Nobody leaves free software for no reason, so start there: why are you looking? In our reading of this market there are exactly three reasons, they lead to three completely different places, and picking the wrong one is how installers end up paying for a platform that solves a problem they did not have.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product. We are not a design or proposal platform and do not compete with anything named on this page — the section that pitches us is marked and comes last.
Reason one: free stopped covering the part you use
This is new and it is the most common trigger in 2026. OpenSolar announced that from 16 April 2026, API Access and its Connectors became paid items. The company’s framing is precise and, to be fair to it, defensible: work that stays inside the platform remains free, while moving data in and out through the API or a connector — CRM sync, accounting handoff, reporting, ops tooling — now carries a charge. The announcement describes a wallet arrangement for API charges and a monthly per-organisation fee for connectors. It does not publish the rates.
If your operation is one salesperson designing and closing inside OpenSolar, nothing about your bill changed. If your proposals feed a CRM and your invoices feed accounting, the platform you thought cost nothing now has an unpublished line item at exactly the point you depend on.
The right response is not automatically to leave. It is to get the number. A paid connector at a modest monthly fee is still comfortably cheaper than a seat-priced platform, and switching design tools to avoid an integration charge is a large project to solve a small problem. Get the quote first, then compare it against a full alternative rather than against zero.
The pricing-change details above reflect what OpenSolar publicly announced on its own site at the time of writing. Confirm current terms, and the rates that apply to your region and volume, with the vendor directly.
Reason two: the model output is not carrying the deal
This is the honest technical case for paying, and it is narrower than the alternatives industry pretends. It shows up as one of three specifics rather than a general feeling:
- A lender or programme wants a bankable shade report. This is a documentation requirement, not a quality argument, and it is the cleanest reason to move. Aurora advertises bankable shade reports and LIDAR-assisted modelling on its Premium tier.
- Complex or heavily shaded roofs keep coming back wrong. Test it rather than believe it: model five roofs you have already installed, compare modelled production against what those systems actually produced, and let the error decide.
- Your work is commercial. Residential proposal tools run out of road on large arrays, and the answer is an engineering tool alongside the sales one rather than a different sales one.
Reason three: you want somebody accountable
Free products come with the support model free products come with. For a two-person shop that is a fair trade. For a company where a stalled proposal costs a scheduled install, a paid contract buys a named escalation path, and that is a legitimate thing to pay for even when the software is otherwise equivalent. Say it out loud in the evaluation rather than dressing it up as a feature gap, because it changes which questions you ask in the demo.
Where each reason leads
| Why you are leaving | What to actually do |
|---|---|
| Integration charges | Price the connector before you price a platform. Most of the time this ends with you staying |
| Bankable shade or LIDAR requirement | Aurora Premium is the reference answer — Aurora Solar pricing breaks down what the tier costs across a year |
| Proposal speed and a single vendor stack | Solargraf, if the annual project quota fits your volume — Solargraf alternatives has the arithmetic |
| Commercial and engineering work | HelioScope or PVsyst beside your sales tool, not instead of it |
| Everything lives in a different system | You are shopping for a spine, not a design tool — Enerflo alternatives covers that market |
| Support accountability | Any paid platform. Negotiate the response commitment explicitly rather than assuming it |
What a free platform never showed you
There is a quiet cost to zero-priced software that has nothing to do with its quality. When designs cost nothing, nobody counts them.
Teams on seat or quota pricing know their designs-per-sale ratio because the invoice forces the question every month. Teams on OpenSolar frequently have no idea, and the number is usually worse, because there was never a reason to be disciplined about which households got a proposal. The software was free; the designer’s afternoon was not.
So before you shop, measure. Completed designs last quarter, divided by systems sold. Multiply by a loaded hourly cost for whoever produced them. That figure is real money and it is invisible on every pricing page in this category, ours included.
Where Scout Data fits
We do not belong in the table above, because we are not an OpenSolar alternative in any sense. List Builder and Scout read live property signals — permits, storm footprints, roof and system age, ownership changes — and hand back the addresses worth working. Whichever design platform survives your evaluation, it keeps doing the design.
The pairing is unusually good with a free tool, for the reason above: when the marginal design costs nothing, the entire cost of a bad target lands on the calendar instead of the invoice, and a filter in front of the funnel is the only thing that recovers it. If you want the prospecting side first, start with how to get solar leads; if the constraint is reps rather than designs, solar appointment setting is the more useful read.
Frequently asked questions
Is OpenSolar really free?
The core application is, and OpenSolar says so in those words on its own site — “100% free of charge” to solar professionals. The company earns from the other side of the transaction: a hardware marketplace and partners who pay to reach installers. What changed is the edge of that boundary, not the middle of it.
What changed with OpenSolar’s API in April 2026?
OpenSolar announced that from 16 April 2026, API Access and its built Connectors — the QuickBooks and Xero accounting integrations among them — became paid. Its own wording draws the line clearly: if your data is created and retained inside OpenSolar, the core app stays free; if you connect it to third-party tools to move data in and out, charges apply. The announcement describes an OpenSolar Wallet for API charges and a monthly fee per organisation for connectors, and does not publish the rates.
Does Scout Data replace OpenSolar?
No. We do not design arrays, model shade or produce proposals, and replacing a free platform with a paid one that does a different job would be a strange trade. Keep OpenSolar. We sit in front of it, deciding which addresses deserve a design.