Tunnel = a 1-mile stretch of road you own. Zone = a neighborhood-sized area of about 0.28 square miles that you own. Background = the whole member network, no geography limit. Full glossary
Veteran-owned. Jacksonville-based. Fixed rate per verified delivery. No auction, no Middleman Tax.
Jacksonville solar market data
Customer acquisition cost
Derived: LocalIQ CPL benchmark ÷ 25–50% close-rate assumptionCost per lead (FL)
LocalIQ Home Services benchmarks, cross-vertical range (solar not separately published), Apr 2024–Mar 2025Highest service-call window
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Climate Normals (Jacksonville, FL)The product
WilDi Maps is not a single flat-rate product. You pick the tier that matches how local you need to be. All three are GPS-verified per claim, with no auction, no exchange rake, no Middleman Tax.
1-mile road strip
Premium
Hyper-local, just-in-time
Claim a one-mile stretch. When a member enters the strip, they get a just-in-time message, perfect for emergency services, on-route specials, and anything where being right there now beats brand awareness later.
Best for
0.28-square-mile area
Premium
Hyper-local, area-based
Claim a one-square-mile block, not tied to a single road. Catches the residential cluster, retail district, or industrial park where your work actually lives. Same just-in-time delivery as tunnels; different geometry.
Best for
City-wide rotation
From $0.25
per claim, tier-based
City-wide brand presence on rotation. Highest reach for the budget; best when familiarity beats precision. Per-delivery rate drops by tier (Enterprise: $0.25 / Pro: $0.32 / Local: $0.40 / Starter: $0.50). See /pricing for the live rate card.
Best for
What the member gets when an ad is claimed
If the member wants to act on the ad, the app navigates them straight to the advertiser's location.
Click-through to any URL: ordering page, brand site, blog post, lead form.
Open a specific page inside the WilDi app: promo details, daily specials, claim instructions.
See the full pricing breakdown on the pricing page.
The honest channel breakdown, not vendor pitches. Numbers below are public benchmarks, sourced inline. Each channel has a job; the question is which one delivers the homeowner with a failing system at a price that lets you stay profitable.
| Channel | Cost range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Local Services Ads | Per valid lead, price set by Google by location, job type, lead type and bidding mode. No published price. | Google's own words: 'You're charged for each valid lead you receive'; 'Lead prices may vary depending on your location, the job type, the type of lead, or your bidding mode.' Google publishes no per-vertical or per-market lead prices, so no dollar figure appears here. Note: from August 2026 Google is migrating LSA into Performance Max with pay-per-lead goals; you still pay only for valid leads, but manual maximum cost-per-lead bidding is going away. Google Local Services Ads help (charges, credits, Performance Max migration) |
| Google Search Ads | $93.69 to $228.15 cost per lead across published home-services trades; solar not separately published | LocalIQ's per-trade benchmark (medians, 3,211 US campaigns, Apr 2024 to Mar 2025) does not include a solar row. We show the span across the trades it does publish and say so, rather than borrow a figure. National, auction-priced. LocalIQ Home Services Search Advertising Benchmarks (Apr 2024 to Mar 2025) |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) lead ads | $2.23 avg CPC · $41.26 cost per lead (Home and Home Improvement, leads campaigns) | Platform-benchmark from 726 US leads-objective campaigns, Apr 2024 to Jun 2025. A Meta lead is a form fill from someone scrolling, not someone physically in your area; conversion rate in the benchmark is 5.22%. WordStream Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2025 |
| Static billboards (Jacksonville) | $3 to $10 CPM nationally (executed contracts); Jacksonville blended traditional-billboard CPM $5 to $12; static bulletins $1,800 to $6,500 and posters $800 to $2,200 per 4-week flight, production $400 to $1,400 extra (AdQuick 2026 guide) | No Jacksonville operator publishes a rate card, so the local figure is a marketplace listing and labelled secondary; the national range is from executed contracts. Impressions follow Geopath's definition: gross exposures including passengers and duplicated views, not people. Solomon Partners / OAAA 2025 CPM comparison; AdQuick Jacksonville listing; Geopath glossary |
