Wood Mackenzie put a number on the thing every dealer owner already felt.
US residential solar customer acquisition cost hit $0.60 per watt in 2025 — a five-year low, propped up by everybody rushing to install before the homeowner tax credit expired. For 2026, Wood Mackenzie forecasts it surges 40% to $0.84/W.
On an 8 kW system, that's roughly $4,800 to find a customer last year and $6,700 to find one this year. Before you design anything, permit anything, or install anything. It is, for most orgs, the single largest line item that isn't hardware.
The reason isn't mysterious. With Section 25D gone, the residential market was set to contract 19% when that forecast was published in March — SEIA's Q2 update revised it to 21%. And the reps who used to work for the companies that folded didn't leave the industry — they went somewhere else. More sellers, fewer buyers, same doors. That is the definition of an expensive customer.
The lead market can't agree what a lead is worth
Here's the part that should bother you more than the price: there is no benchmark.
Pull up four different lead vendors' published pricing guides for the exact same product — a shared residential solar lead — and you'll find bands of $20–$60, $35–$125, $40–$120, and $50–$100. Same product name. Four different markets. Exclusive leads run anywhere from $85 to $350 depending on who you ask and what state you're in, with California consistently at the top. Confirmed appointments range from $150 to $450. Aged leads go for a dime.
None of those numbers are independent research. They're rate cards, published by the companies selling the thing. And that's the point: in a market with a real price, the price is discoverable. In this one, four sellers describing the same product can't land within a factor of six of each other.
What you're actually buying, when you buy a shared lead, is a position in a line. The homeowner filled out one form and is going to get called by several companies, of which you are one. The vendor's incentive is to sell that record as many times as it can be sold. Your incentive is to be first. Everything downstream of that — the response-time obsession, the auto-dialers, the burnout — is a rational response to a product designed that way.
The compliance bill lands on you, not the vendor
One correction worth making, because a lot of 2024-era advice is still floating around: the FCC's "one-to-one consent" rule — the one that would have required a homeowner's consent to name a single seller at a time, and would have broken the shared-lead model outright — never took effect. The Eleventh Circuit vacated it on January 24, 2025 in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC, holding that the Commission exceeded its statutory authority by redefining "prior express consent." The FCC later deleted the language. The pre-existing prior-express-written-consent standard is what still governs.
So the shared-lead business survived. But note what didn't change: the Do Not Call and consent obligations bind the party placing the call. That's the dealer. Not the aggregator, not the list broker, not whoever scraped the form. When you buy a list, you buy its liability, and you generally cannot see how the consent was captured or how many times the record has been sold.
That's the honest frame for the rest of this post. Leads aren't just a cost. They're a cost plus an exposure, and both of them are yours.
What GRID does instead
We give leads away. Not as a promotion — as part of how the platform works.
Every dealer org on GRID earns free leads at three milestones. The ladder is 5 / 5 / 15 — twenty-five leads total, and each rung has a definition, because a definition is the only part of an offer that's worth anything:
- 5 leads for account setup. Your org is stood up and your compliance record is approved on our side. Not "you signed up" — approved.
- 5 leads for a verified proposal. Verified means a proposal record from one of our install partners' platforms. One you keyed into your own CRM doesn't count. It's a source test, not a quality judgment — we're checking which system the record came out of, nothing else.
- 15 leads for your first funded deal. The biggest rung sits at the milestone that actually pays everyone.
You don't get all 25 at signup, and that's deliberate. Leads handed to an org that isn't set up to work them are leads that die in a spreadsheet.
Where the leads come from
Fair question, and one you should ask every vendor you buy from.
They come from our own inventory: more than 450,000 homeowner records, about 320,000 of them in California. We own the data. We're not brokering someone else's file.
What we do to it before it reaches you:
- One dealer, one lead, one time. Assignment is one-way. A lead assigned to your org leaves the pool. We don't resell it, and you're not racing four other companies to the phone.
- Geography comes from the property address, never the phone number. Mobile numbers travel — we've seen genuine Long Beach addresses carrying 916, 510, and 585 area codes. Sorting by area code puts your reps in the wrong county.
- DNC-scrubbed before assignment, and households sharing a phone number are excluded at assignment rather than quietly delivered as two leads.
- Each lead ships with a written brief — what home-improvement work the property has had done and roughly when, the trade, and the utility-bill band the homeowner reported. Enough to open a conversation with something true instead of a script.
And one thing we deliberately leave out: we never name the company that did the work. That's private. The insight is public — the property had roofing work done around a given month — and the insight is what you actually need.
What this doesn't do
Twenty-five leads is not a pipeline. It's a starting balance.
It won't replace your canvassing, it won't fill a 20-rep org, and we're not going to tell you what it converts at, because that depends entirely on your reps and we don't publish numbers we can't stand behind. What it does is take the most expensive month of a new org's life — the one where you're paying full retail for records of unknown provenance to prove to yourself the model works — and remove the cost from it.
That's consistent with the rest of how GRID is built. The platform is $0 to dealers: CRM, pipeline, e-sign, recruiting, training, commissions, compliance, the vetted installer network. We're paid on the install side of funded deals, which means we make money when your deals build and not before. Free leads aren't a loss leader in that model — they're the fastest way to get a new org to its first install, which is the only event that pays either of us.
If your org is currently buying leads and can't tell you what a closed customer costs, that's the number to go find this week. If you'd rather have the conversation with us, it's a 20-minute conversation.
The bottom line
Acquisition is going to cost the industry about 40% more this year than last, in a market with fewer buyers and no agreed price for a lead. In that environment the orgs that win are the ones that know their real cost per closed customer and refuse to pay retail for records they can't verify.
We'd rather hand you the first twenty-five and get paid when the system goes on the roof.
Sources: Wood Mackenzie, "US residential solar customer acquisition costs set to spike 40% in 2026 before gradual decline" (March 2026); SEIA / Wood Mackenzie US Solar Market Insight Q2 2026 (June 10, 2026); Morrison Foerster on Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC (January 30, 2025); lead pricing bands compiled from the 2026 published rate cards of The Leads Warehouse, RGR Marketing, Leadgen Economy and VA Horizon — cited deliberately as sellers' asking prices rather than independent market data, and deliberately not linked. Lead-inventory figures are GRID's own, current as of August 2026. GRID is a dealer operating platform and does not sell solar to homeowners. Nothing here is a representation about conversion rates or earnings; results depend on your organization.
Selling solar in this market? Run your numbers with us.
GRID is the $0 operating platform for solar dealers — tools, training, commissions, e-sign, and installer pricing negotiated on pooled network volume. One 20-minute intro call. No pressure, no runaround.
Book the intro call →