Aurora’s pricing page gives you a per-user-per-month figure, and that figure is genuinely what it says it is. It is also only the first of three numbers that determine your annual spend. The other two are the monthly project cap attached to each seat and the billing term you commit to — and neither is obvious from the sticker.
This page works through all three, then converts the result into the only unit that lets you compare Aurora with a quota-priced or free competitor.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product. It is not a design or proposal platform and does not compete with Aurora; we sell the layer in front of it. Treat the last two sections as our pitch and the rest as an honest read of a published rate card.
Number one: the advertised seat rate
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | Published annual saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $159 per user/month | $135 per user/month | $288 a year |
| Premium | $259 per user/month | $220 per user/month | $468 a year |
| Enterprise | Custom, quoted per project, with unlimited users | ||
Multiplied out, one Basic seat is $1,620 a year committed or $1,908 paid monthly; one Premium seat is $2,640 committed or $3,108 monthly. A four-person design team on Premium annual is $10,560 a year. Those are the numbers to carry into a budget conversation, because monthly figures systematically feel smaller than they are.
Every figure above is what Aurora Solar publicly advertised on its own pricing page at the time of writing, and rate cards move. Confirm current pricing with the vendor directly.
Number two: the 50-project cap most buyers skim past
Basic and Premium both advertise one user and 50 projects a month. That is a hybrid model, and it is the part of the card people misread: you are not buying unlimited use of a seat, you are buying a seat with a throughput ceiling attached.
Fifty designs a month is a lot for one person — comfortably more than most residential designers produce — so for the majority of teams the cap never binds. It binds in exactly one shape: a company that centralises design, where two or three people produce for a floor of twenty reps. That team hits 50 per seat quickly, and the pricing page does not publish what happens next.
Aurora signals the answer in its own packaging. Basic and Premium meter seats; Enterprise meters projects. Read that as the vendor telling you that above a certain volume the honest unit is designs produced rather than people employed. If your model is centralised design, you are an Enterprise conversation whether or not your headcount suggests it, and you should open with your monthly project volume rather than your seat count.
Number three: the term you are signing
The annual discount is real — $288 and $468 a year, published by Aurora itself — and for a stable team it is free money. For a seasonal one it can be negative. Solar sales headcount moves with the season in most markets, and a twelve-month commitment on seats you release in November costs more than the monthly premium would have.
The arithmetic is quick. On Basic, the monthly premium over the annual rate is $24 per seat per month, or $288 across a full year. If you would release that seat for three months, monthly billing costs you $288 in premium but saves $405 in unused commitment — a net $117 in your favour. Two seats released for a quarter is a $234 net saving on Basic, and $384 on Premium. Whether that is worth the administrative friction is your call, but make it deliberately rather than defaulting to the discount.
Turning the three numbers into one
Seat pricing, quota pricing and free platforms cannot be compared until you express all of them as cost per proposal. Take your committed annual spend and divide by the proposals you actually produced.
Two teams on identical contracts land in completely different places. A Premium annual seat is $2,640 a year. A designer producing 30 proposals a month — 360 a year — costs $7.33 a proposal. A part-time designer producing 8 a month, 96 a year, costs $27.50. Same invoice, nearly four times the unit cost. Under-used seats are where money leaks in this category, and they are invisible until you do this division.
With that number in hand the market becomes comparable. Solargraf sells annual project quotas — $2,799 a year for 240 projects, up to $12,999 for 1,500 — which works out between roughly $8.67 and $11.66 a project; we break the whole card down in Solargraf alternatives. OpenSolar’s core app is free, which makes its cost per proposal zero and moves the entire question to your designers’ time and the integration charges at the platform edge — OpenSolar alternatives covers what changed there in April 2026.
Competitor figures above are what those vendors publicly advertised on their own pricing pages at the time of writing. Confirm current pricing directly with each vendor.
Five things to establish before you sign
- What happens at the 51st project in a month — overage, block, or an upgrade conversation?
- Can seats be reduced at renewal only, or mid-term? This decides whether the annual discount is safe for a seasonal team.
- Which of your lenders or incentive programmes require a bankable shade report? That question, not a feature list, decides Basic versus Premium.
- What does the Enterprise per-project rate look like at your actual annual volume, expressed as one number you can divide?
- Is there an implementation or training charge, and is it one-off?
Where Scout Data fits
Every figure on this page prices a design you have already decided to produce. The multiplier sitting on top of all of them is how many designs it takes you to close one sale — and at eight designs per close, a $7.33 proposal is a $59 sale cost before anyone’s hour is counted.
List Builder and Scout are the filter in front of that multiplier: live permit records, storm footprints, roof and system age and ownership changes, resolved into the addresses worth a designer’s time, with owner-matched and DNC-scrubbed phones attached. Aurora still does the design.
If you want the wider platform comparison rather than the rate card, Aurora Solar alternatives puts the field side by side. If the problem is upstream of all of it, how to get solar leads is the place to start.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Aurora Solar cost per month?
As publicly advertised on its own pricing page at the time of writing: Basic at $159 per user per month billed monthly, or $135 billed annually; Premium at $259 monthly or $220 annually. Both include one user and 50 projects a month. Enterprise is quoted custom, per project.
What is the difference between Aurora Basic and Premium?
Basic covers design, HD imagery, on-demand site models and tablet-friendly sales proposals. Premium adds LIDAR-assisted modelling, bankable shade reports and battery modelling for backup, self-consumption and arbitrage. The practical test is whether a lender or incentive programme in your market asks for a bankable shade report — if it does, the tier is decided for you.
Is Aurora cheaper billed annually?
Yes, and Aurora publishes the saving itself: $288 a year on Basic and $468 a year on Premium. What it buys with that discount is your commitment for twelve months, which is the trade you are actually evaluating — a seasonal team that scales down in winter can lose the entire saving to seats it cannot release.
Does Scout Data compete with Aurora Solar?
No. We do not model arrays, produce shade reports or generate proposals, and we have no plans to. We appear in the same conversation because both products are priced against solar sales activity — but Aurora prices the design, and we price the decision about which address deserves one.