| Digital billboards (Jacksonville) | Freeway digital bulletins $5 to $12 CPM (share of voice $3,000 to $12,000 per unit per month); downtown LEDs $12 to $22, JAX airport $15 to $28, programmatic exchange $4 to $11 (AdQuick Q2 2026 marketplace rates); self-serve plays from $0.01 per ~8-second play | A digital board rotates advertisers, typically 8 seconds of exposure every 64 to 80 seconds, so your exposure is a fraction of the board's traffic. Marketplace ranges are asking prices; the per-play price is the only platform-published billboard price that exists. AdQuick Jacksonville DOOH listing; Blip pricing |
| Lead marketplaces (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Networx) | Angi and Thumbtack publish no per-lead prices; Networx publishes $10 to $100+ per shared lead and $15 to $120+ exclusive (2023) | Angi's 10-K: pros pay for the match 'regardless of whether the Pro ultimately provides the requested service'. Thumbtack caps a homeowner at five pros in the first four hours, then lifts the cap. Networx sends one pay-per-lead to up to four contractors. The FTC's 2022 to 2023 action against HomeAdvisor concerned the quality and source of leads sold to pros (allegations resolved by consent order). Solar-specific marketplaces publish no verifiable per-lead price either, so none appears here. Angi FY2025 10-K; Thumbtack help center; Networx help center; FTC |
| WilDi Maps: Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD) | From $0.25 (background, tier-based); tunnels and zones priced for hyper-local | Three-tier model: tunnel (1-mile road strip), zone (0.28-sq-mile neighborhood cluster), background (city-wide rotation). GPS-verified human delivery, no auction, no shared-lead economics, no Middleman Tax. WilDi Maps pricing |
The pricing model
Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD) is a pricing model where you pay a tier-based rate (from $0.25) each time your message is delivered to a real phone moving through a real street segment you own. The delivery is GPS-verified: the device was physically present in the corridor at the time of delivery. Not an impression, not a click, not a "potential reach": a delivery to a known location at a known time.
CPVD replaces auction-based CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click), the pricing models that hide 30-50% of an HVAC budget in the Middleman Tax. No exchanges, no demand-side platforms, no supply-side platforms, no resellers. One fixed rate, one verified delivery, one operator on the other end.
Read the full breakdown of where every dollar of an ad budget actually goes: What is the Middleman Tax?
Also known as ad platform fees. What is the Middleman Tax?
Same budget. Follow where the dollars actually go. Pick your vertical for a personalized waste estimate, or leave it on Average for the industry-wide baseline.
That's $30,000 per year. Here's where every dollar ends up:
What you put in
27% taken by SSPs and DSPs before an ad runs
26% on made-for-advertising sites, unmeasurable and non-viewable placements, and bots
47% of what you put in
Same budget, same ambition
Fixed verified human delivery · no auction
100% of your budget, a known quantity
$15,870 stops flowing to middlemen. 93,744 WilDi verified deliveries instead.
Priority Access to Jacksonville pilot zone and tunnel coverage. Background brands can use the Phase 1 Jacksonville rollout now as we start expanding.
Baseline Middleman Tax is anchored to the ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study: Complete Report (Association of National Advertisers, December 5, 2023), which found that transaction costs, primarily DSP and SSP fees, account for 29 percent of the ad dollar, and that only 36 cents of every dollar entering a DSP effectively reaches the consumer once invalid traffic, non-viewable impressions and made-for-advertising sites are counted. Per-vertical estimates are not pure fee figures: they blend that fee skim with WordStream cost-per-click benchmarks and DoubleVerify invalid-traffic rates. Full methodology and sources →
Jacksonville's median home year built is 1990 , meaning a typical home is now 36 years old, well past original-system replacement age. The neighborhoods below combine housing-stock age, AC-strain factors, and replacement-driven demand.
Large 1970s-1990s single-family rooftops, deep south-facing exposures, mature owner-occupied stock with above-average electric bills. The highest-volume residential solar corridor in Jacksonville.
Newer master-planned construction with EV-ready garages, solar-friendly HOA architectural standards, and a buyer demographic actively comparing lease and PPA products in the post-25D environment.
