Angie’s List
Some things in life are too important to take a gamble on. Your home, your family’s health, and financial decisions are too big to be left to chance.
When making important decisions, we can’t do it on our own. When looking for a contractor to renovate our house, when we need a new pediatrician, or when we would like to purchase a new car, we don’t just crack open the phone book and find the first service available.
We consult others for advice. We ask other family members, friends and neighbors. The problem with this method is that it only gives a small sample size. One person’s experience may be vastly different from another’s. Angie’s List seeks to solve this problem.
How Does Angie’s List Work?
Angie’s List compiles thousands of reviews of services, contractors, and stores from it’s members, which you can access and explore to find the best option for whatever you need. Here’s how it works as an Angie’s List member. Let’s say you are looking for a contractor to build a new deck for your home.
- Log into Angie’s List and click onto the “Decks and Porches” category.
- Peruse the list of companies in your area that are displayed.
- Review grades that each company has received from people who live near you and have used their service.
- Find the best company, and give them a call! Be sure to mention that you found them through Angie’s List, as they know that you are likely to write a review about their service.
Sign up for Angie’s List today!
Angie’s List does cost a membership fee, but it pales in comparison to the amount you’ll save by finding lower prices and higher quality work. You can sign up for a monthly fee of $5.95 or pay for a 1-4 year membership. If you choose the 4 year membership it ends up being less than $3.50 a month.
The only flaw in Angie’s List is the possibility that a company posts false reports about it’s business. However, Angie’s List employees read each review to try and weed those out. And really, one review among dozens probably won’t make a big difference. But it is a possibility.
Overall Angie’s List is a great idea, and it is executed well. Try it out!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
red line, drywall company in concord ca, did aterrible job in my house in Alamo, before they were finished they require the total payment, we were in doubt to give it to them and did not feel comfortable but they insisted, finally we gave them the total and never came back to finish the job, after a month we notice several cracks on walls and ceilings. They were terrible.
I really like the idea of Angie’s list, but they literally have nothing without the open, honest reviews of actual consumers of business services. I am in a rather large metropolitan area (Los Angeles) that has not yet been fully immersed by consumers who are writing reviews for Angie’s list. That is, there are literally thousands of excellent businesses that don’t exist on Angie’s list for Los Angeles, so when you type in your zip code and look for businesses you may end up with ones that are 10s of miles away and in LA that means possibly over an hour or two or three or four of commute time to get to a business or for a business to get to you. In reading a few critiques of Angie’s list I see that the annual fee in LA is possibly lower (~$12 + $5 sign up fee with coupon) than other metropolitan areas where there is better penetration, but the level of penetration in a particular metropolitan area is not particularly clear when you sign up. There are other services that are free like Yelp that are more comprehensive for LA at this time. That doesn’t mean that a few years from now that Angie’s list won’t be more comprehensive, but as of this writing (July 2010) I am disappointed and I’m guessing many new subscribers in LA will be too. BTW, cancellation does not get you back your money, but does prevent them from automatically renewing your annual membership each year, so I’m guessing there will be quite a few alienated subscribers in LA for a few years. Another problem I can see with Angie’s list is the possibility that a business’s friends and relatives could stuff the ballot box, so to speak. Inversely a business could negatively influence the rating of a competing business using the same friends and relatives. I don’t know what provision Angie’s List or any other rating service, for that matter, makes for that possibility, but I’m guessing that’s pretty hard to track.