleaner that I'm buddies with and I do subcontracted work for him where we were chatting one day and found out we both had been sent the same job. It wasn't what we would call a roof cleaning job...the customer just wanted leaves blown off his roof and he wanted it done for essentially what it cost me from Home Advisor and gas. We both contacted Home Advisor and requested a refund since it wasn't a legitimate roof cleaning request. I got my money back, but my friend didn't, so that was the day he quit using Home Advisor. He had told me several instances where the leads ended up being false where the address was an empty lot, or the phone number given was not a residence and so on.

On the flip side I started with Thumbtack first and still use Thumbtack, although I stopped doing quotes for house washes when they charged me $54 on a $200 house wash bid on a house that was supposedly actively lived in and when I arrived it had been vacant for quite some time. They refused to even entertain the idea of a refund. Thumbtack has their share of other false leads too in my opinion, but I still find it worthwhile to use Thumbtack. Here is the frustrating part. I used the exact same information on Thumbtack and Home Advisor. I built a spreadsheet years ago that gives me my roof cleaning cost based on square footage, pitch, degree of staining, gutters/no gutters, etc...you know the drill. So my costs were not biased between HA and TT. I used the exact same knowledge and sales tactics on all customers, yet on Thumbtack I win about 75% of the jobs where I am able to open any kind of dialogue with the customer beyond just sending my original response. Versus on Home Advisor I won 1 out of a few dozen quotes...based on that I'm saying in my opinion that Home Advisor is just a huge scam. Now I've been a "Top Pro" on Thumbtack ever since I have been eligible 3 years ago, and since that is reviewed every 6 months starting 1/1/2019 I'll have my 6th back to back Top Pro award.

Thumbtack also seems to have reduced their support staff. When I first joined Thumbtack I submitted several suggestions to make them better, and they used a few of them. I've also sent information to correct bad information on their roof cleaning website at least 10 times over the past 4 years and they have never made any changes, even though I've sent them technical documents proving their information is incorrect.

Just my two cents on the subject.