Loadside makes money on the spread: we sell the homeowner a sold, scoped job at retail, pay the electrician a fixed rate they approved before accepting, and keep the difference. Electricians never pay us anything — no lead fees, no subscription, no percentage. The trade is that on network jobs the customer relationship belongs to Loadside, not to you. We think that's an honest deal, and this page is the math behind it.
"Too good to be true" is the correct default setting when a company that isn't your customer says it wants to pay you. You should be suspicious. So here's the entire business model with the quiet part said out loud — what we make, where we make it, and exactly what you give up.
The spread, plainly
The homeowner pays Loadside retail for a finished job: sold, scoped, scheduled, warranted. You get offered that job with a fixed payout attached — a number you see, and accept or decline, before anyone rolls a truck. The gap between those two figures is the spread, and the spread is our entire revenue. It has to cover our marketing, our sales calls, the scoping, the scheduling, the materials logistics, the callbacks, and our profit. When people ask what Loadside charges electricians, the accurate answer is: nothing, because you're not the customer. On a lead platform, the contractor is the customer — the party being billed. Here the homeowner is the customer, and you're the supplier the entire machine depends on. That one difference explains everything else about how we behave.
Why paying you well is self-interest, not charity
Nobody should trust altruism in a business model, so here's the greedy version. Customer acquisition — the thing that eats lead-buying electricians alive — is our cost, and at volume it behaves differently: the spend amortizes across many jobs, and it gets cheaper as reviews, repeat customers, and word of mouth compound on one brand instead of being scattered across every contractor buying the same zip code. Meanwhile the genuinely scarce input in this machine is not homeowner demand. It's a licensed electrician who shows up when promised, passes inspection, and doesn't make us re-sell the job. Our expensive problem is partner churn — recruiting, vetting, onboarding a replacement — not partner pay. So paying good subs promptly and fairly isn't generosity; it's us protecting our own margin's weakest point. You don't have to like us for the deal to hold. You just have to believe we can do arithmetic.
The same incentive shapes the day-to-day mechanics. A job that's scoped sloppily comes back to us as a callback on our warranty, at our cost — so scoping carefully before you ever see the offer is us protecting ourselves, and it happens to be the thing that makes the fixed payout trustworthy. Incentive alignment beats promises; we'd rather show you the machine than ask for faith in it.
What you give up — stated plainly
Here's the part most pitches mumble. On network jobs, the customer is ours. The homeowner hired Loadside; their next electrical problem comes to Loadside; the warranty and any callback run through Loadside; and network customers aren't a list for you to market your own shop to. If your strategy is building your own brand equity on every roof you park under, network work fights that strategy, and you should weigh it honestly.
Two boundaries that matter just as much: your own customers stay entirely yours — your referrals, your repeats, your book are none of our business — and the channel is throttleable: take network jobs when the calendar has holes, decline them when your own work is paying better. What you're renting us isn't your business. It's spare capacity, at a fixed price you approved.
Why we think the trade is honest
Compare the two structures on where the risk sits. A lead platform charges you up front for maybes: you fund the acquisition risk, run the unpaid sales shift, absorb the discounting of a visible footrace, and carry collections — the full ledger of that model is here, and it lands at several hundred dollars per booked job for many electricians. In our structure, every one of those costs sits on our side of the table, and the entire trade is compressed into a single visible number: the payout on the job offer. Nothing about the deal hides in a close rate you can't predict or a dispute process you have to fight. If the number works for your costs, accept; if it doesn't, decline and we've wasted thirty seconds of your day. What you give up is the upside of owning one more customer relationship. What you get back is every acquisition cost in the ledger, deleted. We're comfortable arguing that trade in daylight — it's the argument the whole site makes.
Run your own numbers
Don't take the framing on faith — it's still our framing. Price your current channel with the pillar-post ledger: lead fees plus unpaid quoting hours, divided by booked jobs, three-month average. Then look at what a fixed-payout, zero-acquisition job has to pay to beat it. For most people who run that math honestly, the spread stops looking like something we're taking and starts looking like something they've been paying all along — just to a platform, with worse terms and a race attached. The mechanics of offers, payouts, and scheduling are on how it works, and if the model reads as fair to you, apply here — it costs nothing, which by now you'd expect.