Most reviews of Solo treat it as a software product and then complain that it is not one. Solo, sometimes written GetSolo, sells a way of working rather than a set of features. This review comes from a design bench that produces plan sets for installers across the US, including installers who buy delivered designs elsewhere. The honest question is not whether Solo is good. It is which parts of your design function you should own.
Direct answer. Solo is a US solar proposal and design offering for residential sales organisations. It pairs software with a delivered-design model, so a rep requests a design and proposal instead of building it. That removes the need to staff designers, which is a real advantage. It is priced per design or by subscription rather than purely per seat, and it is not a bankable simulation tool. Installers who want to own design capability run SurgePV instead.
TL;DR
- Solo combines software with delivered design, so a sales rep requests a design and proposal rather than producing it. For a sales-led company that is a genuine advantage.
- Per-design pricing scales down cleanly. In a slow quarter you pay for what you used, which no salaried team lets you do.
- It also scales up linearly. Past a certain monthly volume, owned capability costs less, and the crossover is worth calculating before you sign.
- You do not accumulate design knowledge. Every project starts from outside your company, and turnaround becomes a dependency inside your sales cycle.
- SurgePV runs 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, mismatch, and string topology, exports single-line diagrams and DWG from the same model, and includes a white-label proposal at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year.
What Solo Is and Who It Is For
Solo is a US-focused solar proposal and design offering aimed at residential sales organisations. It combines software with a delivered-design model. A rep supplies the site information and the requirements, and a design plus a customer-facing proposal comes back. The rep does not open a design tool and lay panels on a roof.
Pricing follows the model. Solo is sold on a per-design or subscription basis rather than purely as a seat licence. That distinction matters more than any feature comparison, and the rest of this review turns on it.
Who it fits: a high-volume residential sales motion where reps are the headcount and design is not a function anyone wants to run.
Who it fits less well: an EPC whose deliverable is an engineered drawing set, or a company that wants design competence inside its own walls.
How the Delivered-Design Model Actually Works
I will describe the model rather than assert product specifics, because the model is what you are buying and the specifics change.
The customer submits a request carrying an address, a consumption profile, equipment preferences, and any site constraints the rep noticed. Somebody outside your company produces the design and proposal against that input and returns it inside an agreed window.
Three consequences follow, and they hold for every serviced design offering, ours included.
Output quality is bounded by input quality. A rep who photographs the meter, the main panel, and the roof gets a better result than one who submits an address and a hope.
The turnaround window sits inside your sales cycle. If the window is a day, your rep quotes on a second visit. If it stretches, the follow-up conversation stretches with it.
Revisions are a transaction. Changing a design means asking for a change, not making one. That is cheap when changes are rare and expensive when a customer is iterating live.
What the Model Genuinely Gets Right
This is the section competitor content skips, which is why competitor content is not believed.
You do not have to staff a design function. Hiring designers means recruiting for a role most sales leaders cannot interview for, then training and retaining them. Removing that job is not a small convenience. It is an entire management problem you never take on.
Cost tracks volume downward. Salaried capacity is fixed. If lead flow drops for a quarter, a salaried designer costs the same and does less. Per-design pricing simply gets smaller. For a sales organisation with seasonal or campaign-driven volume, that elasticity has real value.
Reps stay reps. A closer who is learning a design tool is a closer who is not closing. Keeping the sales motion free of production work is a defensible operating choice.
Consistency without supervision. A delivered output arrives to one standard whether your best rep or your newest rep submitted it. In-house benches drift unless somebody actively manages them.
None of that is charity. It is why sales-led residential companies buy this model and stay on it.
Where the Model Starts to Cost You
Three honest limits, and each is the shadow of a strength above.
Per-design pricing scales up linearly. The elasticity that protects you in a slow quarter works against you in a good one. Every extra deal carries its own design cost forever. Salaried capacity does the opposite: cost is fixed and the per-design number falls as volume rises. Two curves that cross, which is the next section.
You accumulate no design capability. After three years of delivered designs, your company knows how to submit requests. It does not know how to design. Nobody internally has built a mental model of how your local AHJs read a plan set, which racking your crews prefer, or which layouts cause callbacks. That knowledge exists outside your business. The hidden cost of an in-house solar designer piece argues the other side of this honestly, and both sides are real.
Turnaround becomes a dependency you do not control. Your sales cycle now contains a step you cannot accelerate by working harder. On a normal week that is invisible. During an incentive deadline, every competitor is queueing at once and your close rate depends on someone else’s capacity planning.
