How we make money

We don't do covert lead-gen. We don't sell your form inputs. We don't deliberately bias a calculator's output because a sponsor would prefer a different answer. If a battery beats a diverter for your setup, we say so even when a battery company is sponsoring us.

This rule is the entire reason the site exists. Most solar advice sites on the AU internet are run by installers or quote brokers. They show you the answer that pays them best. We're trying to build the opposite of that.

Right now the site costs us about $20/month in hosting (Vercel, Supabase, the registrar) and earns us nothing. There are no ads, no affiliate links, no sponsorships, no email captures. This is a side project run on personal time, described honestly because that's relevant context for any number we report.

Once the calculators have an audience and we've written enough content to be discoverable, the first revenue layer is passive affiliate links. Recommended smart plugs, energy-monitoring gear, that sort of thing, on Amazon AU and a small number of vendor sites. We only recommend products we'd use ourselves and the recommendation is the same whether it's an affiliate link or not. Every affiliate link is marked.

We'll also offer an optional premium tier (a low annual fee) that gets you saved profiles, alerts when tariffs change, and access to deeper analyses. The free calculators stay free forever. Premium is extra, not gated.

Once we have a few thousand regular users we'll consider 1–3 transparent sponsorships from diverter or battery manufacturers. The deal is explicit:

• The sponsor is named on the page where they appear.
• Editorial independence is contractually preserved.
• Sponsors don't see calculator outputs they could bias.
• If a sponsor's product is the wrong call for a given household, the calculator still says so.

We'll also start licensing the calculator engine to manufacturers and installers who want to embed it on their own sites. Flat annual licensing, no usage tracking, no funnelling back to us.

By Year 3 there might be enough audience to do opt-in, user-controlled lead handoff to installers, where you ask us to pass your details to three local installers and we get a referral fee. Note the wording: opt-in, user-controlled. This is the opposite of how SolarQuotes works.

We'll also explore B2B data products: aggregated, anonymised insight sold to retailers, network operators, and DePIN networks. No personally identifiable data, no inputs traceable to individual households. The aggregate dataset is the genuinely valuable long-term asset, and we're patient about building it honestly.

• No covert lead-gen. The SolarQuotes-style "run our calculator, get three installers calling you in the next hour" model is the failure case we exist to fix.
• No selling raw inputs. Your postcode and solar setup never leave our database in a form anyone could resell.
• No paid placement that influences calculator output. A sponsor cannot buy a better suitability score.
• No mandatory accounts. The calculators work without signing up. Ever.
• No dark patterns. If the answer for you is "don't buy anything," the calculator says that.

This page is updated before any new revenue stream goes live, not after. If you visit this site six months from now and the page still describes only affiliate links plus a premium tier, that's still all we're doing. If you see something on this page that's missing from the list of revenue streams above, we owe you an update.