In a two-sided marketplace, it's critical you create liquidity as fast as possible. Before focusing on you're going to monetize the service, it's crucial that you test the core interaction such that you know you have a scaleable business.

You've tried to test an idea around selling subscriptions that seems to have given you what you need to know. Contractors are unwilling to pay you upfront for the promise of leads.

I would strip out that requirement, and make sure that contractors are willing to bid on the contract using your site for free. If that piece can't be validated, there are bigger problems. But if it's validated, you can then look at other revenue experiments, the most obvious being to charge a small fee per each job accepted through your service.

I'm happy to look at the site and in a brief call, talk to you about how you can ensure the core concept is validated by user actions and how to test multiple revenue experiments to find the right model for your marketplace.

There are many other ways to experiment with pricing once you know that both sides