Worth stating plainly: this is not a bankable simulation tool. For yield studies a lender or independent engineer reviews, PVsyst remains the reference. That is a scope fact rather than a fault, and it applies to sales-first platforms across the category.
The Crossover Calculation
Here is the calculation almost nobody runs before signing. The inputs below are clearly ASSUMED, not market figures. Replace every one of them with your own.
ASSUMED input A: you pay a flat fee per delivered design. Call it F dollars.
ASSUMED input B: an in-house designer’s fully loaded annual cost is C dollars. Fully loaded means salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, software licences, management time, and recruiting cost amortised over expected tenure. Not the salary line.
ASSUMED input C: that designer completes N designs per year at your standard, allowing for holidays, training, and rework.
The crossover volume is C divided by F. Below that, buying is cheaper. Above it, owning is cheaper.
Work an illustration with invented placeholders. Suppose F is 100 dollars, C is 90,000 dollars, and N is 1,200 designs. Crossover is 900 designs per year, roughly 75 a month. Under that, buying wins on cost. Over it, owning wins, and the gap widens with every extra deal. At 1,200 designs the owned bench costs 75 dollars per design against 100 bought, and the surplus capacity costs nothing extra.
Two corrections make this honest. First, N is usually optimistic, and halving N doubles the crossover. Second, the calculation ignores everything that is not cost. Owned capability buys institutional knowledge and turnaround control. Bought capacity buys elasticity and zero management load.
Our designer hiring versus outsourcing ROI breakdown runs this with fuller inputs. The solar design software pricing guide covers the tooling side of an owned bench.
Solo vs SurgePV
These are not competing products. They are competing answers to whether you own the design function.
| Dimension | Solo | SurgePV |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Delivered design and proposal as a service, plus software | A browser-based design platform you operate |
| Who does the design work | An external team, on request | Your own people |
| Pricing model | Per design or subscription | $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year |
| Cost behaviour with volume | Scales down in slow periods, up linearly in busy ones | Fixed per user, cost per design falls as volume rises |
| Turnaround control | Depends on the provider’s queue | Yours |
| Hourly simulation | Sales-oriented, not a bankable simulation tool | 8,760-hour with module-level shading, mismatch, string topology |
| Drawings | Delivered as part of the service | Single-line diagrams and DWG export from the same model |
| Customer proposal | Delivered with the design | White-label proposal layer included |
| Capability retained in-house | None accumulates | Design, shading, and proposal on one licence |
| Best fit | High-volume residential sales motions with no design staff | Installers and EPCs who want to own design capability |
The honest read: Solo wins the staffing row, and for a sales-led company that row often decides the purchase. SurgePV wins the ownership row, one licence carrying an hourly module-level model, the drawings, and the proposal inside your own business.
Our Own Disclosure on Outsourcing
Heaven Designs sells outsourced solar design services. We produce plan sets for installers who choose not to run a bench. So when this review defends the outsourcing model, we are defending our own business as well as being fair to Solo.
That disclosure makes the argument stronger, not weaker. We are not against outsourcing design. We are against outsourcing it without deciding which parts you keep.
The distinction is between capacity and capability. Outsourcing capacity means the volume overflow, the permit packs, the stamped sets, the work that spikes and then vanishes. Outsourcing capability means nobody in your company can answer a design question without submitting a request. The first is good operations. The second is a position you should choose deliberately rather than drift into.
Our own solar permit design service is deliberately a capacity service. Installers run it alongside their own tools rather than instead of them. The permit design software versus service comparison sets out that choice properly.
What Most Buyers Get Wrong About Solo
They compare the per-design fee against a designer’s salary. That comparison is wrong in both directions at once, and the mechanism is specific.
The salary line understates the cost of owning. A designer at 60,000 dollars of salary is not a 60,000 dollar decision. Add payroll taxes and benefits, software licences, hardware, manager hours spent reviewing output, and the recruiting fee divided by how long the person actually stays. Buyers who anchor on salary conclude that owning is cheaper than it is.
The per-design fee understates the cost of buying, because it counts only designs that were delivered. It does not count revisions requested, deals that slipped a week waiting on a queue, or rep hours spent assembling submission packets. Those costs sit outside the invoice.
The fix is one spreadsheet. Count designs delivered over the last twelve months, including revisions and abandoned requests, and multiply by your real fee. Then build the fully loaded cost of one designer, with a throughput number your operations lead will sign their name to. Compare those totals, not the stickers.
