RebateLock — reservation desk for heat-pump installers

1. One-liner

RebateLock shows heat-pump installers which state rebate funds are still open and locks each reservation before install.

2. Trend signal — why now?

The federal rebate world for home electrification blew up on December 31, 2025. The Section 25C energy-efficiency credit and the 30% residential solar credit both expired. The identical heat pump a homeowner installed in 2025 for a $2,000 federal write-off now gets nothing federal in 2026. What replaced it is a fractured patchwork of state-run HOMES and HEAR/HEEHRA programs (up to $8,000–$14,000 per household) plus a couple thousand utility rebates ($200–$2,500), each with its own portal, its own eligibility rules, its own finite pot of money, and — critically — a pre-approval reservation you must lock before the equipment goes in.

The kicker: the money runs out, region by region, with almost no warning. Colorado’s HEAR Region 1 (Front Range) closed April 28, 2026. Contractors got roughly four days’ notice; the state stopped reviewing new income verifications on April 17 unless a project proposal was already on file. Any contractor still quoting that rebate to a Front Range homeowner on April 25 was selling a job they couldn’t deliver.

This is a brand-new operational nightmare that did not exist 12 months ago. Every quote a heat-pump installer writes in 2026 now carries a live question — is this rebate still funded, and did we reserve it before we touched the equipment? — and the tools they already pay for (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber) don’t answer it.

Provenance:

• Signal 1 (Demand): Colorado HEAR Region 1 closed April 28, 2026 with ~4 days’ notice; new-application path shut April 17 — contractors lost the ability to offer the rebate mid-sale. — https://unicolorado.com/hear-rebate-update-april-2026/ — 2026-04
• Signal 2 (Feasibility): Cheap LLM extraction of equipment nameplates / AHRI certs plus agentic monitoring of ~50 state portal fund-status pages is now trivial; state “registered contractor” lists and program dashboards are public. — https://resources.instafill.ai/docs/hvac-construction/energy-efficiency-rebate-programs — 2026
• Signal 3 (Economic): ~$8.8B IRA home-energy rebate pool flowing through state programs in 2026, up to $14K/job, on top of $200–$2,500 utility rebates; manufacturer-side rebate-software vendors (Snipp, RebatePros) prove money moves in this workflow. — https://homes.rewiringamerica.org/federal-incentives/home-efficiency-rebates — 2026 Category: Regulatory arbitrage

3. The opportunity

The 2025→2026 transition moved the incentive from a tax credit the homeowner claimed later (contractor barely involved) to a pre-approval reservation the contractor must secure before install (contractor squarely on the hook). That flips the burden onto the installer and creates three ways to lose money that didn’t exist before:

1. Quote a dead rebate. Fund closes mid-sale-cycle. Homeowner was promised $10K off, contractor now looks like a liar or eats the difference.
2. Miss the reservation gate. Install first, apply after — rejected. On HEAR that’s an $8–14K hole per job.
3. Bounce the submission. Missing AHRI cert, wrong model number, no income verification on file — claim denied, contractor absorbs it or chases the homeowner.

The incumbents are the wrong shape. Snipp and RebatePros are manufacturer/big-builder rebate platforms — they process brand promotions, not the small installer’s state-reservation clock. Rewiring America and WattRebate publish free homeowner eligibility calculators — great for “do I qualify,” useless for “is this fund still open today and did my crew reserve it before Tuesday.” ServiceTitan / Housecall Pro run dispatch and invoicing and have no rebate module at all. Nobody owns the contractor’s operational layer: live fund status across programs + a hard pre-approval gate wired into the job.

4. Target market

• Primary customer: Owner or office manager at a small US HVAC / electrification contractor — 2 to 25 employees, installs heat pumps, heat-pump water heaters, and electrical panel upgrades. The shops that are “registered contractors” in one or more state HEAR/HOMES programs.
• Why they buy: In their words — “I quoted a rebate, the money ran out, and now I’m the bad guy.” / “We installed before the reservation cleared and ate $9,000.” The pain is a specific, expensive, repeatable moment: writing a quote that hinges on a rebate they can’t personally verify is still live.
• Rough TAM reasoning: Contact databases list ~82,000 US HVAC companies. Even if only the 15,000–25,000 that actively chase electrification rebates are in scope, at $150–$400/mo that’s a $30M–$100M ARR ceiling — comfortably a sub-$5M bootstrapped business without needing the whole market.
• Why now for them: Heat-pump installs are projected up 15–20% in 2026, and the rebate is now the deciding factor in whether the homeowner says yes. The contractor who can confidently promise a still-funded rebate wins the job; the one who guesses loses it or loses money.

