How We Make Money
An Excerpt from our FAQs Section
This is a question we get every once in a while, and since I already wrote it for the front page FAQs section, I thought I might as well post it here.
Is Laminar Collective Free?
Laminar Collective research, in 2025, will be free for consumers. And I expect it to be free in 2026 as well.
We’ve tried 3 different funding models:
Grants. We started off with a Mass Save Community Education grant of ~$20,000. And we got an additional grant from the Barr Foundation, via. Building Electrification Accelerator, for an additional $7,500. We tried applying for bigger grants too, but those weren’t a good fit. (See “other funding sources” section below.)
Marketplace. Then we tried the “marketplace” model where we charged ~3% of installation volume in exchange for access to our substantial consumer base. This worked for about 100 installations, but I realized that if we go down this path, I’ll never get to meet people face to face and I didn’t love that.
Academic Hospital. This is what we settled on. We’ll only do a small batch of installations with partnering local contractors & installers, but we play a greater role in the installations (project management, logistics & ordering). This conveniently also gives us unprecedented insight into cost breakdowns, which we weren’t able to achieve with the Marketplace model.
I think the academic hospital model is a good sweet spot between making enough money to fund research, and also being able to go deep on reporting. So for 2025, I think this will be our model.
To ensure you're actually getting a good deal and we're not just taking the highest bidder, we publish our benchmarks publicly. That's why our benchmarks are open. You can also reference it for contractors during seasons we don’t work in (summer).
Have you considered other funding sources?
Yeah, we have. Here are all the other funding sources we considered:
Asking for Donations: I’d rather not spend half of my emails asking you for money. If you believe in what we’re doing, tell your friends about the bulk deals.
MassCEC: we're not really commercializing R&D technology from labs, so the Catalyst grant doesn't apply for us. We tried applying for Empower, but were too early in the process; in any case, that grant is focused on outreach to low/moderate income communities, which we legally can't do anything about because the entire process is handled by regional CAP agencies. Like, the only thing we can do is tell people to go visit the CAP agencies in person.
Community First Partnerships: same problem as Empower. Though we play the role of an energy advocate in some towns, the fact that low-income is completely off limits to us means that we can't leverage any of our negotiating abilities to help. The CFP partnership is supposed to help with uptake of electrification in working class communities, so we don't think we're a great fit there.
Mass Save/National Grid/Eversource: we already have the Community Education Grant, and we are thankful for that. However, that's limited to $25k and the bigger opportunity is Empower. There is no significant grant opportunity that can support a multi-city operation, and the utilities would take years to actually sign a deal. We need to move faster than that.
Foundations: we need to be a 501(c)3 nonprofit, which we could convert to (we are currently a public benefit corporation), but they don't really fund nonprofits that serve market rate customers. Again, because the CAP agencies already have their own thing going on, and nobody else can really touch the process, we can't do that work. I'm not going to go nonprofit just to spend $100k telling people to drive to their local CAP agency.
Cities & Municipalities: cannot strike bulk deals without a public request-for-proposal process, under Chapter 30B of Massachusetts procurement law. I agree with this stance, and I understand why it's essential for the public trust. Private funding allows us to operate outside of that.
Maybe we’ll revisit grants soon enough. But for now, we like the academic hospital model and it gives us unprecedented access to the installation world. So we’re going to stick with it.
How can I help?
Under the academic hospital model, we make money when we do installations. So if you want to support us, come participate in a bulk deal (spring & fall) with us, or tell your friends about Laminar Collective so they can have this resource as well :)
