The best solar proposal software in South Africa is the tool that can put three numbers on the same page: the hours of critical load the battery carries through a load shedding block, the after-tax payback once Section 12B is applied, and the monthly cost of the system compared against the client’s current municipal or Eskom bill including the fixed charges solar does not remove. Most international proposal platforms handle none of the three, because they were built for markets where the utility is a reliable counterparty and the sale is about export credit. Here the grid is the problem, and the proposal is selling reliability first and money second. This guide ranks the ten platforms South African installers and C&I integrators shortlist in 2026, prices them in rand, and names where each one falls short, SurgePV included. SurgePV takes first place at roughly ZAR 24,000 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan.
Direct answer. SurgePV is the best solar proposal software in South Africa for 2026, at roughly ZAR 24,000 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan. It sizes backup autonomy against a load shedding schedule, prints battery state of charge alongside the financials, models Section 12B style first-year write-off through its depreciation fields, and attaches the single line diagram and bill of quantities your SSEG application and Certificate of Compliance both depend on.
This is the sales-side ranking. The engineering view of the same market sits in our best solar design software in South Africa guide. For the cross-market comparison read the solar proposal software roundup, and for the closest regional sibling see the best solar proposal software in Nigeria page, where a diesel generator rather than a load shedding schedule is the thing being displaced.
What a South African Solar Proposal Has to Prove
A South African proposal is answering a different question from an American or British one. The buyer is not asking what they will earn from exporting surplus energy. They are asking what happens to their business, their tenants or their family the next time the grid goes down, and what that protection costs per month.
Four content blocks separate a South African proposal from a generic one. Stage economics, meaning the hours of critical load carried and the cost of the downtime avoided, quantified rather than implied. After-tax financials, with Section 12B applied and clearly labelled as an assumption. The correct tariff, named by supplier, since Eskom direct-supply and municipal-supply customers face different structures and the City of Cape Town’s is different again. A financing structure, because rent-to-own and power purchase agreements close a large share of commercial work and the buyer is comparing a monthly payment against a monthly bill.
What is not on the page is an export credit table. Feed-in arrangements exist in some municipalities but they are typically modest, capped and hedged with conditions, and no serious South African commercial case is built on them. Our power purchase agreement and payback period glossary entries cover the structures the financial section actually needs.
Bring one of your own sites to a free SurgePV demo. We will build the 3D roof from a satellite address, run the 8,760-hour shading simulation, and hand you the SLD, BOQ and branded proposal on the call.
Book a free SurgePV demo → Compare pricingThe Stage 6 Proposal Test: Five Axes That Decide the Tool
This is the frame our design desk applies before a platform goes anywhere near a South African client. Each tool scores 1 to 10 across five axes for a maximum of 50. Below 35 we will not issue a proposal from it.
- Outage narrative. Can the proposal show battery state of charge through a realistic worst day of blocks, and translate that into hours of critical load protected, rather than just an annual kWh figure?
- Tariff fidelity. Does the savings model separate energy charges from fixed, capacity and demand charges, and can you enter an Eskom, a City of Cape Town or an eThekwini structure accurately rather than a single blended rate?
- Tax and incentive handling. Can you apply a first-year capital write-off in the cash flow, present pre-tax and after-tax payback side by side, and label the assumption clearly?
- Financing structures. Rent-to-own, instalment sale and PPA modelled as a monthly figure against the current bill, not only as a capital sum.
- Compliance attachments and cost. Single line diagram and bill of quantities good enough for the SSEG application and the Certificate of Compliance signatory, at a defensible rand cost per issued proposal.
Scored this way: SurgePV 40, Enact 34, Hohm Energy 32 (strongest on axis 2 for residential, but see the status note below: the company is in liquidation and the score is historical), Pylon 30, Sunbase 30, OpenSolar 28, Arka360 27, Aurora Solar 24, QuickEstimate 24, Solargraf 23. Axis 5 does most of the reshuffling: Pylon charges per project rather than per seat and OpenSolar’s core platform is free, so both cost less per issued proposal than the seat-priced tools, while Solargraf’s plan pricing starts at US$2,799 a year and drops it below Aurora on cost.
