What happens to your contract

Why a solar contract is worth protecting

These documents are unusually rich. A typical residential solar agreement carries your legal name, the property address, your signature, the financed amount, the lender, sometimes a partial account number, and occasionally a credit tier. That combination is valuable to exactly the people you'd least want to have it — including lead brokers who resell homeowner data back into the door-to-door sales channel you may be trying to get away from.

That's the reason this page exists before the upload button, rather than in a footer link nobody reads.

What we do with the document

It's read, graded, and dropped.

When you upload a contract, or photos or a scan of its pages, it's transmitted over an encrypted connection to the AI analysis provider we contract with, which reads the terms — price, system size, escalator, guarantees — and drafts parts of the report. Our own fixed rules then measure most of the grades against published figures. Once the report renders, the document is gone from the pipeline. We don't write it to storage, we don't email it, and we don't have a copy to hand over to anyone who asks.

That provider processes it on our behalf, and data sent through its service is not used to train its models. Like most API providers, they may hold request data for a short period for abuse monitoring before it ages out. So when we say the document is gone, we mean it is gone from us and aging out there — not that it vanished from every system on earth the instant your report appeared. Anyone who tells you otherwise about any online tool is overselling.

If you'd rather not send certain details at all, redact them first. Account numbers, your signature, and your phone number play no part in the grade. The analysis needs the price, the system specs, the term language, and the property address — nothing more.

What we keep, and why

The contract data, without the people.

Comparing a contract’s price requires knowing what solar actually costs — and published benchmarks lag the market badly and leave out financing markups entirely. Contracts people bring us are the best available picture of real pricing, which is exactly why your grade is more accurate than a generic calculator's.

So after the grade is produced, we keep the contract's data. That includes, at their exact values:

• The property address: street address, ZIP code, county and map coordinates
• System size, battery size, panel maker and inverter type
• Price, price per watt, dealer fee, monthly payment and any scheduled payment increases
• Contract type (cash, loan, lease, PPA, PACE), term length, interest rate, escalator rate and PPA rate
• The installer, the lender or finance company, and the utility
• Lien, transfer, cancellation and production-guarantee terms, including any fees
• The contract date, the production estimate, and the grades the report gave
• Answers you give on the confirm screen about things that happen after signing: whether the tax-credit prepayment was made, the current loan payment, and the system’s actual production

The finished report. When the full report is locked until payment, we store the complete report — grades, findings and figures, not the document and not anyone’s name — under a random report number, so it can be released once PayPal confirms the payment and reopened afterward. For a paid report we also record the payment processor’s order and payment reference numbers, the amount and the date. If the report was run while signed in to an agent account, it is saved to that account, so the payment is linked to it; otherwise we don’t record who paid. You can ask us to delete a stored report at any time.

What we remove: the names of the people on the contract, signatures, phone numbers, email addresses and account numbers. We don't keep a copy of the document itself. What's left is a record of a solar contract tied to a property, not to a person — though anyone who knows who lives at an address could connect the two, which is why we treat it as personal information and honor removal requests.

The property address and its exact location are stored separately from the contract terms, in a restricted store linked only by a record number; research data is built from the contract terms with the county, 3-digit ZIP and month instead. We license that data, and you should know that before you upload.

Aggregated across thousands of contracts, those rows become something that doesn't currently exist: a real picture of what residential solar costs, which companies charge what, and how often the terms that cost homeowners money show up. Lenders, researchers, regulators, and consumer advocates want that picture, and we sell it to them. It also helps pay for the tool and keeps the report low-cost.

Licensed data never includes a homeowner's name, contact details or account numbers. Some datasets are property-level, meaning a row can include the property address alongside the system and contract terms (for example, for lenders, appraisers or researchers studying solar on specific homes). Company and region summaries apply minimum-sample thresholds so a single contract can't be picked out of them.

If you'd rather your property not be included, send us the address and we'll remove it and leave it out of every future dataset.

Other services that see part of it

A few outside services each see one piece of what’s needed to build the report. None of them receives the document.

• The U.S. Census Bureau geocoder receives the property address, to find its county and map coordinates.
• The PVWatts solar model, run by a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory (formerly NREL), receives the coordinates and system size, to model how much power the system should make there.
• PayPal processes payments and contributions on its own pages, under its own privacy policy. We receive only the payment’s reference numbers, amount and status.
• Stripe processes card, Apple Pay and Google Pay payments on its own checkout page, under its own privacy policy. We receive only the payment’s reference numbers, amount and status.
• Netlify hosts the site and stores the data described on this page; like any web host it keeps short-lived request logs.
• Google Fonts supplies the site’s typefaces, so your browser contacts Google to load them.

