The short answer for a solar company in 2026 is no, and the two reasons have nothing to do with the complaints you have already read.
The first is that Angi is retiring the product. The shared-lead marketplace that solar installers get pitched is not a growth business inside Angi Inc. It is a business the company is deliberately shrinking, and its own filings say so in plain numbers.
The second is that the buying trigger disappeared on December 31, 2025. Every solar lead price guide currently ranking on Google was written for a market where a homeowner got 30% back from the federal government. That market ended. Some of those pages still say the credit exists.
The short answer
Do not build a solar pipeline on shared marketplace leads in 2026. If you are going to test Angi anyway, run it as a capped 90-day experiment with a written kill number, and measure cost per signed contract, not cost per lead.
Everything below is the arithmetic and the evidence behind that.
Angi is winding down the exact product you are being sold
This is the part almost nobody writing about Angi for contractors has checked, and it is public record rather than opinion.
In January 2025, Angi implemented what it calls homeowner choice. Instead of taking a homeowner's request and selling it simultaneously to a handful of pros in the radius, the homeowner picks which pros they want to hear from. That change gutted the side of the business that sells shared leads.
Here is what Angi reported for Q1 2026:
| Metric | Q1 2026 | Change vs Q1 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | $238.2M | down 3% |
| Network Revenue | $17.1M | down 56% |
| US Network Service Requests | down 55% | |
| US Network Leads | down 54% | |
| US Proprietary Service Requests | up 17% | |
| Total US Service Requests | up 5% | |
| Net result | loss of $9.0M | from $15.1M of net earnings |
Read the Network rows twice. That is the channel that historically fed the blast-to-everyone lead product. It shrank by more than half in a year while the overall business shrank 3%, and Angi describes the cause as its own homeowner choice implementation, not a market downturn. The company also took a $14.9 million restructuring charge tied to a global workforce reduction in the same quarter, and reorganized around what it calls an AI-native platform.
Watch out
If you sign a 12-month agreement for shared lead volume in a channel the vendor cut by 55% in the previous 12 months, you are committing to a fixed spend against a supply the vendor has already told investors it plans to keep reducing. That is a different risk from lead quality, and it does not show up in any review site.
For solar specifically, homeowner choice bites harder than it does for drain cleaning. When a homeowner is choosing who to talk to about a $25,000 decision, they scroll to the recognizable name with four thousand reviews. A three-truck local installer with sixty reviews does not get picked as often as it got auto-blasted. The volume you can buy is now filtered through a beauty contest you probably lose.
The credit that closed your deals expired, and Q1 hid it
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed on July 4, 2025. It terminated the Section 25D Residential Clean Energy Credit for expenditures made after calendar year 2025, seven years ahead of the schedule the Inflation Reduction Act had set. A homeowner who buys a system outright in 2026 receives no federal credit. The 48E business credit survives through the end of 2027, which is why leases and power purchase agreements are absorbing the market.
A former solar sales and lead generation operator put the consequence bluntly in an r/solar AMA before the deadline hit: "Once the tax credit is gone, primarily it's going to switch to a leasing model and financing is gonna become much harder to find lenders for unless it's a super reputable company that has really great ties with the lenders they use."
Now look at what the market data actually did, because this is where installers are getting fooled.
SEIA and Wood Mackenzie recorded 1.18 GW of residential installs in Q1 2026. That was up 6% year over year, one of the strongest residential quarters in two years. Sounds fine. Except the report explains why: customer-owned projects had to be installed, not merely interconnected, by the end of 2025 to qualify for 25D, so overflow interconnections and pre-deadline demand propped up a quarter that is normally the weakest of the year. Residential was still down 15% from Q4 2025, and the same report forecasts a 21% decline for residential in 2026.
By the numbers
Q1 2026 residential solar was a backlog burndown, not demand. The hole opens in the back half of 2026. That is precisely when installers with empty calendars start buying marketplace leads, which is precisely when everyone else is bidding for the same shrinking pool of homeowners.
The casualties are already visible. Purelight Power, a Medford, Oregon installer, notified the state in December 2025 that it was cutting 109 jobs nationwide and preparing for bankruptcy liquidation. Its CEO wrote that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act "had a significant impact on the Company's business and profitability."