Verdict. Nothing on this list scores full marks on axis 2, because South African tariffs are genuinely complicated and every vendor ships a simplification. Whichever tool you buy, one person on your team needs to own the tariff library and check it against a real bill each quarter.
Top 10 Solar Proposal Software in South Africa Compared
Pricing is 2026, converted at approximately ZAR 18.5 to the US dollar and annualised per seat unless stated. Most vendors bill in dollars, so rand figures move with the exchange rate.
| # | Platform | ZAR per user per year | Key proposal capability | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SurgePV | ZAR 24,000 (US$1,299), 5-User Team | Backup autonomy modelling plus SLD, BOQ and branded proposal in one licence | Installers and EPCs selling hybrids across residential and C&I |
| 2 | Enact | US$279/mo for 2 users on annual (~ZAR 61,900/yr for the pair) | Proposal with lease, loan and PPA modelling and lifecycle tracking | C&I teams selling on PPA or rent-to-own |
| 3 | Hohm Energy | No longer available: entered business rescue 31 July 2024 and voluntary liquidation in September 2024 | Local residential quoting, ZAR pricing, installer network | Nobody today. Listed for context only |
| 4 | Sunbase | From US$59/user/mo (~ZAR 13,100/yr); higher tiers not published | CRM plus proposal with e-signature and project handover | Sales-led teams whose bottleneck is pipeline, not design |
| 5 | Pylon | Per project: US$4.00 Standard, $10.00 Pro (~ZAR 74 to ZAR 185) | Interactive web proposals with finance integrations | Teams selling on visual, shareable web proposals |
| 6 | Arka360 | India list price only (₹46,000 to ₹1,00,000/yr plus GST); South African pricing not publicly listed | Design plus proposal in one at a lower entry price | Small teams wanting a single licence |
| 7 | OpenSolar | Free core platform; API Access and Connectors chargeable from 16 Apr 2026, rates not published | Free proposal builder with strong residential templates | Solo installers and new businesses |
| 8 | Solargraf | US$2,799/yr Starter (2 users, 240 projects) up to $12,999 Enterprise (~ZAR 51,800 to ZAR 240,500) | Proposal-first flow with e-signature | Teams standardised on Enphase hardware |
| 9 | QuickEstimate | ~ZAR 8,000 (US$435) | Quotation, CRM, WhatsApp follow-up | Teams losing deals to slow follow-up |
| 10 | Aurora Solar | US$135/user/mo Basic, $220 Premium, billed annually (~ZAR 30,000 to ZAR 48,800/yr) | Most polished residential sales experience | Teams doing export design work for US clients |
Two observations. Only three vendors here actually sell a per-seat licence, and the rest price by plan, by project or not publicly at all, so a like-for-like rand-per-seat column is partly a fiction that buyers keep asking for. And every tool on the list handles axis 4 through generic finance fields rather than through named South African structures, which is why the financing section of your template still needs a human.
1. SurgePV
What it does best. SurgePV is the only platform here that carries a project from a satellite address to a signed proposal with the backup story quantified inside it. Battery autonomy is a first-class input, so you size against a critical-load list and a block schedule, then show state of charge across a realistic worst day rather than an averaged design day. That chart is the single most persuasive object in a South African proposal, because it turns “you will have power” into a defensible engineering claim. Depth of discharge, round-trip efficiency and C-rate are editable, and lithium iron phosphate can be compared against lead-acid inside one project so the client sees why the cheaper quote delivers half the usable energy. The proposal output attaches the single line diagram and bill of quantities, which is what your SSEG application and your Certificate of Compliance signatory both need. Depreciation and incentive fields let you apply a first-year write-off in the cash flow and show pre-tax and after-tax payback side by side.
