Shared solar leads cost $25 to $100. Exclusive solar leads cost $100 to $250. Every guide on this keyword gives you that table, quotes a higher close rate on exclusive, and tells you exclusive wins.
Then run the arithmetic those same guides publish. Service Hero's 2026 channel breakdown prices a shared lead at $65 with roughly a 6 percent lead-to-sale rate, which is about $1,080 per closed install. It prices an exclusive vendor lead at $175 with roughly a 15 percent rate, which is about $1,170 per closed install. The article's own FAQ concludes that "exclusive leads almost always win on cost per closed deal." Its own table says shared wins, by $90.
That $90 is the entire argument you have been having with your vendor. Two other numbers in solar right now are worth many multiples of it, and almost nobody buying leads is looking at either.
The short answer
Buy exclusive if your bottleneck is reaching people. Buy shared if your bottleneck is closing them. Exclusivity buys you one thing and one thing only: it removes the other four installers from the race to first contact. If your team already dials within minutes and your contact rate is healthy, you are paying two to three times the price to win a race you were winning.
Then stop tuning that dial and go fix the two things that moved under you this year: what happens to your lead 30 days after you buy it, and whether your lead source can qualify a homeowner who is going to sign a lease rather than a loan.
What each product actually costs in solar in 2026
| Product | Typical price | What you are buying |
|---|---|---|
| Aged record | $0.10 to $10 | A form fill already worked and resold, 30 days or older |
| Shared marketplace lead | $25 to $100 | A form fill also sent to 2 to 5 other installers |
| Real-time lead | $40 to $120 | A fresh form fill, often still shared |
| Exclusive marketplace lead | $100 to $250 | The same form fill, routed to you only |
| Inbound call | $100 to $300 or more | The homeowner live on the phone |
| Booked appointment | $150 to $500 | A time on a calendar, set by someone else |
| Door-to-door appointment | $200 to $400 or more | A canvasser-generated set |
Those bands come from ActiveProspect's 2026 solar lead cost breakdown, which compiles figures published by The Leads Warehouse and Enervio.
Note what the labels do not tell you. Elevarus put four published price guides side by side and found RGR Marketing pricing an exclusive lead at $40 to $100 while The Leads Warehouse prices a real-time, often-shared lead at $40 to $120. One publisher's exclusive band sits almost entirely inside another's shared band. A $75 quote is meaningless until someone says how many buyers get the contact.
Watch out
The word "shared" never carries a number. One vendor means two installers. Another means five. Those are different products at the same price. Make the vendor say the integer out loud before you compare anything.
Run both products to the end and the gap nearly closes
The reason exclusive looks like an obvious win is that the price gap is compared against the close-rate gap in isolation, and both are real. Getlead reports appointment set rates of 40 to 60 percent on exclusive leads against 25 to 40 percent on shared, with contact rates of 50 to 70 percent on quality leads. Those are meaningful differences.
They stop being meaningful once you multiply them by price. Getlead's own worked example: a $50 shared lead at a 30 percent sit rate costs $167 per appointment, and a $200 exclusive lead at a 50 percent sit rate costs $400 per appointment. Whether that extra $233 is worth it depends on your close rate at the kitchen table, which is a number about your reps, not your vendor.
Carry it one stage further to cost per closed install and, in the published numbers, the two products converge:
| Product | Price | Published lead-to-sale | Cost per closed install |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared marketplace | $65 | ~6% | ~$1,080 |
| Exclusive vendor | $175 | ~15% | ~$1,170 |
Service Hero labels those close rates industry estimates rather than measured data, and that caveat is fair. It is also the point. Every exclusive-versus-shared comparison you can find is built on borrowed conversion rates, and the conclusion flips on a single percentage point. SolarReviews, which sells leads, puts normal lead-to-sale conversion at around 6 percent and shows a California client converting 92 purchased leads into 8 jobs, an 8.6 percent rate it calls a little above average.
Borrow a 15 percent close rate and exclusive looks brilliant. Borrow 6 percent and it does not. Your own number is the only one that predicts your result, and if you cannot state it by source this week, you are not actually in a position to have this argument yet.
Exclusivity in solar has a published expiry date
This is the part the comparison articles skip, and it is checkable in about a minute.
Aged Lead Store publishes its aged solar lead pricing in tiers: records aged 30 to 85 days sell for $1.20 to $1.50, records aged 86 to 365 days sell for $0.35 to $0.40, and anything older starts at $0.17. Those records are not a separate species. They are yesterday's leads, including the exclusive ones, coming back to market once the original buyer stopped working them.
So the $200 exclusive lead you bought in March is inventory your competitor can buy in May for about a dollar thirty. You did not buy a homeowner. You bought roughly 30 days of head start, and the resale price of what you bought is public.
