The most common question we get on the first phone call is some version of this: "If you're not charging me, then surely you're getting paid by the retailer, which means I'm paying — just hidden." It's the right instinct. Here's the actual answer.
Yes, we get paid by the retailer. No, you don't pay for it in your quote. The reason both of those things can be true at the same time is that we're replacing money the retailer was already going to spend somewhere else. This essay is the maths.
01The short answer: it's the mortgage broker model
If you've used a mortgage broker, you already understand the structure. The broker is free to the borrower. The lender pays the broker a commission when a loan settles. The commission comes out of the bank's customer-acquisition budget — the budget they were going to spend on Google Ads, branch advertising, and broker channel either way. The borrower benefits from the broker shopping the market without paying a fee to do so.
Solar brokerage is structurally identical, with one important difference: the unit economics actually favour the homeowner, because solar customer-acquisition is unusually expensive.
02Where the referral fee actually comes from
A solar retailer in Australia spends, on average, somewhere between $400 and $900 to acquire a single residential customer through their own channels. That number includes:
- Paid search and social ads, where solar keywords cost $15 to $35 per click
- Lead-gen platforms that resell the same homeowner to three retailers at once
- Doorknockers, shopping-centre kiosks, and call-centre teams chasing aged leads
- The 60 to 75 percent of those leads that never convert — whose cost still has to be amortised across the ones that do
When a broker delivers a pre-qualified customer to a retailer — bill uploaded, system already specced, ready to go ahead — the retailer pays a referral fee that is typically $300 to $700. That's cheaper than what they would have spent acquiring that same customer through their own funnel, and the conversion rate is significantly higher because the homeowner came to the conversation already informed.
The net effect is that the same dollar of acquisition spend produces a better-informed customer for the retailer and a comparison-shopped offer for the homeowner. We are not a tax on the system. We are a more efficient routing of money that was already moving.
03The objection: "you're paying for it in the quote"
This is the version of the question most homeowners are really asking. The honest test is whether the same quote, for the same system, comes back materially more expensive through a broker than going direct. We have run that test, many times, in both directions.
What we observe — and what the wider industry data supports — is that broker-channel quotes come back at the same or lower price than direct quotes for the same hardware. The lower-price outcome is more common than the same-price outcome, for two reasons:
- The retailer's customer-acquisition cost is genuinely lower per broker-routed customer, and the competitive pressure across our panel pushes that saving into the quote.
- Retailers price more aggressively when they know they're being compared on a level field. A direct quote is a monologue. A broker quote is part of a conversation.
The reason we can confidently say that is the maths almost never goes the other way — and on the rare occasion it does, your consultant has the room to negotiate a matched price with the retailer directly.
We're not a tax on the system. We're a more efficient routing of money that was already moving.
04Why we don't push the highest-paying retailer
The natural follow-up: "If you get paid by retailers, doesn't that bias you toward the one who pays you the most?" It would, if the fee varied wildly between retailers. We've designed it so it doesn't.
The referral fee from every retailer on our panel sits within a tight range. The difference between the highest-paying and lowest-paying retailer is small enough that it's swamped, ten times over, by the difference your recommendation match-rate makes. In plain English: we make far more money over a year by recommending the right retailer for each customer (so the install proceeds, the warranty period passes cleanly, and we get to recommend that retailer again) than by chasing the highest fee on any individual job.
That's the broker incentive geometry in one sentence: over a year, being right beats being greedy. Our internal panel data — quote-to-install conversion, 14-day and 90-day satisfaction, complaint rate — directly determines which retailers get more volume from us. The customer's outcome is the input to our economics, not an externality.
05The transparency test (ask us, ask anyone)
The cleanest way to validate any solar broker's claim of independence is to ask the questions and listen for whether the answer comes back specific or evasive.
- Do all retailers on your panel pay you the same referral fee? If "yes, exactly the same," follow up with: "what's the range, then?" A broker with nothing to hide will tell you. Ours is roughly $300 to $700 depending on system size.
- Has a retailer ever been removed from your panel? Why? If the answer is "no" or "we don't talk about that," the panel is decorative. The vetting essay covers what real removal looks like.
- Can I see all the quotes you received on my behalf, not just the one you're recommending? If yes, the broker is shopping the market for you. If no, the broker is brokering the same retailer they always recommend.
- If I go ahead and you turn out to be wrong, what happens? A clean answer here usually involves a best-price guarantee, an installer-rating system, and a way to escalate if the install goes sideways.
The honest disclosure. We earn between $300 and $700 per residential solar install that completes through our panel. The fee is paid by the retailer, not by you, and it does not appear as a line item in your quote. You can ask us to confirm this in writing on any specific job — we will.
06The honest summary
"Free" with an asterisk is reasonable to be suspicious of. In this case the asterisk reads: free to the homeowner, paid for by the retailer's existing marketing budget, structurally cheaper for both sides than the alternative. That is the entire mechanic, and the reason every comparable category — mortgages, insurance, business energy, freight — has a brokerage layer above the retail layer.
The catch, if there is one, is that the model only works if we keep recommending well. We're aligned with you across every recommendation we make, because the alternative is losing access to the only thing we have — a panel of installers who care that we keep sending them good customers, and customers who care that we keep finding them good installers. Lose either side of that and the model collapses.
So when you ask "is a solar broker really free?" — the honest answer is yes, and the reason it can be is that the alternative was you paying for marketing you never saw.