How this site earns money
The short version
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy or request quotes through one we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes a number on this site: the prices here come from Berkeley Lab's record of what people actually paid, and no partner can pay to alter them.
What we will not do
We do not ask for your phone number, we do not run a quote form, and we do not sell your details to installers. If you want quotes, you will leave this site and give your details to the company that will call you.
That is a deliberate choice with a cost attached. Publishers who collect a homeowner’s phone number and pass it to installers earn far more per visitor than affiliate links pay. It also puts them inside the consent rules that govern telemarketing, and it means a reader’s details end up somewhere they did not choose. We would rather earn less.
Every commercial link on the site
This list is generated from the same registry the links themselves are built from, so it cannot fall out of date. “Commission” means we are paid if you go on to buy; “none yet” means the link is an ordinary recommendation and earns nothing.
| Company | What it is | Programme | We earn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | Equipment and accessories on the gear pages | Amazon Associates (solarpanelcosts-20) | commission |
| Solar.com | Competing quotes from vetted installers. You give your details to them, not to us. | - | none yet |
| EnergySage | Marketplace where installers bid against each other on a standardised quote. | - | none yet |
| SanTan Solar | New and used panels sold direct, for self-install and off-grid builds. | - | none yet |
| Signature Solar | Inverters, batteries and the EG4 range, for whole-system DIY builds. | - | none yet |
| Renogy | Panels, charge controllers and kits, mostly 12V, RV and off-grid. | - | none yet |
| Anker SOLIX | Home batteries, portable power stations and balcony solar kits. | - | none yet |
| EcoFlow | Portable power stations and balcony-scale solar. | - | none yet |
| BLUETTI | Power stations and expandable home backup batteries. | - | none yet |
| Goal Zero | Portable power stations and folding panels for camping and outages. | - | none yet |
What cannot be bought
No company can pay to change a figure on this site, to be ranked higher in a table, or to have a state’s numbers presented more favourably. The prices come out of Berkeley Lab’s dataset, the production out of PVGIS, and the electricity rates out of the EIA, all through scripts described on the methodology page. There is no editorial lever to sell.