Install-base economics
What is your install base worth?
Every system you have ever installed is a customer you already won, and it can pay you twice: a Solar Assurance plan the homeowner subscribes to every month, and the repair jobs monitoring finds before the homeowner ever notices something is wrong. This page does the arithmetic for both.
Start with the recurring line. Move the sliders.
- $96,000
- Solar Assurance revenue / year
- $7,200
- Sol AI cost / year (at $1.50/system/mo)
- $88,800
- Net new recurring revenue
400 systems → $96,000/year of Solar Assurance revenue against $7,200/year of Sol AI cost.
revenue = systems × price × 12
cost = systems × $1.50 × 12
net = revenue − cost
No adoption-rate assumption is baked in. These figures assume every system on the slider is on a Solar Assurance plan — if you expect 60% take-up, set the slider to 60% of the systems you've installed.
The recurring maths
Three numbers, no assumptions.
Solar Assurance revenue is the number of systems on a plan, times the monthly price the homeowner pays, times twelve. US installers usually price these plans between $10 and $25 a month, covering monitoring, fault alerts and a periodic performance report.
The cost side is the monitoring platform. Sol AI charges $1.50 per system per month, so annual cost is the number of systems times $18.00. The install base is already paid for. Those trucks rolled years ago. The spread between the two figures is margin on work that is already done.
A 400-system install base at $20 a month is $96,000 a year of Solar Assurance revenue against $7,200 a year of monitoring cost. It survives being written on a napkin, which is the test that matters. It is also why an installer with a large base and a slow sales quarter has more revenue available than they think.
No adoption rate is baked into these figures. They assume every system on the slider is on a plan. To model partial take-up, set the systems slider to the number of homes you expect to convert rather than everything you have installed. An adoption multiplier hidden inside a vendor calculator is a number you cannot check.
Service revenue
Never miss a paying repair job again.
Every fault Sol AI finds in the systems you've installed becomes a customer call you get to make. You bill the visit and the repair at your own rates — the customer gets a working system and someone to thank.
- 1
Sol AI flags a fault
classified, and priced in plain terms
- 2
You call your customer
before they ever notice
- 3
“Please fix it.”
a known fault is an easy yes
- 4
Truck rolls, repair billed
your crew, your rates
- 5
System healthy again
and it's your name they thank
Pre-set to typical numbers — drag if yours differ:
Extra revenue you could be billing
+$10,000/month
$120,000 a year
10 repair jobs found for you each month
1,000 systems × 1% × $1,000 = $10,000 a month
Every market's numbers are different — drag the bars to match yours. What Sol AI does is find the work.
The service revenue is yours — we don't take a cut.
And that's only the repair engine — Solar AssuranceSolar AssuranceA simple monthly plan — $10–25 — you sell to homeowners. It means: someone is actually watching my solar system. We do the watching, you get the service call, and your brand is on every report — and most of that monthly line is yours.Customers who feel looked after renew, refer their neighbors — and hand you a closing line the other bid doesn't have: “every system we install is watched for its lifetime.” subscriptions add their own line.
FAQ
Questions, answered
How do solar installers make recurring revenue from systems they've already installed?
By selling the homeowner a monitoring and Solar Assurance plan on the system already on their roof, typically $10–25 per month. The installer's cost is the monitoring platform — Sol AI charges $1.50 per system per month — and the spread is recurring margin on work already done. A 400-system install base at $20/month is $96,000 a year of Solar Assurance revenue against $7,200 a year of monitoring cost.
What is a solar installer's existing install base worth as recurring revenue?
Multiply the number of systems by the monthly Solar Assurance price by twelve, then subtract monitoring cost of $1.50 per system per month. The install base is already paid for, so the only new cost is monitoring. No adoption-rate assumption should be hidden in that figure — model partial take-up by using the number of homes you expect to convert, not everything you have installed.
What happens to solar monitoring when an installer goes out of business?
The systems keep producing, but nobody is watching them. The manufacturer's app still shows basic production to the homeowner, and faults that need interpretation — a dead string, a failing optimiser, gradual soiling — go unnoticed because no one is comparing output against an expected baseline. Any monitoring platform that can connect to the inverter brand through its cloud API can adopt those systems without a site visit, which is why orphaned systems are a route to market for installers who can take them on.
What is Sol AI?
Sol AI is a monitoring platform that builds a digital twin — a live model — of every solar system an installer has put in, across every supported inverter brand, in one dashboard. Because the model knows what each system should be producing under today's weather, Sol AI can flag the gap when real output falls short, classify the fault with an estimated dollar cost, and explain it to homeowners in plain language. It currently watches 504 systems totalling 19.8 MW — 399 of them installed by other companies — checked roughly every 11 minutes.