By the numbers
An exclusive solar lead retains under 1 percent of its purchase price once it ages 30 to 85 days. Aged Lead Store also notes that most aged records received only 1 to 3 follow-up attempts from the original buyer, meaning the majority were never properly worked before being resold.
That second number is the uncomfortable one. If most exclusive leads get fewer than four contact attempts before their buyer moves on, exclusivity was never the constraint. Follow-up depth was. Paying a premium to be the only caller, and then calling twice, is the most expensive way to buy nothing.
In solar, "shared" is what the homeowner asked for
Here is where solar diverges sharply from the trades it usually gets compared to. In restoration, the homeowner is standing in a flooded kitchen and hires whoever answers first, which is why we argued in exclusive vs shared restoration leads that speed beats exclusivity outright there.
Solar is the opposite. The homeowner is making a $25,000 to $31,000 decision on a 20 year horizon, and comparison shopping is the rational thing to do. Entire businesses exist to help them do it. EnergySage's whole model is side-by-side installer quotes, and it pitches homeowners on the savings from comparing rather than accepting one bid.
SolarReviews goes further and makes the count a homeowner setting. Its solar calculator "allows consumers to select how many quotes they would like to receive," and the company reports that on average its leads are "only sold to 2.3 companies per lead." That is not a marketplace secretly diluting your lead. That is a homeowner who asked for three quotes getting three quotes.
Which reframes the objection. When you buy an exclusive lead in solar, you are not buying a homeowner who will not shop. You are buying a homeowner who will not shop through that vendor. They can still open a browser. The exclusivity is on the routing, not on the decision.
If you are buying exclusivity because you have no channel of your own, you are renting a head start every month instead of building one. Pavado builds the lead system solar operators own: a conversion page that ranks for your metro, a qualifying form that arrives with the utility bill, roof and financing preference already attached, and source-level tracking so you can see cost per funded install instead of cost per lead. See how the lead generation system works.
The lead market is still quoting a tax credit that no longer exists
The IRS is unambiguous. On the Residential Clean Energy Credit page: "The credit is not available for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025." A homeowner buying with cash or a loan in 2026 receives nothing federally. It was a hard cliff with no phase-down.
Now read what the lead industry is still saying, on pages live today.
SolarReviews' solar leads page opens by telling installers that "with the federal tax credit reauthorized as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, this is a great year to grow your sales organization." Aged Lead Store's recommended opening script for solar prospects reads: "The federal tax credit is still at 30 percent," and its state performance table attributes conversion strength to "the federal ITC at 30 percent" continuing to drive interest nationwide.
Both are lead vendors. Both were fetched in August 2026. Neither statement is currently true for the cash and loan buyers those scripts are aimed at.
This matters beyond the embarrassment. Every close rate, every ROI multiple and every cost-per-close benchmark in the exclusive-versus-shared debate was measured in a market where the federal government paid 30 percent of the customer's system. Wood Mackenzie's forecast has residential customer acquisition cost rising 40 percent to $0.84 per watt in 2026, from a five-year low of $0.60, with the market contracting about 19 percent. We worked through what that does to channel selection in how to get more solar leads.
The implication for this decision is narrow and specific: the conversion rates you are using to justify an exclusivity premium are historical, and history had a subsidy in it. Discount them before you sign an annual commitment at last year's close rate.
Two thirds of your deals are now TPO, which breaks the qualification filter
The second large lever, and the one that should genuinely change which vendor you buy from.
Aurora Solar's 2026 Snapshot found that 44 percent of salespeople reported more than half their projects used third-party ownership in 2025, and 65 percent expect that in 2026. The share selling no TPO at all falls from 9 percent to 1 percent. In New Jersey it is already 72 percent of projects, Connecticut 69 percent, Florida and Massachusetts 65 percent, California 54 percent. Asked what homeowners prioritize when choosing financing, 82 percent of reps said monthly payment amount, well ahead of overall savings at 49 percent.
Leases and PPAs still access the credit through the system owner under Section 48E, which is precisely why they took over.
So consider what your lead vendor is filtering on. Most solar lead qualification was built to identify a loan-qualified homeowner: credit band, homeownership, bill size, roof. On a TPO deal the credit criteria are set by the finance provider and the pitch is a monthly number, not a payback period. A vendor screening hard for loan qualification is now rejecting or deprioritizing homeowners who would have signed a lease, and charging you an exclusivity premium for the ones who are left.
Ask any vendor quoting an exclusive premium one question: what share of the homeowners you sold me last quarter closed as TPO? If they cannot answer, exclusivity on their lead is a premium on the wrong thing.
What operators report versus what vendors publish
The published bands and the field reports do not agree, and the gap runs in one direction.
An operator posting in r/solar in early 2026, summarizing work across multiple installers' appointment pipelines, put bought shared solar leads at $200 to $300 each, going to three to five other companies, closing at 8 to 12 percent "if you're fast," for a cost per closed deal of $2,500 to $4,000. Their example: one company spending $10,000 a month on shared leads and closing two deals, so $5,000 per deal on an install worth $15,000 to $20,000.
