How SolarZA makes money
Last updated: 10 August 2026
A site that tells you which solar equipment to buy and which installer to call should say plainly how it gets paid, because you cannot judge advice without knowing who funds it. SolarZA earns from three sources. All three are described below, along with what each one can and cannot influence.
1. Installers pay for enquiries
This is our largest source of revenue. When you submit a quote request, solar installation businesses can pay to unlock your enquiry and contact you. They buy credits in advance and spend one when they choose to take an enquiry.
Homeowners never pay for this. Nothing about your enquiry costs you money, and you are under no obligation to buy from anyone who contacts you.
What it does not buy: position. Paying for enquiries does not move a business up a directory listing, improve its rating, or change how it is described. Directory ordering is by claim status, then Google rating, then review volume, and that rule is applied by code with no manual override. A business that has never spent a cent with us appears above a paying business if its rating is higher.
2. Display advertising
We show third-party display advertising, served by Google. Adverts are labelled as advertising and are visually separated from editorial content. We do not choose the individual adverts you see; they are selected by the ad network, and what you are shown depends partly on the consent choice you made in our cookie banner.
We deliberately keep adverts off the pages where they would be a conflict or a nuisance: the quote request form, the matching flow, and the installer and administrator dashboards carry no advertising at all.
What it does not buy: coverage. An advertiser cannot commission an article, influence a comparison, or have a competitor's brand page altered. We have no editorial relationship with the ad network and no visibility of who buys the inventory.
3. Affiliate commission from retailers
Some links to retailers are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, we may receive a small commission from that retailer. The price you pay is exactly the same as it would be if you had gone to the retailer directly; the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your pocket.
Affiliate links appear mainly on product and "where to buy" pages. Not every outbound link is an affiliate link, and we do not add one where no programme exists, which is why some products link straight to a manufacturer with nothing in it for us.
What it does not buy: a recommendation. We do not choose which products to cover based on commission rates, and we say when a cheaper product is the better buy even where the more expensive one pays us more. Where a product has a known weakness, it goes in the write-up.
The rules we hold ourselves to
- We do not accept payment for positive coverage, for a higher directory position, or for the removal of criticism. There is no rate card for any of those because they are not for sale.
- We do not write reviews of equipment we have not researched, and we do not present manufacturer marketing copy as our own assessment.
- Cost, payback and generation figures are published with their assumptions attached, so you can check the arithmetic instead of trusting it.
- A listing being unclaimed or unverified is stated on the listing rather than hidden, and any business can correct or remove its own entry free of charge.
- If we get something wrong, we correct it on the page rather than quietly deleting it. Tell us and we will fix it.
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