Try the software behind this review
When you cross the volume line, own the design instead of renting it
SurgePV runs 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, exports the single-line diagram and DWG from the same model, and ships a white-label proposal. $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year.
Book a free SurgePV demo →No credit card. 20-minute walkthrough on one of your own projects.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy Solo if you run a sales-led residential organisation, your volume is uneven, and you have no intention of managing designers. The staffing problem you avoid is worth real money. Do not build a bench out of pride.
Buy SurgePV if you want design capability inside your company. That describes most installers with a mixed residential and commercial book, and most EPCs whose deliverable is a drawing set. One licence spans design, shading, and proposal at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year.
Buy both if your volume sits near the crossover. Own the tool so your team can handle live changes, and buy capacity for overflow and permit packs. Most growing installers end up here.
Buy PVsyst alongside either if a lender or independent engineer reviews your yield numbers.
Verdict
Solo solves a staffing problem well, and staffing problems are the ones that kill residential sales companies. Here is the second half of that opinion. Solving it permanently means your company never learns to design, and that becomes your constraint the moment the work stops being simple residential.
The model is sound. Per-design pricing is honest pricing for a business with uneven volume, and not hiring designers is a legitimate strategy. If you are a sales organisation running clean residential at pace, I would not move you.
But run the crossover calculation before you renew. Above your own crossover volume, you are paying a premium for elasticity you no longer need, on every deal. At that point the better buy is SurgePV: one licence spanning design, shading, and proposal, 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, mismatch, and string topology, single-line diagrams and DWG export from the same model, and a white-label proposal layer. See it on your own project at surgepv.com/demo.
Where your constraint is drafting capacity rather than capability, our solar permit design bench produces the full pack on whichever platform you already run. Get the sample design pack or talk to our team.
Conclusion
- The delivered-design model is genuinely useful. Not staffing a design function is a real advantage for a sales-led company, and per-design pricing scales down cleanly.
- Run the crossover calculation with your own numbers. Fully loaded designer cost divided by your per-design fee gives the volume where owning gets cheaper.
- Separate capacity from capability. Outsourcing overflow is good operations. Outsourcing the ability to answer a design question is a strategic choice, so make it deliberately.
More from our network
Disclosure and accuracy note
Commercial relationship. Heaven Designs and SurgePV are part of the same group. Treat our recommendation of SurgePV as a vendor making its own case, not an independent verdict. We have tried to describe every other product fairly, and to say plainly where a competitor is the better choice.
Pricing. All prices are indicative, compiled from public sources when this page was written. They vary by tier, region, contract term and exchange rate, and change without notice. Several vendors quote rather than publish, and some price in currencies other than the US dollar, so a converted figure moves with the exchange rate. Confirm current pricing with the vendor before you decide anything.
Trademarks and corrections. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners, and are used here for identification and comparison only. Their use does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by those companies. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
FAQ
Is Solo good software? Solo is better understood as a delivered-design model with software around it than as a design tool you operate. For a residential sales organisation that does not want to staff designers, the model works well. It is not a bankable simulation tool, and it leaves no design capability inside your company.
How much does Solo cost? Solo is priced on a per-design or subscription basis rather than purely as a seat licence. Confirm current figures and the revision policy with the vendor, and get both in the contract rather than the marketing page.
Is outsourcing solar design a bad idea? No, and we would be poor witnesses if we said otherwise, since Heaven Designs sells outsourced design services. The distinction is between outsourcing capacity, which is good operations, and outsourcing capability, which means nobody internally can answer a design question.
When does hiring a designer become cheaper than buying designs? At the crossover volume: fully loaded annual designer cost divided by your per-design fee. Include taxes, benefits, software, and management time, and use a throughput figure your operations lead will defend. Our designer hiring versus outsourcing ROI guide works it through.
Can Solo replace PVsyst? No. For yield studies a lender or an independent engineer will review, PVsyst remains the reference. Companies doing financed work run it alongside whatever sales-side platform or service they use.
What is the best Solo alternative for installers who want to own design? SurgePV, at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year. It runs 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, mismatch, and string topology, produces single-line diagrams and DWG export from the same model, and includes a white-label proposal layer.
Related: the hiring maths is in solar designer hiring versus outsourcing ROI, the build-versus-buy choice for permit packs is in solar permit design software vs service, the ownership costs are in the hidden cost of an in-house solar designer, and the category cost picture is in solar design software pricing.