What an Angi solar lead actually costs per signed contract
Angi does not publish a solar rate card. Contractor-reported figures put a shared solar request at roughly $35 to $100, at the upper end of the $15 to $85 range most trades report, alongside an annual membership near $300, a lead deposit, and in many accounts a monthly minimum. Contracts are typically 12 months with auto-renewal, 30% to 35% early termination penalties, and 60 days notice required to stop a renewal.
Now run the funnel. Take one hundred shared solar leads at $60 each, so $6,000 of spend.
| Stage | Rate | Remaining |
|---|---|---|
| Leads purchased | 100 | |
| Become sales qualified | ~20% | 20 |
| Convert to a real sit | 30% to 40% | 6 to 8 |
| Close on the sit | 20% to 30% | 1.5 to 2.4 |
| Cost per signed contract | $2,500 to $4,000 |
The 20% qualification rate is not a guess pulled from a marketing blog. An operator on r/solar working on client acquisition inside an energy company described the exact problem: "The problem for this company is that they have to call and follow up with so many dead ends, something like 80% don't become sales qualified."
Run the generous version, $50 leads and a 25% qualification rate with a 40% sit rate and a 30% close, and you get three contracts from $5,000, or about $1,667 each. That is the best case, and it still sits at or above the ceiling of what installers say they are targeting. SolarReviews reports that installers in competitive markets like California and the Northeast try to keep cost per close under $1,500, and $800 to $1,300 in emerging markets like Florida, Colorado and Texas.
And none of that counts rep time. One hundred leads at roughly twenty minutes of dialing, texting and follow-up each is about 33 hours. At a loaded $30 an hour that is another $1,000 of cost sitting on one or two closed deals.
Tip
Sanity-check any lead channel against NREL's cost benchmark instead of against your gut. NREL puts residential customer acquisition at roughly $0.48 to $0.81 per watt. On an 8 kW system that is $3,840 to $6,480 of allowable acquisition cost across your entire mix. A single channel eating $4,000 of that leaves nothing for the referrals, the canvassers and the ads that actually carry the rest of your pipeline.
The five gates an Angi form does not check
Every trade complains that marketplace leads are unqualified. In solar the word means something much more specific, because a solar deal has to clear five separate gates before it can close, and four of them have nothing to do with whether the homeowner likes you.
- Ownership. The most common disqualifier, and the fastest. A solar appointment-setting agency posting its lessons on r/solar put it first: "The biggest objection isn't 'no,' it's 'I don't own the house.' Qualifying for home ownership first is crucial."
- Roof. Age, material, structural condition and remaining life. A twenty-year-old shingle roof turns a solar sale into a re-roof conversation the homeowner did not budget for.
- Shade and orientation. Tree cover and azimuth can kill production math before you quote. This is why installers keep building irradiance heatmap tools instead of trusting form fills.
- Consumption. A homeowner with a $95 monthly bill has no payback story in most utility territories, credit or no credit.
- Credit and financing. Post-25D this is the sharpest gate. With ownership economics weakened, more deals route through leases and PPAs, and those require a credit approval the homeowner has never been screened for.
An Angi request captures a name, an address, a phone number and a rough job description. It checks gate zero. Everything else is your rep's unpaid labor, applied to a contact that three or four competitors received at the same moment.
Contractors describe the downstream effect the same way across trades. One HVAC operator in a heavily upvoted r/hvacadvice thread on Angi and HomeAdvisor: "Most of the time it has misled the actual homeowner into thinking they can get quick info or pricing as plan to begin thinking about potentially doing something. They aren't answering the screening questions honestly. Not worth. Tire kicker central."
Another commenter in the same thread named a structural disadvantage that applies directly to solar, where national brands compete against local installers in every market: "Large companies can cut deals to get the leads first and handle the call before they even sell it to you too."
If your qualification happens on the phone instead of on the form, you are paying reps to do filtering that a page can do for free. We build the conversion page and the qualifying form that arrive with the roof, the bill and the ownership answer already attached, then track each lead through to signed contract so you can see cost per deal by source.
Solar has no fallback job
This is the difference that makes marketplace leads worse for solar than for any other trade on the platform, and it is the one that never appears in generic Angi reviews.
In roofing, a dead replacement lead can still become an $800 repair. In HVAC, a homeowner who will not replace the system will still pay for a diagnostic and a capacitor. In plumbing, almost every bad lead has a $250 version. Those small jobs do not make the channel profitable, but they recover part of the spend and they put a customer record in your database.
Solar has no small version. The homeowner either signs a $20,000 to $40,000 contract or they do not. There is no consolation invoice, no service call, no maintenance plan to recover the acquisition cost against. Every unqualified solar lead is a total loss.