Real pricing. Roughly ZAR 24,000 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, about ZAR 120,000 for five seats. The Individual plan sits near ZAR 35,000 (US$1,899). Free trial, no card.
Who it suits. Installers and C&I integrators in Gauteng, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal issuing ten or more hybrid proposals a month, especially where the same team designs and sells.
Honest weaknesses. SurgePV carries no South African municipal tariff library, so City of Cape Town, City of Johannesburg and eThekwini structures including their fixed and capacity charges are entered by hand and maintained by you. Section 12B is not a named allowance in the software, only a generic first-year depreciation field, so your client’s accountant should confirm the after-tax figure rather than the software owning it. It does not generate an SSEG application pack or an NRS 097-2 declaration, and it does not filter the inverter database against a specific municipality’s accepted-inverter list, so that check stays manual and stays yours. It has no native PPA or rent-to-own contract builder, so a lease structure is modelled through general finance fields rather than as a product. It is not a CRM and will not chase a cold lead. It is cloud-only with no offline mode. And a solo installer doing two residential systems a month is paying for engineering depth they will not use.
2. Enact
What it does best. Enact is one of the few proposal platforms that treats financing as a first-class object rather than a text box. Lease, loan and power purchase agreement structures can be modelled and presented as a monthly figure against the client’s current bill, which is exactly the comparison a South African commercial buyer wants. It also tracks the project past signature, so the same record carries into delivery.
Real pricing. US$279 a month for 2 users on an annual commitment, or US$299 billed monthly, so roughly ZAR 61,900 a year for the pair at ZAR 18.5 to the dollar. Commercial projects are capped at 10 a month, and Asset Management and enterprise tiers are not publicly listed.
Who it suits. C&I teams whose deals close on PPA or rent-to-own rather than on capital purchase.
Honest weaknesses. The design engine is lighter than SurgePV’s, and outage simulation is not its strength, so the backup narrative that sells a South African hybrid has to be assembled elsewhere and pasted in. There is no South African tariff, SSEG or NRS 097-2 content, and its finance templates are shaped by the markets it grew up in rather than by local instalment-sale practice.
3. Hohm Energy
What it did best. Hohm Energy was South African, and that showed in the parts that matter for residential: rand pricing on locally available equipment, quoting logic built around how local deals actually close, and a lead flow through a vetted installer network. For a residential installer, the local price accuracy alone removes a class of error that global tools introduce by default.
Status, and it matters more than the price. Hohm Energy is not a live option. The company entered business rescue on 31 July 2024 and filed for voluntary liquidation in September 2024, months after an $8 million seed round, as demand for backup solar fell away with the easing of load shedding. It never published a per-seat price, and there is no current price to quote. We leave the entry here because South African installers still ask about it and still have quotes and customer records inside it, not because it is something you can buy.
Who it suits. Residential installers who want locally accurate pricing and are happy to work inside a partner model.
Honest weaknesses. It is a quoting and market platform, not an engineering one. There is no detailed shading simulation, no string-level design and no compliance drawing set, so a serious C&I proposal needs a second tool behind it. The partner model also means you are operating partly on someone else’s commercial terms and lead economics, which is a strategic decision rather than just a software one.
4. Sunbase
What it does best. Sunbase pairs a solar CRM with proposal generation and e-signature, so the pipeline, the document and the handover to installation live in one place. For a sales-led business where deals die in follow-up rather than in pricing, that matters more than another decimal place of yield accuracy.
Real pricing. Sunbase publishes an entry point of US$59 per user per month, about ZAR 13,100 a year, and does not publish its higher tiers.
Who it suits. Teams of three or more salespeople where lead volume, not design throughput, is the constraint.
Honest weaknesses. Design and simulation are shallow, so the generation figure on the proposal is an estimate rather than an hourly simulation. That is tolerable on a 5 kW residential hybrid and unacceptable on a 300 kW warehouse roof with plant rooms and extraction units shading the array. No South African tariff or compliance content.
