If you sell commercial HVAC work, you’ll eventually run into three different kinds of product wearing the same “leads” label: shared-lead marketplaces built for residential service calls, raw permit or project databases built for teams that want to build their own filtering, and a small category of exclusive, curated commercial-HVAC intelligence. None of these are bad products. They’re built for different buyers. This page compares exclusivity, how often the data refreshes, how it’s priced, and whether it’s built for commercial HVAC, so you can tell which category fits how you sell.
The comparison
Competitor pricing and cadence are sales/marketing-led and change over time. Figures below are drawn from each company’s own public pricing pages and marketing as of mid-2026; where a number wasn’t publicly confirmable, that’s noted rather than guessed. Confirm current pricing directly with any vendor before deciding.
| Lead source | Exclusivity | Refresh cadence | Pricing model | Commercial focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HVAC Scout | Exclusive: one HVAC contractor per county | Daily re-scan; same-day alerts on the Regional & Operator tiers | Flat monthly subscription, 4 tiers: $150–$1,875/mo | Commercial-HVAC-only, curated: mechanical permits, property sales, code violations, business licenses, open bids, boiler certificates, EPA air records |
| Shovels | Non-exclusive: licensed data you can reuse and resell, per their own terms | Twice a month (the 1st and 15th), per their published schedule | Self-serve API from $599/mo, plus a custom enterprise data license | General-purpose permit, property & contractor data for all trades, nationwide |
| Dodge Construction Network / ConstructConnect | Non-exclusive: the same project data and bid invitations reach many subscribing firms | Continuous/daily, per Dodge's own marketing | Sales-led enterprise quote; third-party sources cite roughly $300+/user/mo and up | All-trades commercial & public project intelligence, not HVAC-specific |
| BuildZoom | Not exclusive: matches a property owner to multiple bidding contractors | Ongoing, driven by new owner project submissions rather than a bulk refresh | Pay-on-success: free to receive leads, a 2.5% referral fee on project value if hired | Residential-leaning marketplace, some commercial |
| Raw metro permit-list sellers (e.g. Construction Monitor) | Not marketed as exclusive; sold as a data product to any buyer | Weekly release cadence, per their own marketing | Metro-priced self-serve list; historically in the low hundreds per year for one metro in past pricing examples; confirm current rates directly | Undifferentiated permit list, all trades, no scoring or contact resolution |
| Residential-style marketplaces (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Networx) | Non-exclusive: the same lead is commonly resold to several contractors at once | Real time, as homeowners submit a form | Pay-per-lead, roughly $15–$120+ per lead per public reporting (rates vary and change) | Primarily residential service calls, not built for commercial project scope |
When each one fits
Being straight about fit matters more than winning every comparison, so here’s who each category is built for:
- HVAC Scout fits a commercial HVAC shop that wants a smaller number of counties worked hard, exclusively, with the owner or GC’s contact info resolved and a drafted outreach message, and doesn’t want to compete with another HVAC contractor for the same public-record signal.
- Shovels fits a team with its own engineering or data resources that wants broad, nationwide, general-purpose permit and property data to build custom tooling across many trades and geographies, and doesn’t need a single county exclusively.
- Dodge Construction Network and ConstructConnect fit a general contractor, a large multi-trade subcontractor, or a dedicated estimating team that needs visibility into every sizable commercial and public project across a large territory, at an enterprise budget and sales cycle.
- BuildZoom fits a contractor who wants zero upfront cost and is comfortable being one of several bidders introduced to the same project, and who does meaningful residential or smaller commercial work.
- Raw metro permit lists fit a budget-conscious shop willing to do its own qualification and outreach on an undifferentiated permit feed for one or two metros.
- Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, and similar fit a shop whose calendar is mostly homeowner service calls (a furnace swap, an AC repair) rather than commercial project scope. The reverse is also true: HVAC Scout is not built for a residential-service shop. If that’s most of your business, a residential marketplace is the closer match.
Common questions
No. Angi-style marketplaces sell a homeowner's contact info as a pay-per-lead auction, the same lead resold to several contractors at once, and the volume is mostly residential service calls. HVAC Scout is a flat monthly subscription to one exclusive county of commercial-HVAC opportunities sourced from public records (permits, property sales, code violations, business licenses, open bids and more), with no per-lead auction and no reselling a county to a second HVAC contractor.
Those are data products: broad, non-exclusive, and built for a team that wants to build its own filtering and outreach on top. HVAC Scout is a curated feed. It scores each record for genuine commercial HVAC scope, resolves the owner or GC's name, phone, and mailing address, drafts a first outreach message, and re-scans daily. If you want raw rows to build on, a database is the better fit. If you want to be told who to call, HVAC Scout does that work for you.
Not really. HVAC Scout is HVAC-specific and scoped to a smaller number of counties per plan. A GC or multi-trade subcontractor that needs every large commercial project across all trades in a big territory is better served by an enterprise project-intelligence platform like Dodge or ConstructConnect, which are built for exactly that scale and are sold on a quote basis.
No. HVAC Scout is built for commercial work: rooftop-unit replacements, mechanical buildouts, service contracts on commercial and multifamily buildings, and similar scope. If most of your calendar is homeowner furnace and AC service calls, a residential-focused marketplace is a closer match to how you sell.
Browse the sample of scored commercial HVAC opportunities before you decide, or compare plans if you already know the exclusive model is what you want.