Ping Post vs Direct Post: How Lead Selling Actually Works
What ping post is, what the pings cost, which platforms run it, and how to tell whether your lead business needs an auction or just a routing rule.
If you are comparing lead distribution platforms, half of them advertise ping post and the other half do not mention it. Nobody explains which camp you belong in.
This guide covers what ping post is, what it costs to run, which platforms do it, and the case for the simpler arrangement that most lead businesses under about ten buyers are better off with.
Short version. Ping post is an auction: you offer a stripped-down lead, buyers bid, the winner gets the full record. It pays off when many buyers value the same lead differently and your volume is high enough for a few cents of margin to matter. Below that, it is machinery you maintain for nothing, and the money is usually being lost somewhere else entirely.
Direct post: one request, one decision
The simpler arrangement. Your system decides who should get the lead, then sends the whole record to them in a single request, usually a webhook. The buyer takes it. If it turns out to be bad, they send it back under whatever return policy you agreed.
You decide the price, because you negotiated it. You decide the order, because you set the rules. The buyer's system does one thing: accept a POST.
Ping post: two requests, and the buyers decide
Ping post splits that into two steps.
The ping. You send a stripped-down version of the lead to every buyer who might want it. Postcode, product, a few qualifying answers, and deliberately not the name, the phone number or the email. Each buyer answers within a second or two: a price, or a no.
The post. The winning bid, either the highest or the first acceptable one, receives the full record and is billed for it. Everyone else gets nothing and pays nothing.
A ping tree is the same idea arranged in tiers: the lead is offered to the top tier first, and only falls to the next tier if nobody up there takes it.
| Direct post | Ping post | |
|---|---|---|
| Who sets the price | You, in advance | The buyer, per lead |
| Requests per lead | One | One ping per buyer, then one post |
| What the buyer sees first | The whole record | A stripped-down version |
| What the buyer has to build | An endpoint that accepts a lead | An endpoint that prices a lead in under a second |
| Fits | Negotiated contracts, a handful of buyers | Many buyers, high volume, real price competition |
What ping post costs to run
Pings are billed, and there are a lot of them. One lead offered to twenty buyers is twenty pings before anyone pays you anything.
From our own comparison of the platforms, with prices as published in May 2026:
- Lead Prosper bills $1 per 10,000 pings, plus another $1 per 10,000 pre-ping checks, on top of charging for every ingested lead including duplicates and leads that fail validation.
- LeadsPedia includes 1 million pings with its $1,500 a month Lite plan, and 5 million with Premium at $2,500.
- boberdoo prices bid experiments as a separate add-on at $500 a month.
The cost that does not appear on an invoice is the integration work. A ping endpoint has to return a price in well under a second, every time, or it drops out of the auction. That is a system your buyers have to build and keep running, and it is the reason smaller buyers simply refuse.
Which platforms run ping post
All of these do, and each one has its own comparison here:
- Lead Prosper. Distribution only, billed per ingested lead, with full ping post and ping/pick/post.
- LeadsPedia. Ping post plus ping tree, with call tracking alongside it.
- boberdoo. Among the oldest in the category, with bid experiments as an add-on.
- Phonexa. Ping post as part of a wider suite that also covers calls and email.
- LeadConduit. Real-time ping post bidding on its Pro edition, covered in our platform comparison.
If you have decided you need an auction, pick from that list. It is a genuine capability and building it yourself is not a weekend.
When you do not need it
Ping post solves one problem: you do not know what this particular lead is worth to this particular buyer. If you already know, because you negotiated a rate last quarter and it holds until the next one, the auction has nothing to decide.
You are probably in that position if most of these are true:
- You have fewer than about ten buyers and you know all of them by name.
- Prices are set per contract and change a few times a year, not per lead.
- Your buyers are agencies or local businesses rather than networks with their own ping infrastructure.
- The part of the month that actually hurts is working out what everyone owes you.
That last one is worth sitting with. In a lead business with negotiated prices, the expensive hour is almost never the routing. It is the reconciliation: who got how many, which ones came back, what the credit note should say, and which tax rate applies to the buyer in another country.
What Leadflip does instead
No ping post and no auction, stated plainly so nobody finds out after signing up.
Leads are posted straight to the partners a distribution profile selects, and the selection happens in your account. Three strategies decide it: the first match, everyone who fits, or whoever has had the least this month. Around that sit caps by day, week, month and total, time windows per partner, and duplicate checks that can count either across all partners or per partner.
The price is either a fixed amount per lead or a rate multiplied by a number on the record, and it can be set on the profile and overridden per partner where a contract differs. At the end of the period, one invoice per partner comes out of the same data, in their tax case, with credit notes for anything returned inside the deadline.
Before any of it runs, a dry run puts a real record through the current rules and names every partner along with the reason they did or did not get it.
That is the trade. If your business model needs buyers to bid on each lead, use one of the platforms above. If your prices are negotiated and your month end is the part that hurts, see how distribution works here.
Related guides
- Best Lead Distribution Platforms and Tools. Seven platforms compared on what each one actually costs.
- Lead Distribution Pricing: Per-Lead Fees vs. Flat Pricing. What per-lead billing does to your margin at volume.
- How to Build a Lead Distribution System. Routing logic, caps and delivery channels from scratch.
- How to Invoice Lead Buyers. Pricing rules, counting, and the invoice at the end of the month.