Comparing tools on a live deal? Bring one real Johannesburg or Cape Town site with its critical-load list and twelve months of bills, and see which proposal survives contact with the client’s finance manager. Talk to our team for the scoring sheet our design desk uses.
5 to 10: The Rest of the Shortlist
Pylon does not sell seats. It charges per project, US$4.00 on Standard and US$10.00 on Pro with no monthly minimum, about ZAR 74 and ZAR 185, plus US$0.80 per project for eSignature, 2.50 percent per payment transaction and a separate Solar CRM add-on from US$49 per user per month. For a South African installer issuing a modest number of proposals that is dramatically cheaper than any per-seat product here, ours included. It builds interactive web proposals that clients open on a phone and share internally, which shortens the decision cycle in a family or a management committee. Its lender integrations are built for its home markets and do not extend to South African instalment-sale providers, so the finance page becomes an attachment.
Arka360 puts design and proposal in one licence and handles storage competently. It publishes plan prices for India only, Lite ₹46,000, Basic ₹70,000 and Premium ₹1,00,000 a year, all plus 18 percent GST with a ₹10,000 one-time onboarding fee, and publishes no South African price, so budget from a quote rather than a converted Indian figure. Its default financial framing was built around Indian rooftop subsidy logic, so load shedding economics and Section 12B are custom cases you construct rather than features you switch on.
OpenSolar has a free core platform for any number of users. OpenSolar has said that API Access, charged per project on creation, and Connectors, charged as a flat monthly fee, become chargeable from 16 April 2026, but it has not published those rates and they vary by geography, so a South African team pays nothing today and cannot yet be quoted a 2026 add-on figure. Nothing else here is cheaper. Genuinely useful for a new installer with no budget, and widely used here. No outage simulation, no local tariff library and no tax treatment. Our OpenSolar alternative comparison covers the point at which teams move on.
Solargraf prices by plan rather than by seat: US$2,799 a year covering 240 projects and 2 users, rising to Enterprise US$12,999 for 1,500 projects, with API access US$4,000 a year on every plan except Enterprise, so roughly ZAR 51,800 to ZAR 240,500. It is proposal-first with a clean e-signature flow and is the natural choice if Enphase is your standard. No South African content of any kind.
QuickEstimate at roughly ZAR 8,000 (US$435) per user per year is the cheapest paid option and targets follow-up rather than design. See solar proposal best practices for the structure it produces. Pair it with a design tool.
Aurora Solar publishes US dollar prices: Basic US$135 per user per month billed annually and Premium US$220, so about ZAR 30,000 and ZAR 48,800 a year per seat. Five Premium seats are US$13,200 and five Basic US$8,100. It has the most polished residential sales experience in the category. In South Africa the LIDAR roof capture degrades to manual tracing, and LIDAR modelling, bankable shade reports and battery modelling sit on Premium while plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion. Premium is roughly twice SurgePV per seat for a narrower job, but Basic is not the expensive option people assume: at US$1,620 a year it undercuts a SurgePV Individual seat at US$1,899. Our Aurora Solar alternative writeup covers the trade.
⚠️ Watch out
Dollar-priced licences move against you with no change in what you receive. A 15 percent rand slide adds roughly ZAR 7,300 per seat per year on an Aurora Premium licence at US$2,640.
Load Shedding Stage Economics: The Number That Closes the Deal
Reliability is an emotional purchase, but a commercial buyer still has to justify it to a board. The bridge between the two is cost of downtime, and it belongs on page two of every C&I proposal.
Build it in four steps. First, list the critical load, meaning the circuits that must stay live: production line, cold storage, servers, point of sale, security, lighting. Second, take the published schedule for the client’s block and count the realistic worst day, which at higher stages means multiple outages with short recharge windows between them rather than one long block. Third, put a rand figure on an hour of that downtime, using the client’s own gross margin per operating hour, spoilage risk or staff cost, and get them to confirm it rather than estimating it yourself. Fourth, show the battery holding through the worst day and multiply the protected hours by their own number.
