hipages review: what it does and what to run alongside it

hipages is the best-known platform in Australia for connecting homeowners with tradespeople, and most trade businesses have either used it, considered it or been called by its sales team. This guide looks at what it is actually designed to do, when it earns its keep, and what belongs alongside it.

What you are actually paying for

When a homeowner decides the bathroom is finally getting done, they can open the hipages app, describe the job, and be connected with local businesses within minutes. What a subscription buys you is a place in that moment.

That is worth being precise about, because it is a specific product.

You are paying for introductions to people who are ready to hire right now. Not for visibility in general, not for reputation, and not for marketing in the broader sense. Introductions.

Seen that way, a lot of the strong opinions about lead platforms start to make sense. Businesses that need introductions, because they are new, or growing, or quiet, tend to get real value from them. Businesses that already have more enquiries than they can handle tend to wonder what they are paying for. The platform did not change between those two experiences. The job it was hired to do did.

How the platform works

hipages runs on a subscription. You pay a monthly fee to be a member, and the plans scale with how much work you want through the platform.

Because hipages Group is listed on the ASX, the shape of the business is public record.

In its results for the year to June 2025, hipages Group reported 36,600 subscribing tradies and 1.38 million jobs posted, which produced 2.8 million connections between homeowners and businesses.

Those numbers tell you two practical things.

The first is scale. More than a million posted jobs a year is a volume of demand that no individual business could reach on its own, and access to it is the genuine article being sold.

The second is that connections outnumber jobs, which means a posted job is typically shared with more than one business. That is by design. The homeowner gets to compare quotes, which is the reason they used the app in the first place. For you, it means the introduction is the start of a small competition, and the businesses that respond quickly, with a clear message and a fair quote, win more than their share of them.

It is also worth sitting with the fact that a subscription is a fixed cost. It is there in a busy month and it is there in a quiet one, which is not a flaw, it is simply what a subscription is. The businesses that stay happiest with the arrangement are the ones that treat it as a planned marketing cost and measure what it brings in, rather than noticing the invoice only when the month has been slow.

When it makes the most sense

There are times in the life of a trade business when a lead platform is close to the perfect tool.

• When you are starting out. A new business has no reviews, no gallery of finished work and nobody passing its name around yet. A platform supplies work while those things are being built.
• When you move into a new area. Reputation does not travel with the ute. In a new town you are new, and the platform is already talking to the homeowners there.
• When you add a service. You might have wired houses for fifteen years and just started installing EV chargers. The people who know your name do not know that yet.
• When the work goes quiet. Most trades run in waves. Having a tap you can turn on for a slow six weeks has real value, even if it stays off the rest of the year.
• When marketing is never going to happen. Some owners have no interest in websites, profiles or photography, and would rather pay a subscription than spend a weekend on any of it. That is a legitimate choice, and for those businesses the platform is doing the whole job.

What these situations share is a need for work soon. That is the platform’s home ground, and on it, it is very hard to beat.

What to build alongside it

Here is the part most reviews of hipages skip past.

In most established trade businesses, the bulk of the work never touches a platform at all. It arrives through referrals, repeat customers and people who found the business themselves. Almost none of those people ring straight away. They look you up first.

That is the job your own presence does, and it is a different job from the one the platform does. hipages introduces you to strangers. Your website, your Google Business Profile and your reviews convince the people who already have your name that the recommendation was right. Our guide to websites for tradies covers what that takes in detail, but the short version is familiar: show the work you want more of, name the areas you cover, make it easy to get in touch, and let your reviews sit where people can read them.

The two channels also age differently. A subscription works while it is running, which is exactly what you are paying for. Your own presence accumulates. The website you set up this year, the reviews you gather job by job, the photos of work you are proud of, all of it keeps introducing you to customers years after the effort went in. One channel is a tap, the other is a tank, and a business with both gets to choose how it grows.

Getting the most from both

A few habits make the combination work noticeably better.

Reply fast, everywhere. On the platform, a shared job rewards the first useful response. Off the platform, a referral who hears nothing for three days quietly moves on. Speed of reply might be the single cheapest advantage available to a trade business.

Finish every job with a review request. Do it while you are standing there and the customer is happy, and point it at your own Google profile. The work came through hipages, but the reputation it earns can live somewhere that belongs to your business.

Keep score. Add one line to the job sheet or your quoting software: where did this enquiry come from? Platform, referral, Google, repeat customer, saw the ute. Fill it in for three months and you will know what each channel is actually doing, which makes every renewal and every marketing decision easier than it was.

None of this is about choosing a side. hipages is good at what it is designed for, and the businesses that get the best results from it tend to be the ones with a strong presence of their own, because the same homeowner who found them on the platform often checks them out on the web before accepting the quote. The two channels are not rivals. They are the same customer, met at different moments.

How we can help

North Point Digital builds modern websites for trades and local service businesses, the kind that keep earning long after the work went in.

If you are weighing up where next year’s marketing money should go, tell us what is bringing work in now and what you would like more of. We are happy to give you a straight answer about what a site would add, and what it would not.