INDIANAPOLIS — Any intrepid consumer can’t help but be intrigued by the promise — and nerve — of Angie’s List.

Like Yelp, which had its initial public offering Friday, it allows you to search for reviews of useful services near you and contribute your own evaluations, too.

But unlike Yelp, you are not anonymous when you praise or eviscerate a provider on the Angie’s List website, and the company requires paid subscriptions in cities where it has been up and running for a while.

That business model makes it unique. There are few companies of its size that are built entirely around user-generated content yet ultimately charge its contributors to access just about all of it.

Yet despite this chutzpah, Angie’s List has seen its subscription renewal rates grow in the past few years, even as it’s tripled the number of cities it covers and built sections of its site that may not have much content yet.

Thanks to its own initial public offering in November and the data it released, we now know that its paying members, more than 1 million of them today, had an average renewal rate of 75 percent in 2011, up from 62 percent in 2008.

Given that the company’s strong suit is in high-ticket service providers who can fix and remodel your home, plenty of people may only want to be Angie’s List members when they’re in the middle of a move or remodeling.

Membership prices range from free (in cities where Angie’s List is new and needs to add more reviews) to $62.40 a year in its 34 most mature markets. That price gets people access both to the household services lists and the newer health one that includes doctors and massage therapists. Those who wish to review services providers grade them from A to F in six categories, including “overall experience.”

Unlike Yelp, which is strongest in restaurant listings, bars and the like, Angie’s List focuses on what it refers to as “high-cost-of-failure” services, things that could cost you plenty to redo or fix, or at least burn hours of your time if they go awry.

So from the start, the company has refused to take anonymous reviews. Angie’s List site users don’t see contributors’ real names, but you need one to register, and service providers who want to respond on the site to a complaint or compliment can ask the company for your name.

In its securities filing before it went public, Angie’s List, in what could have been a direct message to anyone thinking about investing in Yelp, put it this way: “The anonymity of the Internet renders it inherently susceptible to outright manipulation by unscrupulous service providers and unhappy customers, so consumers have limited means for discerning which information they should trust.”

That’s pretty heavy breathing for a Securities and Exchange Commission document, but Roger Lee, a general partner at the venture capital firm Battery Ventures, doesn’t think it was over the top given the fakery for sale out there in the world.

“There are booming businesses overseas that charge you anywhere from $3 to $5 to write a glowingly positive review,” he said.

No site can stop all such shenanigans, but forcing people to pay and register with a real name helps. Angie’s List also has Evan Hock, who leads a team that uses algorithms and human intervention to sniff out problematic reviews each day.

“We trust the data we see, and we’re used to being lied to,” said Hock, who aspired to the ministry before becoming the confession-seeker-in-chief for Angie’s List. “We’re the guerrillas of reliable data warfare.”

Angie’s List now makes the majority of its revenue from advertising plus its cut of Groupon-like deals that it introduced last year. Service providers who advertise must also offer some sort of a discount to members.

The company can apparently make such demands because of the focused opportunity it offers.

“If I’m a plumber, and I can put an ad in the Yellow Pages or I can put it in a place where people are paying money to find plumbers, the choice is pretty obvious,” said Lee, the venture capitalist.

Still, Angie’s List is not always the best venue for every advertiser and may not serve every consumer best either.

Consider Brooklyn, where Angie’s List competes with entrenched, hyperlocal service sites like Park Slope Parents and Brownstoner, which is focused on home purchases, maintenance and improvement.

Antonio Ceriello Electric advertises on both Angie’s List and Brownstoner and gets more leads from Brownstoner, which allows anonymous reader contributions.

“People may feel more comfortable going to a forum where everyone can just really put an opinion out there,” said Rosalia Ceriello, the office manager at Antonio Ceriello. She was quick to add that the far more expensive ads the company places on Angie’s List (more than $3,000 worth annually) pay for themselves quickly too.

“Clearly they’ve done a great job,” said Jonathan Butler, Brownstoner’s proprietor, of Angie’s List. “But I’m more local and accessible than Angie, who is supposedly in thousands of cities. They can actually see me at the flea market, so there is a greater sense of intimacy.”

This is something that Angie’s List has heard before, and the company hopes that argument fades away over time.

“Once we start really deepening our penetration, then he’s not competing against Angie’s List,” said Oesterle, who is now the chief executive. “He’s competing against the collection of Angie’s List members, and it turns out they’re as local as it gets.”

Until Angie’s List reaches that point, I plan to continue availing myself of both the locally owned listing and review sites and Angie’s List, where the discounts have already paid for the annual subscription many times over in my household.

But that isn’t to say that you won’t ever get the runaround on the site, even from the A-rated service providers. As I raced to make a flight Thursday afternoon, an Angie’s List staff member and I used the local list to find me a ride to the Indianapolis Airport.

The clear winner and ratings champion, the A-rated Tommy’s Taxi, wasn’t available because Tommy was at the drugstore with a customer who needed to pick up a prescription. The phone number for the local cab company on Angie’s List site was busy. Was it incorrect? There wasn’t really time to investigate.

Growing impatient, I tried the local branch of Carey (which was also on the list, though it didn’t have as many reviews as Tommy) and mentally prepared myself for a sky-high fee for a ride in a Lincoln Town Car. The dispatcher offered a shared ride for $16.95 instead, and the driver turned up earlier than promised with a stretch limo, which I ended up sharing with no one.

I plan on giving them an A.