The pricing model matters more than the feature list
Most global design tools are sold per seat per month. For a five-person Indian sales team that is roughly $500–$1,250 a month — ₹45,000 to ₹1,10,000 — before a single proposal has been sold. Indian rooftop margins do not absorb that, which is why teams end up sharing one login and bottlenecking every quote through one designer. Usage-based pricing inverts the problem: you add the whole team for free and pay against the kW you actually design, so software cost tracks revenue instead of headcount.
| Model | Monthly software cost | Cost per proposal |
|---|---|---|
| Per-seat CAD tool at $99/seat | ~₹44,000 | ~₹1,100 |
| Per-seat CAD tool at $250/seat | ~₹1,10,000 | ~₹2,750 |
| SolvSolar subscription (Lite, India tier) | ₹499 | ~₹12 |
| SolvSolar pay-per-kW wallet at ₹10/kW | ₹2,000 | ₹50 |
The eight things to test in a trial
- Time from address to shareable client proposal — measure it with a stopwatch, on a phone, on 4G.
- Does it compute the PM Surya Ghar slab correctly (₹30,000/₹30,000/₹18,000, ₹78,000 cap) or does it treat subsidy as a flat percentage?
- Does it know your DISCOM and the state's metering model, or does it assume US-style 1:1 net metering everywhere?
- Can a field salesperson generate a quote from WhatsApp or Telegram without opening a laptop?
- Is the Bill of Materials editable per proposal, so a module substitution is captured on the document the client signed?
- Does the PDF export cleanly as a fixed set of pages, with your branding, without CAD watermarks?
- Are seats genuinely unlimited, or does 'unlimited' mean unlimited proposals on one paid login?
- Is there an escape route — can you export your proposals and client data if you leave?
Where heavyweight CAD tools still win
Be honest about this: for utility-scale ground mount, detailed shading analysis with LiDAR, string-level electrical loss modelling and bankable energy yield reports, dedicated simulation software remains the right tool. A rooftop sales team quoting 3–100 kW jobs is not that use case, and paying utility-scale prices for residential quoting is the single most common overspend we see.
Red flags in a demo
- Pricing only revealed after a sales call — you cannot model your cost per proposal.
- Annual contract with no monthly exit during your first season.
- No India-specific tax handling, so GST is bolted on manually after export.
- Proposals that cannot be regenerated after a price change without rebuilding the design.
- Demo runs only on desktop Chrome — your field team sells from an Android phone.
A defensible shortlist process
Take one real job you already quoted — same roof, same bill, same tariff — and rebuild it in every tool on your shortlist. Compare the designed capacity, the year-one savings figure and the total time taken. If two tools disagree on savings by more than 10%, find out which one is wrong about your tariff or your metering model before you buy either. Then price the tool at your actual monthly volume, not at the vendor's example volume.