The least glamorous part of putting solar on a roof may be the most expensive: everybody has to agree on what, exactly, is being built. A salesperson sketches panels. An engineer redraws them. Operations discovers a mounting mismatch. Finance recalculates the deal. Years later, a service team opens three inverter portals to work out why production dipped. The panels sit quietly while the humans perform an elaborate relay race with PDFs.
Enact Solar has spent a decade trying to remove the baton. The Pleasanton, California software company gives installers a cloud platform to design solar and battery systems, calculate economics, create proposals, manage project records and watch the equipment after installation. Homeowners and commercial owners get the other side of the window: production, savings, system health and service communication.
That breadth is the point. Plenty of software can place rectangles on satellite imagery. Plenty can turn production into a handsome chart. Enact wants the design assumptions to survive the sale, the construction plan to survive the handoff, and the operating data to remain useful after the salesperson has forgotten the address.
The first failure was the handoff
Deep Chakraborty did not arrive at this problem through a weekend hackathon. He began in automotive product development, moved into strategy consulting in Germany, then helped build the North American arm of European solar supplier CentroSolar. He has said that operation reached $30 million in annual sales in less than four years. It also gave him a close view of solar's customer experience: costly, technical and low on transparency.
In 2014, Chakraborty quit and started Enact with product co-founder Manasij Kar. Their original wedge was not “AI-powered lifecycle intelligence.” It was a much easier sentence: make the journey from solar design to cost savings simpler. The early target was the proposal, where roof geometry, electricity rates, equipment, financing and customer trust collide in one document.
“Our primary and enduring goal has been to simplify the journey from solar power design to cost savings.”Deep Chakraborty, co-founder and CEO
The old method failed first because it could not tolerate change. Sunniva Solar, a Utah installer featured in an Enact case study, used Word for proposals and Excel for calculations. A two-page document took hours. Enact brought that job down to roughly ten minutes, according to Sunniva. Another customer, Italy's Delta Impianti, described swapping components without rebuilding a proposal from scratch. That matters when a panel goes out of stock after the homeowner has already nodded at the picture.
One record, five jobs
For an installer, the platform begins with remote design. A user can map a roof, account for obstacles and shading, add solar panels and storage, pull a utility tariff, estimate generation and turn the result into a branded proposal. The model can compare cash, loans, leases and power-purchase agreements. Costing goes down to a line-item bill of materials, so margin changes do not require an expedition through somebody else's spreadsheet.
After installation, Enact shifts from sales aid to asset manager. It ingests data from multiple equipment brands, tracks fleets, flags faults, issues performance reports and translates kilowatt-hours into money saved. The customer app gives owners a reason to keep the relationship alive. This is the company's most interesting strategic choice: the software does not disappear when the contract is signed.
The users are correspondingly mixed. Small and midsize installers use the proposal workflow. Larger EPCs and dealer networks use it to standardize selling and delivery. Engineers use detailed design tools. Customer-service teams watch installed fleets. Owners check system health and financial outcomes. Public case studies name Tata Power Solar in India, Sharaf DG Energy in the UAE, Occidental Power in San Francisco and installers across the United States and Europe.
The acquisition that changed the shape
Enact could carry a project impressively far, but detailed engineering remained a seam. In January 2026, the company acquired PVComplete, maker of PVCAD and web-based solar design tools. PVComplete's software automates layouts, construction plans and bills of materials inside an AutoCAD-centered engineering workflow. Its CEO Shane Lebow and CTO Brian Hogan joined Enact.
The deal says more than an AI label ever could. Enact had learned that owning the proposal and the monitoring screen was not enough if the exact project had to be reconstructed between them. Buying PVComplete brings permit-ready engineering closer to the original design. The output from the sales conversation has a better chance of becoming the thing on the roof.
Three 2025 partnerships made the same argument from adjacent directions. Renusol connected mounting calculations and bills of materials to the design. Blu Banyan connected Enact to a NetSuite-based solar ERP, where purchasing, inventory and invoicing live. Palmetto LightReach put lease and power-purchase financing inside proposals. Hardware, back office, money: each integration removes a place to retype the project.
What it costs - and what the price hides
Enact publishes entry pricing, a welcome break from the enterprise-software ritual of “let's hop on a call.” Design and proposals cost $279 per month when billed annually, or $299 month-to-month for two users. PVCAD costs $267 per month annually for a team that already owns AutoCAD. The PVCAD and AutoCAD bundle is $333 per month annually. Monthly engineering plans cost more. Asset management requires a quote.
Annual billing. Residential projects are unlimited; the published plan includes ten new commercial projects monthly.
Annual billing for teams that already have an AutoCAD license.
Annual billing with the AutoCAD license included. Monitoring is priced separately.
The sticker price is only half the calculation. The potential return is avoided rework: fewer hours redrawing, fewer incorrect orders, quicker proposals and one fleet view instead of many vendor portals. The cost can also compound in the other direction. A broad platform asks a team to configure tariffs, equipment libraries, templates, permissions and integrations. Software cannot rescue bad utility data or a sloppy installation; it can only make the assumptions easier to see.
Where Enact sits in a crowded sky
The alternatives are credible. Aurora Solar and OpenSolar compete for design and sales workflows. HelioScope, PVsyst and Scanifly serve specialist design needs. Energy Toolbase focuses on storage and financial modeling. Equipment makers provide their own monitoring portals. An installer can assemble an excellent stack from those parts.
Enact's difference is not that every individual feature is unique. It is the decision to join installer workflow with owner experience, then stretch that connection across design, engineering and operations in multiple countries. Its data can begin as a proposed panel and end as a service alert. For a company scaling across salespeople, branches, equipment brands or geographies, continuity is attractive.
Where it fits
Growing residential or commercial installers that need repeatable proposals, detailed costing, handoffs and multi-brand aftercare. It becomes more useful as project volume and operational complexity rise.
Where it may not
A tiny installer needing occasional layouts may prefer a lighter tool. A utility-scale developer may still require specialist engineering studies. A team locked into another ERP and monitoring stack may face more migration than payoff.
The playbook worth stealing
Enact's most copyable move is not “add AI.” It is to follow the expensive object through its entire life. Solar panels are expected to operate for decades, yet the customer data around them is routinely chopped into stages. Enact started where time waste was obvious, then kept asking where the same record went next.
The playbook fails when the workflow is simple, the data is unreliable, integrations are shallow or users refuse to adopt a shared process. It also fails if breadth becomes bloat. Enact now has to make a bigger suite feel like one product, especially as PVComplete's engineering culture meets Enact's sales-and-asset platform.
That is the tension to watch. Enact is no longer merely speeding up a proposal. It is trying to become the memory of a solar project. If it works, the quiet victory will not appear in a dramatic dashboard. It will show up as the order nobody had to correct, the customer who understood the economics, and the fault somebody noticed before the next utility bill.