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Solar Design Lab vsGreenLancer
If you're using GreenLancer, you're outsourcing plansets so you don't have to produce them in-house. Reasonable starting point. The friction shows up once you scale or hit a tough jurisdiction. Pricing creeps up, the engineer doing your work is impossible to talk to, and errors survive revisions. The alternative isn't better outsourcing. It's a tool your own team runs.
What GreenLancer does well
- Access to licensed engineers without hiring in-house
- Straightforward path to stamped plansets for standard residential jobs
- A workable way to get started with solar volume
Where it starts to break
As volume goes up, the workflow becomes the bottleneck.
Today's loop
Outsourcewaitrevisewaitfile
- Per-project pricing climbs once stamps, structural, and revisions get bundled, and you find out at invoice time
- The engineer doing your job is someone you've never met and often can't reach. Questions go through chat queues and email chains, not the project
- Revisions are a resubmission loop: errors can survive a round of corrections because the person fixing the file isn't the person who hears your feedback
- Tough jurisdictions are where templated outsourced output struggles most: HVHZ Florida, site-specific structural, uplift calcs
The real limitation
Outsourcing doesn't remove the bottleneck. It moves it outside your walls.
A different approach
Your team does the design. The platform does the engineering, no manual CAD.
- Your team does the design. The platform does the engineering: wire sizing, OCPD, ground paths, voltage drop all derive live from the drawing
- AHJ rules checked per county as you design. The engine flags problems before the AHJ does
- Complete packet from one engine: SLD, electrical, structural, roof layout, BOM, AHJ-specific labels
- Revisions reuse the project. No resending updated PDFs
- $50 per planset, flat. No subscription, no minimums, revisions free
- Need it stamped? Request a PE stamp inside the app
The workflow shift
Five steps become three, and none of them is waiting.
GreenLancer
Outsourcewaitrevisewaitfile
Solar Design Lab
Designcheckfile
You don't need better outsourcing. You need a tool your own team runs in minutes.
Some shops keep an outsourcing relationship for overflow and run their everyday residential through SDL. That's fine. The everyday jobs are where the waiting costs you most.
Quick application · no credit card.