Rebate Hunter: Get Money Back for Making Your Home Greener
A Denver family put in a heat pump last year. The cost: $12,000. Half a year later, they discovered they were eligible for $4,800 in rebates they never applied for. Federal programs. State programs. Utility incentives. All designed to stack together. All sitting there waiting. All missed because no one flagged them and the family had no idea where to look. This isn't a rare occurrence — it happens all the time. The federal government is actively pushing residential electrification. That's why Congress enacted the Inflation Reduction Act. It unlocked billions in consumer rebates. Tax credits worth thirty percent. State-level programs that layer on top. Utility-sponsored deals hidden deep in program documents. The funding exists. What doesn't exist is a clear path to finding it. Fifty states, hundreds of utility providers, thousands of individual programs. Each with its own eligibility criteria. Its own expiration dates. Its own application paperwork. It's a system literally built to distribute money that's nearly impossible for regular people to access. Rebate Hunter cuts through all of that. It's a web application where homeowners plug in their project details and zip code. Instantly, every credit they're eligible for appears. Every rebate gets broken down clearly. How they combine. How to file for them. Detailed instructions, start to finish. Solar panels. Heat pumps. Insulation upgrades. Window replacements. EV chargers. A single search. Every available dollar. Pricing: $29 per report for individual homeowners. $299/month for contractors who need to run dozens of lookups for their customers and want to demonstrate the true out-of-pocket cost after all rebates are applied. The database gets built by scraping federal, state, and utility program websites. Energy consultants serve as partners to validate tricky edge cases. All this information is publicly available — it's just fragmented across thousands of different sources. The competitive advantage is pulling it all together in one place. Launch strategy: start with the top 10 states where rebate amounts are highest and the confusion is most severe. Every rebate that gets successfully claimed turns into a testimonial that drives the next customer. 1.2 million heat pump installations happened last year alone. The typical unclaimed rebate ranges from $3,000-$8,000. Capturing even 1% of that market represents enormous revenue potential. The vision: become the TurboTax of energy efficiency — no one wants to deal with rebate paperwork, but everybody wants to pocket the maximum savings with the least possible effort.