That asymmetry is why the same cost-per-lead number that is merely disappointing for a plumber is genuinely dangerous for a solar company. It is also why the standard "just respond in five minutes" advice is calibrated to the wrong trade. Speed wins an emergency furnace call. It does not win a solar deal, because a homeowner comparing twenty-five-year financial commitments is not buying from whoever dialed first. They are buying from whoever produced the most credible proposal within thirty to ninety days. If you want the longer version of that argument, we broke down the conversion failure points in why your solar leads are not converting.
When Angi genuinely makes sense for a solar company
Three narrow cases, and they are narrow on purpose.
You are brand new with no review history. A company with four Google reviews cannot rank and cannot get chosen. Buying a handful of first jobs to generate real reviews is a legitimate, temporary use of paid inventory. Cap it at a fixed dollar amount and treat the reviews as the deliverable.
You are in a thin market. In a rural territory where the shared pool is two installers rather than eight, the arithmetic changes materially. Ask the rep how many pros in your zip code hold the solar category, and get the answer before you sign.
You sell adjacent small-ticket work. If you also do battery retrofits, panel cleaning, service on orphaned systems or electrical work, you have the fallback job that pure-play installers lack. That changes the loss profile on an unqualified lead from total to partial.
Outside those three, the money buys more pipeline somewhere else.
Where the money goes instead
Ranked by realistic cost per signed contract, not by how easy it is to start.
| Channel | What it costs | Why it beats shared leads |
|---|---|---|
| Your existing install base | Near zero | Referrals and battery retrofits from customers who already trusted you once |
| Google Local Services Ads and search | $50 to $150 per lead | The lead is yours, there is no annual term, and intent is self-selected |
| Your own conversion page plus paid traffic | Ad spend plus build | You keep the contact, the answers and the data forever |
| Exclusive or appointment-grade solar inventory | $100 to $250 exclusive, $150 to $500 for a booked appointment | Someone did the qualification work before handoff |
| Shared marketplace leads | $35 to $100 | You are buying a starting position in a race |
One warning on the fourth row. The word "exclusive" carries no fixed meaning in this market. A lead vendor analysis comparing four published solar price guides found the bands do not even agree with each other: one publisher prices an exclusive solar lead at $40 to $100 while another prices a shared real-time lead at $40 to $120, so one guide's exclusive band sits almost entirely inside another guide's shared band. Never accept a quote until the vendor answers two questions in one sentence: how many buyers get this contact, and who spoke to the homeowner before I did. Our breakdown of exclusive versus shared solar leads covers the contract language to ask for.
The 90-day test protocol
If you are going to run the experiment anyway, run it like an experiment.
- Write the kill number first. Decide the cost per signed contract at which you stop, in writing, before you spend a dollar. For most installers that number is $1,500.
- Cap the spend. Refuse any annual term you cannot exit. If the only offer is 12 months with a 30% to 35% termination charge, that is your answer.
- Tag the source. One source field in your CRM, populated on every lead, no exceptions. If you cannot report cost per signed contract by source, you are not testing anything.
- Time-box qualification. Build the five gates into a two-minute script. Ownership, roof age, shade, bill amount, financing appetite. Disqualify fast and stop paying reps to be polite to non-buyers.
- Measure at 90 days, not 30. Solar sales cycles run 30 to 90 days. A 30-day read will look worse than reality and a 12-month contract will look better than reality.
- Compare against a control. Run the same budget through Local Services Ads or your own conversion page for the same 90 days. Absolute numbers mean nothing without the alternative next to them.
Be this rigid because lead vendors are structurally advantaged in any argument about attribution. Angi's Q1 2026 quarter reported total US Service Requests up 5% while the shared-lead channel fell more than half. Both facts are true, and only one is about the product you would be buying. Bring your own numbers.
The bottom line
Buying Angi leads for solar in 2026 means paying $35 to $100 for a shared, unqualified contact, in a channel the vendor cut by 55% last year, to sell a product whose federal incentive expired eight months ago, into a residential market forecast to contract 21%, with no small job to fall back on when the deal dies.
None of those five conditions is fixable by responding faster. Four of them were not true two years ago, which is exactly why the advice you find on page one still reads like it is 2024.
Spend the same money on inventory you own, on qualification that happens before the phone call, and on the install base you already have. That mix is boring, and it is the only one that survives a 21% year.