That last step is why outage simulation matters more than yield precision here. A proposal that says “we will save you ZAR 18,000 a month on energy” competes on price with every other quote. A proposal that says “we protect 6.5 hours of production a day that currently costs you ZAR 40,000 an hour to lose” is not comparable to anything, which is the position you want to sell from.
💰 Real numbers
Ask the client for their own cost of an hour offline and quote it back to them in the proposal. A number they supplied is a number they cannot argue with.
Two honesty rules go with it. Do not model the system carrying the full site through the worst day unless the battery genuinely does, because the first stage 6 week will test the claim. And size against the schedule rather than a single block, since at higher stages the bank frequently arrives at the second outage of the day already partly depleted.
Section 12B and the After-Tax Payback
📘 Regulation note
Section 12B of the Income Tax Act allows a taxpayer carrying on a trade to deduct the cost of qualifying renewable energy plant against taxable income, with photovoltaic generation qualifying for a full write-off in the year the asset is brought into use. Terms, thresholds and any enhanced variants change with the budget cycle, so confirm the current position through SARS and the client's own tax adviser before the proposal goes out. Present it as a labelled assumption, never as a guarantee.
The arithmetic is worth spelling out because most proposals bury it. Take a ZAR 3 million commercial installation for a company paying corporate tax. A full first-year deduction against taxable income reduces the tax bill in that year by the company’s marginal rate applied to the ZAR 3 million, which is real cash that arrives inside twelve months. Against a pre-tax payback of, say, five and a half years, the after-tax figure commonly lands more than a year earlier. That is not a rounding difference. It frequently decides whether the project clears the client’s internal hurdle rate, and our internal rate of return glossary entry covers the metric their finance team will actually apply.
Three presentation rules. Show pre-tax and after-tax payback in the same table so nobody accuses you of only showing the flattering number. Label the tax treatment as an assumption subject to the client’s own tax position, since a loss-making entity gets nothing from a deduction. And name Section 12B explicitly rather than writing “tax benefits”, because a finance director recognises the section and does not recognise the phrase.
Eskom, Municipal Tariffs and the Fixed Charges That Erode Savings
This is the section where most South African proposals are quietly wrong, and it is worth getting right because it is the one the client’s finance manager will check.
A South African electricity bill is not one number. It typically carries an energy charge in cents per kilowatt hour, plus some combination of a fixed or service charge, a capacity or demand charge, and in commercial cases a time-of-use structure where the energy rate varies by season and time of day. Solar reduces the energy charge. It does not reduce the fixed charge, and it reduces the demand charge only to the extent the system reliably shaves the peak, which for a site with an evening peak and no battery may be very little.
- ✓ Energy charge, split by season and time of use
- ✓ Fixed and service charges that do not fall
- ✓ Demand charge, reduced only if the battery shaves the peak
- ✓ Any tariff change triggered by SSEG registration
- ✗ A single blended rand per kWh for the whole bill
- ✗ Assuming Eskom rules apply to a municipal customer
- ✗ Ignoring a move to an SSEG tariff on registration
- ✗ Modelling export credit as a material revenue line
Two structural points. First, confirm the supplier from the client’s bill rather than the address. Eskom supplies many customers directly, while metropolitan and local municipalities supply others and set their own SSEG rules, thresholds, forms and tariffs. Second, the City of Cape Town’s structure is distinct enough that a model built for a Johannesburg client will not transfer, and its treatment of registered small-scale embedded generation customers, including the charges that apply once you register, needs checking against the current schedule rather than last year’s.