High-income coastal buyers, large rooftops, and the disposable-cash profile that absorbs cash purchases without leaning on tax-credit financing. The strongest cash-buyer pocket in the metro.
Environmentally-aware urban-historic demographic; solar uptake here is values-driven, well-suited to story-led creative and visible-rooftop diffusion within the historic district.
Premium owner-occupied housing, high electric bills on older HVAC, design-conscious buyers who pair solar with battery storage and EV charging. Strong multi-product attach.
High-volume mid-bill households where rising JEA rates plus financeable lease and PPA products move the close. Broad-funnel background rotation works here before zone targeting tightens around installed clusters.
For operators on shared-lead platforms
Solar lead marketplaces do not publish verifiable per-lead prices, and the same homeowner is routinely routed to several installers per quote request, so the real cost per booked install is a multiple of whatever the headline price turns out to be once you back out dead leads, price-shoppers, and the installer who got there first. The one marketplace fact that is on the record across home services: Angi's 10-K says pros pay for the match regardless of whether they end up doing the job. CPVD is a different model entirely: you own the corridor, the delivery is verified to a real phone while someone is driving through it, and nothing is resold to a competitor. See how the math compares for solar operators.
See the lead-marketplace comparisonHonest take
WilDi isn't the right answer for every solar ad budget. A few honest cases where traditional channels still pencil out:
Multi-megawatt procurement, IPP development, and large commercial rooftop PPA deals are sold through buyer relationships, RFP platforms, and trade-association presence, not consumer-grade local advertising. CPVD doesn't help you reach a JEA wholesale-power planner or a corporate sustainability officer mid-procurement.
If you're a national rooftop solar brand running awareness across 30 metros, broadcast TV and programmatic display deliver scale that GPS-verified delivery can't match yet. WilDi delivers nation-wide via Backgrounds and into any Tunnel or Zone the operator places, but per-metro network density is sized today for hyperlocal saturation, not broadcast TV's mass reach. The Middleman Tax is a worse deal at small budgets. At $50M+ annual spend, the absolute waste is large but the scale convenience may justify the trade.
Third-party-ownership platforms (Sunrun, Sunnova, GoodLeap, Mosaic, and similar) bring co-funded marketing dollars that flow through their preferred-vendor stack. If the financing partner is paying half the impression spend on a programmatic buy, the channel mix isn't yours to optimize on CAC alone.
When a major hurricane causes multi-day grid outages and storage demand spikes, sheer reach beats targeting precision. Radio plus broadcast plus Google Search Ads combined still deliver more raw impressions in the first 72 hours than a single-zone mesh deployment. WilDi catches the consideration wave that follows the outage over the weeks after, not the immediate panic-buy hour.
Solar is not among the verticals with a platform-published cost-per-lead benchmark: across the published home-services verticals, search-ads CPL runs $93.69–$228.15 (LocalIQ, Apr 2024–Mar 2025), which at a 25–50% close rate implies roughly $190–$920 per acquired customer. Solar's long consideration cycle pushes real acquisition cost toward the top of that band, but no qualifying source publishes a solar-specific figure and we will not borrow one from a consultancy note or a lead marketplace. Google publishes no Local Services Ads lead prices. WilDi Maps' Cost Per Verified Delivery starts from $0.25 per GPS-verified delivery on background rotation, with tunnels and zones priced higher for hyper-local precision. A delivery is not a lead; it is one verified offer to one opted-in person driving where you chose.
The Inflation Reduction Act extended the 25D residential 30% Investment Tax Credit through 2032, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Public Law 119-21, signed July 2025) repealed the homeowner-owned 25D credit effective January 1, 2026. Owner-purchased residential systems installed in 2026 and beyond no longer qualify. Third-party-owned products (leases and power-purchase agreements) still qualify under the commercial 48E ITC if construction begins before July 2026 or the system is placed in service by 2028. Standalone battery storage retains a longer credit timeline. The practical effect: installers are pivoting sales motions to lease and PPA products, which changes both the close cycle and the messaging, and makes neighborhood-level visibility worth more, not less.
