How we make money
Most solar sites bury this page because the honest version reads badly. Ours doesn’t, so here it is — along with how the rest of the industry is funded, which is the part nobody prints.
Updated
The site is free for homeowners. Run your numbers, read the verdict, close the tab — that costs nothing and nobody calls you. If you decide you want an installer, we place you with one licensed company that serves your address and name it to you first. You approve the introduction, or you don’t. If you do, we may be paid for it.
An introduction fee is a real incentive and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. The rest of this page is the industry it sits in, and the reasons that fee can’t reach the arithmetic.
How everyone else gets paid
Type “solar savings calculator” into a search bar and most of what comes back is a lead generator wearing a calculator costume. The math on screen is set dressing. The product is you.
- 01
The form is the product, not the calculator
Those sites make nothing from the estimate. They make money when your name, address, phone and email become a record that can be sold. Everything before the phone field exists to get you to the phone field.
- 02
Your record goes to auction
The moment you submit, that record is priced and offered to buyers — installers, or brokers who resell to installers. Homeowners with big bills, good roofs and expensive electricity fetch more. You were valued and sold in the time it took the spinner to finish.
- 03
It sells more than once
A single record is routinely sold to several companies at the same time, and it can be resold afterwards down a chain of aggregators. That is the whole explanation for the week of calls from numbers you don’t recognise, the ones that keep coming after you’ve already signed with somebody. You didn’t get on one list. You got on a market.
- 04
The installer has to earn that money back
Sales cost gets built into the price of the system, along with the cost of every lead the company bought that never closed. Buying leads is expensive, so the pitch that follows has to be aggressive enough to justify it. The pressure in your living room isn’t a personality trait. It’s a budget line.
- 05
Paid whether or not solar was right for you
Here is the part that matters. The site was paid at step 2 — when your phone rang, not when a system went on your roof, and not when it saved you a dollar. Whether solar made any sense for your house is, financially, none of its business.
This is why a lead-gen site can never tell you solar is a bad idea. Not because the people there are villains — because a “no” is the one outcome that pays them nothing. A business does not build the thing that empties its own till.
It also explains the tells. Free tools cost real money to run — data, maps, engineers, servers. If a site is free, gives no price for anything, and every path through it ends at a phone field, the funding question is already answered. You’re looking at the acquisition cost of a lead, spent on you.
And the word to watch is “free” attached to an estimate. An estimate is arithmetic. Arithmetic doesn’t need your phone number.
What’s different here
Same industry, different plumbing. Four structural things, and they’re structural on purpose — a promise to behave well is worth roughly nothing if the money is arranged the other way.
- 01
The numbers exist before any handoff does
Your estimate is computed and shown to you before there is anything to be paid for. It comes out of a published model — installed cost per watt, your state electricity rate from EIA, peak sun hours from NREL, whatever state, local or utility money is still open at your address. No installer is an input to that calculation, because at that point no installer is involved.
- 02
The verdict is allowed to say no
Renting. A bill under a hundred dollars. Heavy shade. A roof that needs replacing first. Each of those produces a page telling you solar isn’t worth it for you right now — and then the page ends. There’s no form under it. A homeowner the model disqualifies is never shown one, which means the no costs us the fee and we’ve built it that way anyway.
- 03
One company, named to you first
Your details don’t drop into a pool, because there is no pool and no auction. We place you with a single licensed installer that serves your address, and you get its name and licence number in an email before it has been given anything about you. Approve that specific company and they call. Ignore the email and nothing happens — no follow-up, no second name, no list.
- 04
Nothing scales with your spend
No percentage of the system, no per-kilowatt kicker, no bonus for a battery. Making your system bigger doesn’t earn anyone here another dollar, so nothing on this site has a reason to push you upward.
The bar a company clears to be placed with anyone: a contractor licence current with the state board, with the number printed so you can check it yourself; general liability and workers’ compensation read off the certificate rather than off the website; crews that install in your county rather than selling the job onward to whoever is cheapest that month; and equipment quoted by model, with a battery priced as its own line if you want one.
This takes days, not minutes — usually about a week. If no company covering your address clears that bar, you get an email saying so instead of a second-best name to keep the machine fed. You keep the analysis either way.
The conflict, stated plainly
An installer paying us for an introduction is a real incentive pointing in one direction: more introductions. Anyone telling you they have no incentives is either not being paid or not being straight. So don’t take the promise. Look at where the incentive is blocked.
What we won’t do is publish a dollar figure we’d be amending every time a market changed. The part that actually affects you is that the figure doesn’t move with your system size, your quote, or your answers — so there is no version of your inputs that pays better than another.
What we will never do
✕ Sell or resell your contact details. Not to aggregators, not to brokers, not to a second installer when the first goes quiet — unless you ask us to look again.
✕ Run an auction. Your information is never priced, bid on, or offered to more than one company. There is no pool to drop you into.
✕ Take payment for placement or ranking. No company can buy its way onto your screen and there is no sponsored tier. An offer to pay for position tells us something useful about the company making it.
✕ Let a fee change what the calculator says. Same inputs, same output, regardless of who covers your area or what they pay. If that ever stopped being true, this page would be a lie and the rest of the site would be worthless.
✕ Ask for your number to show you arithmetic. The estimate is on screen before any contact field appears, and it stays yours whether or not you fill one in.
Ask this of any solar site
Use it on us. Then use it on the next four tabs you have open. It takes about ninety seconds and it is the cheapest consumer protection available in this industry.
How many companies get my information?
If the answer is three to five, or “up to four quotes,” that is an auction described politely. Look for a number, and look for it in writing.
Do I see the company’s name before they see mine?
Nearly nobody does this, and the reason is that a named company can be refused. If you only learn who they are when they call, you were sold.
Are you paid when I fill in the form, or later?
Paid at the form means paid whether or not solar suited your house. It is the single most predictive question on this list.
Show me a result where the answer is don’t buy.
Ask them to produce one. A tool that has no way of reaching “no” is not a tool, it is a funnel with charts.
What does the model assume, and can I see the inputs?
Cost per watt, electricity rate, sun hours, degradation, which incentives are counted. If the assumptions aren’t stated, the output can’t be checked.
Is the federal credit still in your numbers?
The 30% residential credit (IRC Sec. 25D) ended for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025. A calculator still quietly subtracting it is either out of date or hoping you are.
Where does my data go, in one sentence?
If the privacy policy needs a paragraph with the words “marketing partners” in it, that paragraph is the business model.
Our answers, in order: one, yes, later, the verdict page tells people not to buy, published on every cost page, no, and read it here.
Does the fee change your estimate?
No, and here is the check you can run yourself. The model and its assumptions are printed on every cost page, so you can redo the arithmetic without us. The federal residential clean energy credit (IRC Sec. 25D) is not in it — that credit ended for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025, and pretending otherwise would flatter every payback number on the site by years.
An estimate is still not a quote. Only somebody who has looked at your roof can price it. If their number lands far from ours, the useful question is which of our assumptions is wrong for your house — and they should be able to name it.
Contact
Questions about the fee, the bar, or the company we placed you with: hello@killmyenergybill.com. If any line on this page stops being true, it gets changed here first. Operated by Kill My Energy Bill.
What we collect and what gets shared: privacy policy.