OpenSolar’s Fair Use Policy: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

At OpenSolar, our mission is to empower solar professionals around the world with the tools they need to scale faster, sell smarter, and deploy clean energy more efficiently. From day one, we’ve offered a powerful platform—free of charge—to make high-quality solar design and sales accessible to all.

But as our user base has grown (rapidly!), so has the demand placed on our infrastructure, APIs, support team, and engineering resources. That’s why we introduced a Fair Use Policy.

Why did we introduce this policy?

We’ve built OpenSolar to be a free and open platform, but like all great tools, it comes with real operational costs. Most users consume a balanced level of resources, but a small number of organizations—often larger teams with complex workflows—generate extremely high usage that places significant load on our systems and support.

To ensure we can continue delivering fast and reliable performance for all customers we need a framework that ensures equitable usage across our community.

What is the Fair Use Policy?

Our Fair Use Policy outlines baseline usage limits for things like:

• API requests (e.g., data syncing or integration calls)
• Webhook events
• Google imagery loads
• Support requests and engineering time

These thresholds are designed to cover the needs of the vast majority of our users without interruption. If you’re getting close to or exceeding these limits with no option to throttle back due to the size of your organisation, that’s ok. We’ll reach out and work with you to explore options, including onboarding to an Enterprise Agreement tailored to your scale and needs.

What this means for you

If you’re a typical user, nothing changes. Keep using OpenSolar for free—no limits, no disruption.

If you’re a Large Organisation that is constantly hitting Fair Use Limits, we’ll proactively guide you through your usage and help you work through whether you need to optimize usage or upgrade to an Enterprise Agreement.

Our commitment

This isn’t about cutting people off—it’s about preserving performance for everyone and ensuring we can keep investing in the solar industry at scale. We’re committed to keeping OpenSolar free for the majority of users while ensuring large organisations have the infrastructure and support they need.

Got questions?

If you’re unsure where your organisation stands, or if you want to understand your current usage, reach out to your Account Executive or contact support. We’re here to help.

Let’s keep scaling solar, together.