The trend worth being honest about is that fixed and capacity charges for registered SSEG customers have been rising in several municipalities, on the argument that a solar customer still uses the network for backup and should contribute to it. That erodes the energy saving your proposal is built on. Model it, state it, and show the payback with the charge included. A client who discovers it themselves after signature will not believe the rest of your numbers either. Tariff determinations and municipal applications are handled through NERSA, which is the right place to check what has actually been approved.
Rent-to-Own, PPA and How South African C&I Deals Close
Capital purchase is only one of three routes, and for commercial clients it is often the least likely. The proposal has to reflect that.
- Cash purchase. The client owns the asset, claims the Section 12B deduction, and takes the maintenance obligation. Best where the balance sheet allows it and the tax position is favourable.
- Rent-to-own or instalment sale. A fixed monthly payment over a defined tenor with ownership transferring at the end. The proposal argument is simple: the monthly payment against the monthly bill it displaces, with the crossover month stated.
- Power purchase agreement. A third party owns and operates the plant and sells the client energy at an agreed rate, often below the utility rate, over a long tenor. No capital outlay and no maintenance obligation, but the client forgoes the tax benefit and the residual asset, and the escalation clause deserves as much attention as the headline rate.
For options two and three the proposal is not a capital quote with a savings figure attached. It is a cash-flow comparison, month by month, against the do-nothing case. Software that only prints a system price and a payback period cannot make that argument, which is why Enact scores where it does on axis 4 and why several otherwise strong tools do not.
Six Mistakes South African Sales Teams Make on Proposals
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1
Selling energy savings instead of protected hours. Savings compete on price. Protected production hours, priced at the client's own cost of downtime, do not compare to anything.
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2
Using a blended rand per kWh. Solar reduces the energy charge only. Fixed and capacity charges survive, and a savings figure computed on a blended rate overstates the benefit from the first month.
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3
Ignoring the tariff change on SSEG registration. Some operators move a registered customer onto a different tariff. If that happens after you modelled the old one, the payback you sold is gone.
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4
Presenting after-tax payback as a promise. Name Section 12B, label it an assumption, and put the client's tax adviser in the loop. A loss-making entity gets nothing from a deduction.
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5
Quoting nominal battery capacity as usable. Lead-acid at 50 percent depth of discharge delivers half its nameplate. Lithium iron phosphate delivers 80 to 90 percent. Nameplate comparisons lose to cheaper, worse systems.
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6
Naming an inverter before checking the accepted list. Selecting off the operator's NRS 097-2 accepted list is a common cause of rejected SSEG applications, and swapping hardware after signature costs margin every time.
How Heaven Green Energy and SurgePV Help
Heaven Green Energy delivers solar EPC across India with 10,000 or more installations completed, and our design desk supports hybrid and backup work across African markets, which is where the scoring above comes from rather than from vendor decks. When we review a South African partner’s proposal, the first two things we check are whether the battery narrative is defensible and whether the fixed charges were modelled.
- Solar EPC services for turnkey delivery and independent review of a hybrid proposal before it is issued.
- Commercial solar and industrial solar for the warehouse and factory hybrids where downtime cost is largest.
- SurgePV payback and ROI modelling for the cash-flow arithmetic behind the financial page.
- Heaven Designs guide to reading a solar single line diagram for the drawing standard your SSEG application rests on.
For the platform decision outside a South African frame, read the solar proposal software roundup and the solar design software guide, and compare against the best solar proposal software in the UK page for a market where export payments genuinely do carry the case. Global deployment and cost context is tracked by the IEA and IRENA. The best solar proposal software in South Africa is whichever one lets you show a battery holding through a real stage 6 day and an after-tax payback your client’s accountant will sign off.
Compare Other Markets and Tool Categories
- Best solar the full software stack in South Africa
- Best solar proposal software in Australia
- Best solar proposal software in the UAE
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best solar proposal software in South Africa in 2026?
