Just Let Me Buy It!: We Built the Checkout Button for Solar

“It’s time for grandma maxing.”

Last August I wrote about that sentence — what a sales exec at a national installer reportedly told his team, and what it tells you about a business where the fastest way to make money is finding a customer who can’t check your math.

The argument I made was simple. Solar is expensive because it’s sold, not bought. The guy in your living room knows what a system costs in your zip code. You don’t. That gap is worth thousands of dollars and he’s the one holding the pen.

I also said what I thought the fix was: proposal tools light enough to run anywhere and everywhere, so a homeowner could get a straight answer before anybody called them, wrote them, or knocked on their door.

Thirteen months of ranting and writing about it is enough. Earlier this month we shipped the calculator and Asa, the Atmos Solar Agent, on our solar loans page and this month, we started sharing it on our installers websites too.

You Can’t Gouge an Informed Buyer

Last year I used the example of a door knocker quoting $72,000 for a system that should have cost $40,000 less. Why does that quote work? Not because the guy is charming. It works because the homeowner has nothing to compare it to.

Give them the number and watch what happens. Now he has to answer a question he can’t answer: why is yours $40,000 more than everybody else’s? What’s he gonna say? That his Lambo tires are expensive?

That’s it. That’s the whole fix. Not another disclosure on page nine of a contract nobody reads. Not another enforcement action against one bad actor while nine more spin up behind him. Just give the homeowner the number and transform them into engaged buyers.

So What Does Solar Cost Where You Live? Ask Asa

Ask Asa and it’ll tell you the min, the mean, the median and the max for systems in your area.

Not a friendly range built to make one quote look good. The actual spread, expensive end included, so you can see where a number lands in it.

Asa will also tell you the stuff people are too polite to ask about:

• How long from signing to actually having a working system?
• How do loans vs leases work , and what changed when the solar tax credit went away?
• What am I agreeing to right now? (Nothing.)

What Asa won’t do is point you at a specific installer, a specific lender (not even us), or a specific project. No commission. No quota. No reason to send you anywhere in particular. Ask it something it shouldn’t answer and it’ll tell you to go get a real quote.

We called it an agent on purpose. In this business that word has meant the person standing on your porch. We’d like it to mean the thing standing next to you. Asa is trained on thousands of proposals, contracts, and other data from around the country. Every day, it learns and gets smarter. Train it like you would another employee. Give it your historical sales data to create a sales agent that operates 24/7 and has the context of the entire history of your company.

90% Accurate & Free: It’s an Estimate, Not a Proposal

The calculator part is simple. Address, electric bill, and you get a system sized to what you actually use. No credit pull, no obligation, nobody calls you.

Vikram Aggarwal, the founder of EnergySage floated this idea and he was right: give them a 90% accurate quote for free, charge for the surveyed design if they want one. So that’s what this is. A 90% answer. It doesn’t know about the oak tree over your garage or what shape your rafters are in.

Some roofs genuinely need a bespoke design. Most don’t. And honestly, most buyers are never going to ask what the panel layout looks like — everybody’s seen solar panels by now. They’re asking how much will this cost me and how much will it save me. You can answer that in about a minute without sending out a truck or a salesperson.

Put It Everywhere

Here’s the part I actually care about.

Our website is one channel. One small stream of homeowners amidst millions who are looking at adding solar or battery storage this year! Atmos is going to reach a rounding error of the homeowners who are about to get quoted $72,000 for a $32,000 system. A tool that closes the information gap is worth almost nothing if it only exists where we happen to have traffic.

So the point was never to put Asa on joinatmos.com. The point is to put Asa everywhere the homeowner already is.

Every strong tail installer. Local and regional installers perform the majority of the installations in the United States, but don't have the resources of the national players... until now. You’re paying for leads that were never gonna close. Let people self-select on real buying intent and put your humans on the ones who are serious. And the installers who lose when a homeowner shows up informed? They’re not your competition. They’re the ones giving solar a bad name and need to change or leave.

Every green bank and mission-oriented lender. You’re already underwriting these purchases. You’re in the best possible position to hand the borrower real numbers before they sign, and the worst possible position to explain why you didn’t.

Every nonprofit doing solar education. You’ve got the trust and you’ve got the audience. You shouldn’t have to go build software on top of that just to do your job.

We didn’t build this to be a moat. An industry where the homeowner walks in already knowing the numbers is an industry where good installers win more work at higher margins, and where the ones who need the information gap to survive don’t. That trade is fine by me. It’s also the only version of this business that ever gets close to $2/W.

If you run one of those entities and you want Asa and the calculator on your site, email us.

Still On The List: Solarize, 24/7

I’m not gonna pretend this closes the argument.

Part three of that roadmap was group buying that runs continuously. Solarize campaigns have pushed installed costs under $2/W in some markets and saved homeowners 10-30% off local prices, but they run in small discrete blocks, in a handful of places, a few times a year. There’s no technical reason a homeowner shouldn’t be able to pick, on any installer’s website, between getting served today at a premium or joining a cohort in four months at a discount.

Haven’t built it. Somebody should. We probably will.

In the meantime, go ask Asa what solar costs where you live. Takes about a minute and nobody’s going to call you.