Fleet economics
What is your install base worth?
Every system you have ever installed is a customer you already won. Monitoring turns that base into recurring revenue without selling anything new. Move the sliders.
- $96,000
- Care-plan 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 care-plan 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 care plan — if you expect 60% take-up, set the slider to 60% of your fleet.
The maths
Three numbers, no assumptions.
Care-plan 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 $15 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 care-plan 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 fleet slider to the number of homes you expect to convert rather than your whole fleet. An adoption multiplier hidden inside a vendor calculator is a number you cannot check.
FAQ
Questions, answered
How do solar installers make recurring revenue from systems they've already installed?
By selling the homeowner a monitoring and care plan on the system already on their roof, typically $15–25 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 care-plan 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 care-plan 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 your whole fleet.
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 fleets 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 of every solar system an installer has put in, across every inverter brand, in one dashboard. It calculates weather-adjusted expected output per site and per string, classifies faults with a dollar figure attached, and explains them to homeowners in plain language. It currently watches 464 systems totalling 13.9 MW, polled roughly every 11 minutes.