Florida currently offers full retail-rate net metering (1:1 credit for excess generation exported to the grid) for residential systems sized up to 115% of historical usage, under Florida Public Service Commission Rule 25-6.065. Existing solar customers and those who install before scheduled rate changes are expected to be grandfathered. JEA in the Jacksonville service territory operates a distributed-generation program that compensates excess generation at the avoided fuel rate (lower than retail) and pairs the program with a battery rebate; JEA's own program pages are the place to confirm current terms. The grandfathering window is the urgency story for late-2026 sales motions: install now to lock the favorable export rate before the policy steps down.
WilDi Maps has three tiers. Background (from $0.25 per GPS-verified delivery, city-wide rotation) is the broad-awareness layer for the long nurture cycle that defines residential solar, where a decision takes months rather than days, so metro-wide presence keeps you in the frame through the comparison phase. Zone (0.28-sq-mile neighborhood cluster, hyper-local premium) is the right tier once you have a few visible installations on a street: solar diffuses through neighborhoods because a visible rooftop array makes the next conversation on that block easier, and zone targeting saturates the cluster around your installed footprint. Tunnel (1-mile road strip) makes sense for high-traffic corridors past your office or a job site. The recommended mix for solar is zone plus background.
Cost Per Verified Delivery is WilDi Maps' pricing model. You pay a fixed rate each time your message is delivered to a real phone moving through a real street segment you own, starting from $0.25 per delivery on the background tier. The delivery is GPS-verified, meaning the device was physically present in the corridor at the time of delivery. No bots, no off-screen impressions, no auction, no Middleman Tax. When someone claims your offer, they can route turn-by-turn directly to your business, click through to your website, or open your in-app page. It replaces impression-based pricing (CPM), where the advertising industry's own benchmark, the ANA's, puts working media at roughly half of the programmatic dollar.
Solar adoption clusters. Once one rooftop on a street has visible panels, the neighbors have something to look at, someone to ask, and a crew that has already worked the block. The implication for ad spend is that paid reach tends to be most efficient inside an already-installed footprint rather than blanket-metro. Operators who run zone-tier delivery saturated around recent installations lean into that effect; operators who run city-wide auction-based search or shared marketplace leads pay auction rates to reach prospects the cluster might have reached anyway. WilDi's zone tier was built for exactly this dynamic. We publish no conversion-rate claim for it: our own claim data is what we report, and it is reported as ours.
Yes. Florida's hurricane season runs June through November and outage risk is the strongest non-financial buying motivation in this market. The federal storage credit was treated more favorably in the 2025 reconciliation: standalone battery storage retains commercial-ITC eligibility on a longer phase-out timeline than the residential solar credit. JEA also runs a residential solar-battery rebate program in Jacksonville that pairs cleanly with installer financing. Practically, lead with grid-resilience messaging in April and May (pre-season install window), pivot to bill-shock messaging in July through September (peak load on utility statements), and run your ad creative against zones with recent outage history when storms move through the Atlantic basin.
One verified delivery of your offer to the phone of one real person who was physically inside your chosen geography at that moment, confirmed by GPS on the device itself. That person also taps to acknowledge the offer, so a delivery is never an invisible impression. Bots, background tabs, and off-screen impressions cannot generate one. You are billed only when a verified delivery happens.
Background reaches everyone active in the WilDi app: nationwide by default, or limited to one area you choose (your city, your side of town) so budget is never spent outside it. A zone is a neighborhood-sized area you hold exclusively: while it is yours, no competitor can run there. A tunnel is a one-mile stretch of road you can place anywhere, and it follows the road's contours, ideal for the approach to your shop or a route your customers already drive.
No. Every tier has a fixed, published rate per verified delivery. The price you see is the price you pay, whether it is game day or a Tuesday morning. Higher tiers carry lower per-delivery rates.
The pilot market is Jacksonville, Florida, live now. New metros open as our opted-in local audience grows there. If you want your market next, talk to sales.
About this analysis
Written by Timm Ross, founder of WilDi Maps · Jacksonville-based · Veteran-owned. We run our own delivery mesh in this market and hold ourselves to the same numbers we publish.
More about WilDi MapsPriority Access is open to the Jacksonville pilot cohort. Fixed rate. No auction. No bidding. No Middleman Tax.