Set that against SolarReviews telling installers to target under $1,500 per close in competitive markets and $800 to $1,300 in emerging ones. The vendor benchmark and the reported field result differ by roughly a factor of two to three.
The other recurring complaint is exclusivity itself. The most-discussed r/solar thread on lead vendors lists among its grievances "exclusive" leads that somehow get sold to three or more companies, alongside installers spending $5,000 to $15,000 a month with inconsistent results.
Note
None of that means the vendors are lying. It means published bands describe the best case of a screened product and field reports describe the average case of an unscreened one. SolarReviews says its own QA team disqualifies over half the raw leads it generates and sells approximately 48 percent. Whatever your vendor's equivalent number is, it is the number that explains the gap.
The metric that replaces the debate
Stop tracking cost per lead. Start tracking cost per funded install, split by financing type.
Two reasons it has to be funded rather than signed. Solar contracts fall out between signature and install at a meaningful rate, and a TPO deal and a loan deal carry different margin, different dealer fees and different fallout profiles. SolarReviews' own example installer sells at $3.00 per watt against $1.80 per watt in labor, equipment and permitting, for $1.20 per watt of gross margin. On a 10 kW system that is $12,000 of gross margin per install.
That single number sets your ceiling. Decide what share of gross margin you are willing to spend acquiring the customer, then divide by your close rate to get your maximum cost per lead:
Max cost per lead = (gross margin per install x acquisition budget share) x your close rate
At $12,000 of gross margin, a 25 percent acquisition allowance and a 6 percent close rate, that is $3,000 x 0.06, or $180 per lead. At a 12 percent close rate it is $360. Both shared and exclusive fit under the second ceiling. Only shared fits under the first.
That is the whole decision, and notice what determines it. Not the vendor's price. Your close rate.
Five things to make a vendor say out loud
Before price comes up on the next call, get these on the record:
- How many buyers receive this contact? An integer, not the word shared. If they will not give a number, assume five.
- When does it stop being exclusive, and do you resell it aged? Ask for the exclusivity window in days and whether the record enters an aged marketplace afterward.
- What share of what you sold me last quarter closed as a lease or PPA? Tests whether they are qualifying for a 65 percent TPO market or a dead loan market.
- What percentage of your raw leads do you reject, and on what criteria? SolarReviews publishes roughly 48 percent passing. A vendor with no rejection rate is selling you their unfiltered average.
- What is your return policy on a disconnected number or a non-homeowner, and what is the window? The billable-lead definition sets your real cost per lead more than the sticker does.
A 21-day test that costs you nothing extra
You do not need to switch vendors to settle this. You need three weeks of instrumented data.
Week one: tag every lead with source, product type and purchase price on arrival, and log the first-dial timestamp automatically rather than by memory. Most solar teams find their real speed to lead is nothing like their believed speed to lead.
Week two: capture financing preference at first contact, before the sit. One field, three values: cash, loan, TPO. That field tells you whether your vendor is qualifying for the market that exists.
Week three: split the same spend roughly evenly across your shared and exclusive sources and let it sit. Do not intervene.
Then compute one table: cost per funded install by source, with a TPO column. If exclusive wins by more than the $90 that the published tables predict, keep buying it and stop reading articles about it. If it does not, you just found the budget to build something you own. Getting that measurement to work is a tracking problem before it is a marketing problem, and it is the same discipline behind ranking your channels properly in best lead sources for solar companies.
The decision rule
If your contact rate is under 40 percent and your first dial is measured in hours, buy exclusive. You are not losing on price, you are losing the race, and exclusivity removes the race.
If your contact rate is healthy and you are still not closing, exclusive will not fix it and you are about to spend two to three times more to prove that. Buy shared, keep the difference, and spend it on the sit.
Either way, the two things worth more than the exclusivity premium are the same for both buyers: work every lead more than three times, because most buyers do not and that is why the aged market exists at all, and qualify for the financing structure your market actually signs, because in 2026 that is a lease about two times out of three.
Sources
- ActiveProspect, How much do solar leads cost?
- Service Hero Marketing, How much do solar leads cost in 2026
- Elevarus, Solar Lead Prices 2026: Compare Shared, Exclusive, Calls
- Getlead, Solar Lead Generation Costs and B2B Angle 2026
- SolarReviews, Solar Leads: Largest and Best Providers 2026
- Aged Lead Store, Buy Aged Solar Leads: Pricing, Conversion Rates and ROI
- IRS, Residential Clean Energy Credit
- Wood Mackenzie, US residential solar customer acquisition costs set to spike 40% in 2026
- Aurora Solar, Solar financing in 2026: more options, more closes
- r/solar, worked with multiple solar companies on their appointment pipeline
- r/solar, Are Solar Lead Generation Companies Actually Worth It?