5. Product sketch (MVP)

• Live funding board: a per-state, per-program status light — Open / Running Low / Closed — for the programs the contractor operates in, updated from the official portals and dashboards.
• Rebate finder for a quote: enter address + equipment + household income band → returns the specific programs that apply, dollar amounts, and whether each is currently funded.
• Reservation gate: every job gets a status (Not Reserved / Reservation Pending / Reserved / Installed). The system will not let a job move to “schedule install” while a required reservation is still pending, and screams if someone tries.
• Doc checklist per program: auto-generated list of exactly what this program needs (AHRI cert, model/serial, itemized invoice, income verification, pre-approval form) with photo/upload capture from the field.
• Deadline + fund-depletion alerts: SMS/email when a program the contractor uses drops to “running low” or announces a closure date, and when a reservation window is about to lapse.
• Submission packet: assembles the required documents into the format each state portal expects, ready to paste/upload.
• Homeowner-facing one-pager: a clean “here’s your rebate, here’s the status” sheet the contractor hands the customer to close the sale.

6. AI angle — what’s load-bearing

Two places AI does real work, not decoration:

1. Program monitoring & rule extraction. State portals and utility pages are unstructured, inconsistent, and change without notice. An agentic layer reads them, extracts fund status, eligibility rules, doc requirements, and deadlines, and normalizes ~50+ programs into one schema. Doing this by hand across states is exactly the labor that makes the problem unsolved today.
2. Document capture & validation. Photograph the equipment nameplate → extract model/serial, match to the AHRI/ENERGY STAR cert, flag mismatches before submission. This is the single most common rejection cause. Cheap vision + LLM extraction turns a 15-minute clerical task into 15 seconds and kills the error class.

Remove the AI and you’re left with a static rebate directory — which already exists for free and doesn’t solve the live-fund or per-job-validation problem. The AI is what makes it operational.

7. Localization angle (if any)

N/A — this is a US-only play by design, and that’s the point. The opportunity is the localization: it’s hyper-local to US state and utility program structure. The equivalent “geography” wedge here is state coverage — win the 6–8 states with the biggest, messiest HEAR/HOMES rollouts (CA, CO, NY, MA, WA, ME, and the next tier) before anyone else maps them, and expand state by state as programs launch through 2026–2027.

8. Business model — path to $1M–$5M ARR

• Pricing: $149/mo for a solo/small shop (single state, unlimited jobs), $299/mo standard (multi-state), $499/mo for larger crews with team seats and API into their CRM. Optional per-submission assist add-on.
• ACV: ~$2,500–$3,600/year blended.
• Rough math to $1M ARR: ~350 contractors × $250/mo × 12 ≈ $1.05M. That’s ~1–2% of the ~25K rebate-active installers.
• Rough math to $5M ARR: ~1,400 paying contractors at the same blended ACV, plus expansion into panel-upgrade electricians and solar installers who face the identical reservation clock. Needs multi-state coverage mature enough to serve national franchise groups.
• Expansion path: seats as shops grow; add adjacent trades (electricians doing panel upgrades, HPWH plumbers, solar); a “done-for-you submission” premium tier where RebateLock actually files; eventually a lead-referral angle (homeowners searching “who does rebate-eligible installs near me”).

9. Go-to-market wedge — first 100 customers

• Scrape the public “registered contractor” directories. Every state HEAR/HOMES program publishes a list of approved contractors (Colorado, Massachusetts Mass Save, Connecticut EnergizeCT, etc.). That’s a named, pre-qualified list of exactly the shops with this pain — email + call with a 60-second Loom showing their state’s live fund status.
• Ride the next closure. When a state region goes “running low,” that’s the moment of maximum pain. Monitor closures, then blast the registered-contractor list in that state within 24 hours: “Region 1 funds close Friday — here’s what’s still open.” Fear-of-loss converts.
• Distributor & manufacturer rep channels. Heat-pump distributors (Daikin/Mitsubishi/Carrier reps) run contractor training and want their installers to close rebate-dependent jobs. Co-market: they get more equipment sold, we get warm intros to their contractor books.
• r/hvacadvice and contractor Facebook groups. The rebate-confusion threads are already there; show up with the free funding board as a lead magnet.
• Free “Is this rebate still open?” widget. Public, ungated, SEO-friendly per state (“Colorado HEAR status”) — captures search traffic from panicked contractors and homeowners, funnels to the paid product.

10. Build complexity — justification

Medium. The core app (job tracking, checklist, reservation gate, alerts, doc capture) is a standard web + mobile-upload stack an experienced pair ships in 8–10 weeks. The real work is the program-coverage layer — mapping and maintaining ~50 state/utility programs’ rules, doc requirements, and live fund status. That’s not a research problem, it’s a grind: agentic scraping + human review to launch 6–8 states, then expand. Budget ~10–14 weeks to a credible multi-state v1 for a small team, with ongoing content-ops to keep programs current.