SurgePV ranks first, at roughly ZAR 24,000 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, scoring 40 of 50 on our five-axis Stage 6 Proposal Test. It sizes backup autonomy against a load shedding schedule, shows battery state of charge through a realistic worst day, supports a first-year capital write-off in the cash flow, and attaches the single line diagram and bill of quantities that your SSEG application and Certificate of Compliance depend on. Enact is the stronger pick where deals close on a PPA.
Should a South African proposal lead with savings or with backup?
Backup, then savings. The buyer’s motivation is what happens when the grid goes down, so quantify it: list the critical load, count the outage blocks on a realistic worst day, and multiply the protected hours by the client’s own cost of an hour offline. Then present the energy saving as the second argument, computed on the energy charge only. A proposal that leads with a monthly saving competes on price with every other quote in the pile.
How should Section 12B appear in a solar proposal?
As a named, clearly labelled assumption in the financial section, with pre-tax and after-tax payback shown side by side. Section 12B of the Income Tax Act allows a business to deduct the cost of qualifying renewable energy plant against taxable income, and on a ZAR 3 million commercial system the after-tax payback commonly lands more than a year earlier than the pre-tax figure. Never present it as a guarantee, since a loss-making entity gains nothing from a deduction. Confirm the current terms through SARS and the client’s tax adviser.
Do municipal fixed charges change the solar payback?
Materially, yes. Solar reduces the energy charge on a bill. It does not reduce fixed or service charges, and it reduces demand charges only where the battery reliably shaves the peak. Several municipalities have also raised fixed or capacity charges for registered small-scale embedded generation customers, on the reasoning that a solar customer still relies on the network. Model those charges explicitly and show the payback with them included, because a client who discovers them later will distrust every other number on the page.
Is the Eskom tariff the same as a municipal tariff?
No, and confirming which applies is the first step in any South African proposal. Eskom supplies many customers directly, while metropolitan and local municipalities buy in bulk and set their own tariffs, SSEG rules, thresholds and application forms. The City of Cape Town’s structure differs enough from other metros that a model built for a Johannesburg client will not transfer accurately. Check the supplier from the client’s actual bill rather than assuming from the address.
What financing structures do South African commercial solar proposals use?
Three dominate. Cash purchase, where the client owns the asset and claims the Section 12B deduction. Rent-to-own or instalment sale, a fixed monthly payment over a defined tenor with ownership transferring at the end. And a power purchase agreement, where a third party owns and operates the plant and sells energy at an agreed rate with an escalation clause. For the last two the proposal must be a month-by-month cash-flow comparison against doing nothing, not a capital price with a payback attached.
Does proposal software handle SSEG registration and NRS 097-2?
Not automatically, and that gap runs across the whole category. No mainstream platform generates an SSEG application pack or an NRS 097-2 compliance declaration. What good software does is produce a single line diagram, protection detail and bill of quantities complete enough for your registered person and the network operator to review quickly. Selecting an inverter off the operator’s accepted list remains a manual check and is a common cause of rejected applications, so do it before the bill of quantities is finalised.
How much does solar proposal software cost in South Africa?
Most vendors bill in US dollars, so rand figures move with the rate, taken here at about ZAR 18.5 to the dollar. OpenSolar’s core platform is free and its 2026 API and Connector rates are not published. Pylon does not sell seats at all, charging US$4.00 or US$10.00 per project. QuickEstimate sits near ZAR 8,000 per user per year and Sunbase starts at US$59 per user per month, about ZAR 13,100, with higher tiers unpublished. SurgePV is US$1,299 per user per year on the five-seat team plan, about ZAR 24,000, bundled with design. Aurora is US$135 per user per month on Basic and US$220 on Premium billed annually, about ZAR 30,000 to ZAR 48,800 a year. Enact is US$279 a month for two users. Solargraf prices by plan from US$2,799 a year for two users and 240 projects. Arka360 publishes prices for India only. Hohm Energy never published a price and is no longer trading, having entered voluntary liquidation in September 2024.
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