What Should an 18-Person Solar Installation Company Actually Pay for Software?

Most trades don't spend more on advertising than on every other software tool combined. Residential solar does. Google Local Services Ads, the pay-per-lead program that dominates local search results for "solar installer near me," runs $2,500/mo on its own — more than the entire core-operations, finance, and admin pillars added together for an 18-person shop. That single line item is why a generic "software cost" estimate is almost useless here: it either ignores lead-gen spend entirely, or treats it like a rounding error.

Here's what we actually see, tool by tool and pillar by pillar, when we run the numbers for a residential solar installation company around 18 employees — a crew size where a company is running multiple install teams but still deciding case-by-case whether every specialty tool earns its monthly fee.

Sales & Marketing: $3,215-3,565/mo — where the lead-gen budget lives

This pillar is the outlier for solar, and it isn't close. Google Local Services Ads ($2,500/mo) is priced as pay-per-lead, so the fee scales with how many booked consultations a shop wants each month — the failure mode isn't overpaying for the platform, it's running that spend without CallRail ($200/mo) attached, which means nobody can tell whether a $2,500/mo ad bill produced 40 booked consultations or 4. HubSpot ($450/mo) is the CRM tracking each of those leads from first consultation through design, financing approval, permitting, and install handoff — skip it and a sold deal can sit invisible between "financing approved" and "permit submitted" for weeks with nobody chasing it.

The one place this pillar quietly doubles up is the design-and-proposal tool. Aurora Solar ($350/mo) and OpenSolar ($0/mo) both do remote shading analysis and financed/cash proposal generation — the whole point of either one is letting a rep close a deal without a site visit. They compete for the same job, so running both isn't extra capability, it's two proposal formats confusing the CRM handoff and two logins the design team has to remember which lead lives in. Mailchimp ($65/mo) is the cheap piece — consultation follow-ups and post-install maintenance reminders — and it's usually the first thing cut when a shop trims budget, which is a mistake, since it's the lowest-cost-per-booked-appointment tool in the entire pillar.

Core Operations: $600-1,050/mo — the pillar generic tools can't fully cover

Enerflo ($500/mo) is doing a job no generic project-management tool replicates: managing the handoff from sold deal through site survey, permitting, install scheduling, and inspection in one place. The common mistake is trying to run that handoff in a general tool like ClickUp alone — it can track tasks, but it has no concept of permit status or AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction) compliance, so permit delays become invisible until a crew shows up to a job that isn't cleared to install.

SolarAPP+ ($150/mo) only pays for itself where it's actually available — it's an instant online permitting platform, but it only works in participating jurisdictions. A shop that expanded into a new county without checking SolarAPP+ coverage there is paying $150/mo for a tool doing nothing in that market, while still eating the weeks-long manual permit backlog it was supposed to eliminate. ClickUp ($100/mo) coordinates crew scheduling and equipment ordering across concurrent job sites. Samsara ($300/mo) is the one tool in this pillar worth questioning at 18 employees specifically — GPS fleet tracking earns its cost once you're coordinating several crews and trucks across a service area, but a shop running two or three vehicles out of one yard is often better off with manual mileage logs until the fleet grows.

Finance: $370-469/mo

QuickBooks Online (Plus) ($90/mo) is the general ledger virtually every small installer's bookkeeper already works in. Gusto (Plus) ($280/mo) runs payroll for a crew mixing hourly installers, licensed electricians, and salaried sales staff — misclassifying a licensed electrician as a flat-rate contractor instead of running them through proper payroll is a common and expensive mistake as crews grow. Ramp ($0/mo) issues fee-free corporate cards with automatic expense categorization for panel and inverter purchases; the failure mode it fixes is a crew lead using a personal card for job materials and the receipt never making it back to job-costing, which quietly erodes margin on every job it happens to. Bill.com ($99/mo) is the one line worth treating as optional at this size — it automates vendor bill approval for equipment distributors and subcontracted electricians, but a shop with a handful of steady vendors and a bookkeeper who already has a rhythm may not need the automation yet.

Admin & Security: $515/mo

Google Workspace (Business Standard) ($220/mo) covers email, shared calendar, and Drive for sales, design, and install teams. 1Password Business ($95/mo) stops staff from reusing or texting passwords for permitting portals and CRM logins — with multiple jurisdictions each running their own permitting portal, that's a real, specific risk, not a generic one. Huntress Managed EDR ($120/mo) puts 24/7 human-monitored threat detection on office PCs and the field-crew tablets that run Enerflo and SolarAPP+ on job sites — those tablets are genuine endpoints connected to permitting and financing data, and "it's just a field tablet" is exactly the assumption that leaves them unmanaged. DocuSign ($80/mo) handles e-signature for install contracts, financing paperwork, and interconnection agreements, sent from the office or during an in-home consultation.

What this adds up to

Add it up and a genuinely optimized stack for an 18-person solar installer usually lands somewhere in the $4,700-5,599/mo range — but we regularly see installers paying $6,900-8,600/mo for the same functional coverage. The gap almost never comes from needing more capability; it comes from three repeatable mistakes.

The fastest way to see where your specific stack lands against these numbers is to run the free audit — it uses your actual headcount and current spend, not a generic estimate.