11. Gating checklist

Gate	Pass?	Note
Legal in target market	✅	Aggregating public program data + workflow tooling. No licensing needed.
Ethical — no harm / dark patterns	✅	Helps contractors deliver rebates they promise; reduces homeowners getting burned.
Market exists (evidence above)	✅	Documented closures, doc-burden, adjacent funded vendors, CRM gap.
1–5 person team can build this	✅	Standard stack + off-the-shelf AI; coverage is ops, not R&D.
Launchable with <$50K / ₹40L	✅	Solo/pair build; main cost is time on program coverage.

12. Feasibility score

Axis	Weight	Score	Notes
Problem intensity	20	17/20	Losing or eating an $8–14K rebate per job is hair-on-fire, and it recurs on every rebate-dependent quote.
Demand evidence	15	12/15	Strong indirect signals (dated closures, doc-burden coverage, adjacent funded vendors, confirmed CRM gap). Docked because direct contractor-voice quotes on this exact pain were thin.
Build feasibility	15	12/15	App is off-the-shelf; multi-state program coverage is the grind, but it’s ops not research.
Distribution clarity	15	12/15	Named, public, pre-qualified contractor lists per state; closures create timed demand spikes. Conversion still to be proven.
Revenue mechanics	15	11/15	Clean per-seat pricing against $8–14K jobs; risk is WTP for a politically finite incentive category.
Time to first revenue	10	8/10	Self-serve, trial-to-paid; revenue in 4–8 weeks off the registered-contractor lists.
Defensibility	10	6/10	Moat is the maintained cross-state fund-status + rule dataset that compounds; copyable but a real grind. Platform/political risk on the programs themselves.
Total	100	78/100	GO.

13. Qualitative modifiers

Founder-fit tags

domain-expertise-required · technical-heavy — needs someone who understands the HVAC/electrification contractor workflow (or a design partner who does) plus the engineering to build and maintain the agentic program-coverage layer.

Key assumptions to validate (3–5)

1. Assumption: Rebate-active installers will pay $150–$300/mo to avoid quoting-a-dead-rebate and missed-reservation losses. How to test: 30 discovery calls with registered contractors in CO/MA/NY; pre-sell 10 at $149/mo before building full coverage.
2. Assumption: The pre-approval-before-install gate is the pain they’d pay for, not just the rebate finder (which is free elsewhere). How to test: show two mockups (finder-only vs finder+reservation-gate) and see which they say they’d pay for.
3. Assumption: Program fund-status can be monitored reliably enough to be trusted in a sales conversation. How to test: manually track 6 states’ fund status for 3 weeks; measure how fast/accurately we’d have caught the next “running low.”
4. Assumption: The 2026 program money and structure survives long enough to build a business on (political/funding risk). How to test: map program authorization horizons per state; confirm at least a 2–3 year runway in the target states.

Risk flags

1. Regulatory / political risk: These are government-funded, finite, politically contingent programs. A future administration or state legislature could shrink or kill them — the exact same shift that created this opportunity could remove it. Mitigate by expanding into permanent utility rebates (which persist regardless of IRA) and adjacent trades.
2. Platform dependency: Coverage depends on scraping/reading state and utility portals that change format without notice. Requires ongoing ops discipline; a broken scraper = stale fund status = broken trust.
3. Market timing: If federal money fully drains before multi-state coverage matures, the acute pain softens. Move fast on the states with the biggest active rollouts.

14. Structured verdict

Score:                  78/100
Verdict:                GO
Confidence:             Medium
Best-fit builder:       Technical founder + an HVAC/electrification contractor design partner
Time to revenue:        6–10 weeks (pre-sell off registered-contractor lists)
Capital to launch:      $8–15K ($ mostly founder time + AI/scraping infra)
Top 3 assumptions to validate first:
  1. Contractors pay $150–$300/mo — pre-sell 10 before full build
  2. Reservation-gate (not the free finder) is the willingness-to-pay driver — mockup test
  3. Fund-status monitoring is reliable enough to trust in a sale — 3-week manual shadow
Kill criteria:
  - Abandon if <8 of 30 discovery-call contractors will pre-commit at $149/mo
  - Abandon if target states announce program wind-down inside 12 months, gutting the runway

15. Next step — 1-week validation sprint

• Day 1–2: Scrape the registered-contractor lists for Colorado, Massachusetts, and New York. Build a throwaway “live fund status” board for those three states by hand.
• Day 3–4: Cold-call/email 30 registered contractors. Lead with their state’s current fund status. Pitch: “$149/mo — never quote a dead rebate or miss a reservation again.” Offer a founding-member pre-sell.
• Day 5: Decide go / no-go. Falsifiable outcome: ≥8 of 30 contractors verbally commit or put down a deposit at $149/mo. Below that, the operational pain isn’t worth paying for yet — shelve and revisit as more states launch programs.