Realistic quote requests, submitted through each company's own website. Every response timed against carrier logs and inbox timestamps. No vendors' marketing stats — our own receipts.
In July 2026 we submitted one realistic, low-pressure quote request to each of 15 US home-services companies — HVAC, plumbing, roofing and electrical — through the contact form on their own website, mostly during their business hours. Then we started the stopwatch on every channel: auto-acknowledgments, emails, text messages, callbacks. Same persona, same polite inquiry, one per company. Every responder was politely released within hours of replying ("we've decided to hold off — thank you"), and this page anonymizes all of them: the point is the pattern, not the players.
Dataset finalized July 2026 (n=15, one inquiry per company). Anonymized data available on request for replication.
| Finding | Count | What it means for a homeowner |
|---|---|---|
| Form broken, site unreachable, or froze mid-submit | 4 / 15 | The lead can't even get in. The bucket has no handle. |
| Form demanded full street address before any contact | 1 / 15 | High-friction gate; most evening browsers walk away. |
| Instant acknowledgment (auto-email or auto-text) | 1 / 9 submitted | And it landed in the spam folder. The other 8: pure silence. |
| Human reply within 72 hours | 5 / 9 submitted | Fastest: 8.5h (a midnight inquiry answered first thing next morning — the study's best). One owner replied personally with a quote — into our spam folder. |
| No human contact at all, 5+ days and counting | 4 / 9 submitted | These leads are simply gone. Someone else won them. |
The companies that did respond were good companies — a rep texting on her Saturday morning, an owner personally quoting $79.99 with open slots. The failure isn't effort or character. It's infrastructure: nobody — human or machine — was watching the first minute, and the first minute is where jobs are won. Industry analyses consistently show the first responder takes the majority of competitive leads.
And a second, quieter leak: the spam folder ate the replies in both directions. The one auto-acknowledgment went to spam. The best owner reply went to spam. Email alone is a lossy channel for time-critical replies — which is why text-first response matters.
This site practices what it preaches. Call the line and hang up on us.
Your phone gets a text back in under 60 seconds. That's the product, demoing itself.
Get your free lead-leak teardownOne inquiry per company; realistic consumer language; identical persona with a working US phone number and monitored inbox; submissions timestamped; responses timed via carrier delivery logs and email headers. Companies with visible CAPTCHA or verification walls were completed manually. We do not name companies publicly — companies that responded were told about the test afterward, credited for their speed, and released politely. Sample size is small and growing; we publish counts, not percentages dressed as precision. Run the same test on your own company tonight: submit your form at 9 PM and start a stopwatch.
Questions, replication requests, or want your industry's cut of the data? inquiry@getreplyminute.com