What we never do

• Sell your name or contact details, or sell leads. Names, emails and phone numbers in a contract are never kept, so they can't be sold, shared with installers or lenders, or passed to lead generators. The property data described above can't be used to reach you. A tool that grades solar contracts and also feeds the solar sales machine would be worthless, and we'd rather have the tool.
• Contact you with offers. We don't run a sales operation and we don't let anyone else run one through us.
• Use your document to train AI models.
• Let any company pay to change a grade. No installer, lender or utility can pay to improve a grade, suppress a report, or be left out of the data.

If this company is ever sold

If RateMySolar is acquired or merges with another company, the contract dataset would transfer as part of that business, and the buyer would be bound by the commitments on this page. If a future owner ever wanted to handle information differently than described here, that would require notice and, where the law requires it, your consent — it would not happen quietly.

The rest of it

Information you type in. Details you enter directly — home size, occupants, utility bill figures, and the follow-up answers above — are used to produce the report and follow the same handling as the contract. A closing date you enter for the transfer timeline, and anything you type into the paydown or buyout calculators, stay in your browser and are never sent to us.

Your browser. The page keeps your current report in your browser tab’s session storage so a refresh doesn’t lose it, and remembers that you ticked the consent boxes; both clear when you close the tab. If you pay for a report before uploading, or open a report before signing in, the page keeps that purchase or report number in your browser’s local storage until it is used. We set two cookies of our own: one that counts the free preview for your browser (described below) and, if you sign in, an agent sign-in cookie that lasts 30 days. The advertising measurement tags described below may set theirs, and PayPal and Stripe set their own cookies on their own pages.

Your rights. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what we hold about you, request deletion, or opt out of sale of your information. We don't keep documents, names or contact details, so most requests come down to the property address: tell us the address and we'll show you what we hold for it, delete it, or exclude it from anything we license.

Electric bills. If you upload electric bills, they are read once by the same AI analysis provider to find each month's charges and usage, and the files are not stored. The report keeps only the results: the average monthly bill, the months found, yearly usage and the utility's name. If you type an estimate instead, we keep that number.

Agent accounts. If you sign in as an agent, we keep your email address, the name, brokerage and phone you enter, and the reports you run while signed in, including the property address and the contract details you confirmed, so you can reopen them later. Sign-in codes are stored only in scrambled form and expire after 10 minutes.

Sample report by email. If you ask us to email you the sample report, we keep your email address, the date and where you came from (for example, an ad or an email). We send the sample right away and one short reminder about two weeks later, and every email has an unsubscribe link. We don’t sell or share these email addresses.

Free preview. To count the free preview (one per person), the site sets one small cookie that identifies your browser, not you, and keeps a scrambled form of your internet connection's address for the month. It is used only to count free previews.

Not-legal-advice acknowledgment. Before each upload you confirm that the report is information, not legal advice. The time you confirmed is saved with the report.

Chat. The "Chat with us" box sends your questions to the same AI analysis provider to write an automated answer. We don’t store what you type in the chat; we keep only a daily count per internet connection (in scrambled form) to limit automated use. Please don’t type personal details or contract information into the chat.

Bot protection. To keep the service fair and spot automated use, we count how many contracts are read each day per agent account, per browser (using the preview cookie) and per internet connection (in scrambled form). Unusually high counts slow that account or connection down for a few minutes and send us an alert. These counts are used only for this.

Usage counts. We count how many contracts are read and graded each day, and which ads, links or sites visitors arrive from (for example, a Facebook ad or a search), as plain daily totals. Those counts use no cookies and nothing in them identifies you or your document.

Advertising measurement. We advertise on services such as Facebook, Instagram and Google, and the site may load their measurement tags (the Meta Pixel and the Google tag). These tags can set cookies and tell those companies that a visit, an upload, a checkout or a purchase happened, so we can see which ads work and they can show our ads to people likely to find them useful. They receive the page you visited and the event name (and the price, for a purchase). They never receive your document, the contract terms, the property address, your report or its link: the tags wait until a report link is cleared from the address bar, and do not load at all while one is showing. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, the tags are not loaded. You can also limit ad tracking in your Facebook and Google ad settings or block third-party cookies in your browser.

Children. This tool is for adults evaluating property contracts and isn't directed at anyone under 18.

Changes. If how we handle documents changes, this page changes first, with the date below updated. We won't quietly expand what we retain.

Questions, removal or deletion requests: use the contact form. It comes straight to a person.