QuitCarbon's services are completely free for homeowners. We generate detailed electrification plans tailored for each home, provide expert electrification planning calls, match homeowners with vetted contractors, and advise them on saving money and maximizing their rebates.
In order to provide our service for free, we make money in a variety of ways.
We've won multiple prizes and funding from government organizations such as the US Department of Energy, the California Energy Commissions, the City and County of San Francisco, the City of Santa Monica, the City of San Jose, 3C-REN, and others for accelerating electrification and helping them hit their ambitious emissions targets and climate goals. We've also been awarded funding to conduct electrification outreach and engagement in certain regions like the Central Coast.
These competitive prizes and grants are focused on making electrification more affordable and equitable.
We also get a commission from certain contractors when we help them find and serve certain homeowners. These payments come from their existing Sales and Marketing budgets. We educate and inspire homeowners which makes our contractors' lives easier and their business more efficient, eventually driving down costs for everyone.
When we refer a contractor to a homeowner, we review the bid they provide to ensure the homeowner is getting the right work for a fair price. In addition to getting a great experience at a fair price, working with our recommended contractors is a great way to keep our services free for others, giving you an opportunity to pay it forward for your neighbors, reducing pollution and multiplying your climate impact.
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QuitCarbon is free to homeowners - just like Yelp is free, Google Reviews and Google Maps are free, Angi and Nextdoor are free - you don't pay anything for any of those, but contractors do pay for all of those, and many other expenses related to sales and marketing, like radio advertising, print and other media advertising, and most impactful, making bids and proposals for free that aren't accepted. All of those business expenses must be paid for, and they are paid for by the customers that do business with the contractors. This is a simple reality of running a business - the expenses of the business, and a little bit of profit, are what are paid for by the customers of the business.
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Contractors don't inflate their prices to pay QuitCarbon specifically - all of our partner contractors tell us they do not do that. Instead, all of their sales and marketing expenses (listed above) are paid for by their sales and marketing budgets, which are funded by the sales they make to homeowners.
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QuitCarbon regularly helps customers spend less by showing them how to avoid unnecessary electrical work, by guiding them towards lower-cost solutions (like lower-power heat pump water heaters), and by helping them optimize the timing of their upgrades to capture maximum incentives.
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Neither contractors nor homeowners are forced to work with QuitCarbon - everyone has a choice.
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QuitCarbon's contractor partners given fair and honest prices for their work - we check every bid they make (plus every other bid we receive from non-partnered contractors) and we provide our expert analysis on every one of those proposals. When we see a proposal from a non-partnered contractor that is better, we say so - yes, this hurts us in the short term, but it is better for everyone in the long term. If we find any contractor providing what appears to be unreasonable or dis-honest pricing, we say so - and if we see that from a partner contractor, we seek to correct it right away - if we can't get it corrected, we end the partnership.