On a Tuesday in July, an installer finally does a sum he has been avoiding for two years. He adds up what he spent last month on getting work in: £640 between a lead platform and Google Ads. He counts the enquiries: 26. He counts the surveys he actually carried out: nine. He counts the signed jobs: one.
He divides. The lead cost £25. The survey cost £71. The job cost £640. The 210 miles of van and the nine mornings are not in that sum.
The numbers in the example are made up. The arithmetic is not, and it is the only part of this article you can do today with figures already sitting in your bank statement and your diary.
The price you are quoted is not the cost
Lead vendors do publish prices. The trouble is who is publishing them. Search for what a solar lead costs in the UK and the ranges that come back — £15 to £30 for shared, £50 to £150 for exclusive — all trace to companies that sell leads or to agencies that sell lead generation. No sample, no date, no method. The platforms themselves largely don't put a price list on the open web at all.
Treat those numbers as advertising, not market data. And notice what they describe: not a customer, but the right to compete for one against three or four other firms who got the same phone number at the same minute.
Google's autocomplete shows where the frustration actually sits. How much do solar leads cost and how much do solar companies pay for leads are live suggestions. So are checkatrade fake leads, checkatrade no leads, does checkatrade really work and is checkatrade worth it. Installers aren't asking whether to buy leads. They're asking whether they were sold anything.
The benchmark everyone quotes doesn't cover you
When someone tells you the industry cost per lead is X, they are almost always citing WordStream's Google Ads benchmark report. Read its small print: 13,474 US search campaigns between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, figures in dollars, and the "averages" are medians. The closest category to your work, Home & Home Improvement, comes out at $8.33 CPC, an 8.05% conversion rate and $90.92 per lead.
There is no energy or solar category among the 23 industries they analyse.
So the most-cited number in the sector doesn't measure your sector, your country or your currency. Nobody publishes a trustworthy UK solar cost per lead because nobody is measuring the same thing. A "lead" can be a web form with an email address in it, or a thirty-minute call with the electricity bill on the table.
The four numbers you already have
Four figures, one month, fifteen minutes:
- Total spend on getting work in. All of it: platform fees, ads, commissions, directory subscriptions, and the hours of whoever answers.
- Enquiries received.
- Surveys actually carried out.
- Jobs signed.
That gives you three divisions. The first, cost per lead, is the one you are sold. The third, cost per job, is the only one that decides whether you make money. The second, cost per survey, is the one that diagnoses.
The ratio that swings hardest is enquiry-to-survey. That is where the money leaks, not in the headline price of the lead.
Two rules change the answer. One: split it by source. A source with 40 leads and one job is more expensive than a source with 6 leads and two, whatever the cost per lead says. Two: cost in the wasted survey. A survey 25 miles away is half a day of an engineer plus the van. If that isn't in your sum, your cost per job is fiction.
The ceiling is yours to set: your average margin per install. No blog has that number.
Why it dies between the enquiry and the survey
It arrived shared. If the same enquiry went to four firms, answering fast makes you first, not chosen. That is a real advantage and a limited one.
Speed matters, but the evidence for it is old. The famous "respond in five minutes" comes from James Oldroyd's work with InsideSales: three years of data, six companies, over 15,000 leads and more than 100,000 call attempts. Calling at five minutes rather than thirty multiplied the odds of making contact by 100 and the odds of qualifying by 21. It is from 2007. The Harvard Business Review article that popularised it, by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, is from March 2011. US firms, over the phone. Useful as a direction of travel. It is not a 2026 UK statistic, and anyone selling it as one has copied it.
The qualifying data isn't there. Most enquiries arrive without the four things that decide whether a survey is worth doing: owner or tenant, house or flat, what they pay for electricity, and the roof's orientation and shading. Without those, getting in the van is a paid coin toss.
Some properties can't say yes yet. Solar is usually permitted development, but not always. On a listed building, consent is required. In a conservation area or World Heritage Site, panels must not be fitted to a wall fronting a highway, and an Article 4 direction can remove permitted development rights altogether (Planning Portal; Historic England). A leaseholder in a flat needs the freeholder before they need you. None of that makes the lead worthless — it makes it a different kind of lead, with a different timescale, and it should not eat the same diary slot as a semi with a south-facing roof.
The calendar is doing work you can't see. The zero VAT rate on installing energy-saving materials in homes runs from 1 May 2023 to 31 March 2027; from 1 April 2027 it reverts to 5% (HMRC Notice 708/6). The Boiler Upgrade Scheme currently pays £7,500 for air source and ground source heat pumps, £5,000 for biomass and £2,500 for air-to-air, with an extra £1,500 towards a heat pump for homes heated by oil or LPG with no mains gas connection, available until March 2027 (GOV.UK). Meanwhile MCS reported 2025 as a record year, with certified solar PV installations passing the 203,125 set during the Feed-in Tariff peak in 2011 — and around 35% of 2025's solar installs going on new builds, which never generate a homeowner enquiry at all. More competitors, deadlines moving, and a third of the volume never reaching your inbox.
What answering fast does not fix
It does not turn a shared lead into an exclusive one. It does not improve your price. It does not do the survey — nobody sees the state of the roof covering, the rafters, the winter shading or the consumer unit over WhatsApp. It does not do the DNO notification. And it does not decide a grant: eligibility for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme depends on an EPC and property conditions that someone has to check properly.
Above all, it does not fix buying badly. If the problem is that you pay for enquiries with no postcode and no property type, automating your reply just means discarding them faster. That is worth something. It is not what you were sold.
Replying the same day costs nothing
One billing detail that is rarely explained. Since 1 July 2025 Meta charges per message and only charges for templates. Messages the customer sends are not billed, and non-template messages inside an open customer service window are free, according to Meta's own pricing documentation. If the contact came from a click-to-WhatsApp ad, there is a 72-hour free entry point window.
Translated: replying today is free. Chasing on Friday the person who wrote on Monday is not.
Where Zatio fits
Zatio is an AI agent that handles WhatsApp and your website chat: it asks about ownership, property type, postcode and bill before it proposes anything, then either books the survey or closes the enquiry with a written reason. It does not carry out the survey, it does not quote prices that don't come from your own data, and it does not find you leads. If you want to test it against your own enquiries, here's the product.
This is general information, not tax or planning advice. For decisions about VAT treatment, grants or consents, talk to someone who can look at the specific job.