Veteran-owned. Jacksonville-based. Fixed rate per verified delivery — no auction, no Middleman Tax.
Jacksonville solar market data
Customer acquisition cost
Wood Mackenzie — US residential solar customer acquisition costs set to spike 40% in 2026Highest service-call window
EnergySage — Florida solar production and seasonal generation patternsThe 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 — no auction, no exchange rake, no Middleman Tax.
1-mile road strip
Premium
Hyper-local, just-in-time
Lease a one-mile stretch. When a driver 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
1-square-mile area
Premium
Hyper-local, area-based
Lease 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
$0.20
per claim, fixed
City-wide brand presence on rotation. Highest reach for the budget — best when familiarity beats precision. The $0.20 fixed rate is the only flat-rate tier WilDi sells.
Best for
What the driver gets when an ad is claimed
If the driver 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 | $25–$120 per lead (home-services range, no dedicated solar category) | Solar does not have a dedicated LSA vertical and routes through home-services categories; pay-per-lead with the Google Guaranteed badge but auction inflation is steep in dense Florida metros. Blue Grid Media — 50 Google Local Services Ads Statistics 2026 |
| Google Search Ads | $30–$150 per lead (median ~$90) | Non-branded solar keywords clear $20–$60 per click; CPL ranges widely with negative-keyword discipline (jobs, DIY, wholesale) and call-duration filters cutting waste 18–28%. AdShot Media — Google Ads for Solar 2025/2026 |
| Lead marketplaces (EnergySage, SolarReviews, Modernize) | $25–$300 per shared lead | EnergySage and SolarReviews route comparison-shoppers to 3–5 installers per quote request; Modernize sells home-improvement leads by ZIP and system-size filter. Conversion rates run 5–8% on shared leads — well below referral close rates. SolarReviews — Solar Leads providers and pricing |
| Static billboards (Jacksonville) | $4.50–$5 CPM (~$1,500–$4,500 / 4-week flight) | ~750,000 impressions per 4-week unit. Impressions include passengers, renters, and out-of-market traffic — owner-occupied-with-suitable-rooftop share is small. AdQuick — Jacksonville billboard cost |
| Digital billboards (Jacksonville) | ~$11 CPM | Rotating slot, ~7–10 second exposure shared with 5–7 other advertisers. Solar creative competes for attention in the rotation against unrelated verticals. AdQuick — Jacksonville DOOH |
| WilDi Maps — Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD) | From $0.20 (background) — tunnels and zones priced for hyper-local | Three-tier model: tunnel (1-mile road strip), zone (1-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 fixed rate — $0.20 — each time your message is delivered to a real phone moving through a real street segment you've leased. 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.
Applied rate: ~50% waste
That's $30,000 per year. Here's where every dollar ends up:
What you put in
~50% estimated total waste on Local services (HVAC, plumbing, electrical) · ~50% upper · WordStream + DoubleVerify
What's left after the tax
Same budget — same ambition
Fixed verified human delivery · no auction
100% of your budget — a known quantity
$15,000 stops flowing to middlemen. 150,000 WilDi verified deliveries instead.
Priority Access to Jacksonville pilot zone and tunnel infrastructure. Background brands may utilize Phase 1 Jacksonville rollout now as we start expanding.
Baseline Middleman Tax uses the ~30% intermediary-extraction figure from the ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study (PwC, 2023) and the ISBA Programmatic Supply Chain Study (PwC, 2020). Per-vertical estimates combine WordStream cost-per-click benchmarks with DoubleVerify invalid-traffic rates. Full methodology and sources →
Jacksonville's median home year built is 1986 — meaning a typical home is now 40 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 charge $25–$300 per shared lead — and the same homeowner is routinely sent to 3–5 competing installers per quote request. Conversion rates on shared leads run 5–8%, which means real cost per booked install is multiples of the headline CPL once you back out dead leads, price-shoppers, and the installer who got there first. CPVD is a different model entirely: you own the corridor, the delivery is verified to a real driver phone, and there's no shared-lead economics. 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's mesh runs neighborhood-deep, not country-wide. 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 5–10x, 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 30–180 day consideration wave that follows the outage, not the immediate panic-buy hour.
The Inflation Reduction Act extended the 25D residential 30% Investment Tax Credit through 2032, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (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 (PPAs) — 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. 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. 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. JEA reports more than 6,000 rooftop solar customers in its service area, up from roughly 2,200 in 2021.
WilDi Maps has three tiers. Background ($0.20 per GPS-verified delivery, city-wide rotation) is the broad-awareness bottom-of-funnel layer for the 6–12 month nurture cycle that defines residential solar — most leads close 60–180 days after first contact, so brand presence across the whole metro keeps you top-of-mind through the comparison phase. Zone (1-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 one rooftop array drives the next five sales, 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've leased — starting at $0.20 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 a driver claims your offer, they can route turn-by-turn directly to your business, click through to your website, or open your in-app page. CPVD replaces the impression-based pricing (CPM) and shared-lead pricing that hides 30–50% of a solar installer's ad budget in intermediary fees.
Solar adoption clusters. Once one rooftop on a street has visible panels, neighbors on the same block convert at materially higher rates because the social proof is literally on the roof, the homeowner can be asked, and the install crew has already been present. The implication for ad spend is that paid reach is most efficient inside an already-installed footprint — not blanket-metro. Operators who run zone-tier delivery saturated around recent installations capture the diffusion effect; operators who run city-wide auction-based search or shared marketplace leads are paying retail to reach prospects who would have converted at lower CAC through cluster-saturation. WilDi's zone tier was built for exactly this dynamic.
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.
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.
