Hail Recon Pricing Explained: What You're Actually Buying

What Hail Recon actually sells you

Hail Recon is a hail-mapping subscription. It tells you where hail fell, roughly how big the stones were, and when. That is the product. It is not a lead list, it is not a property record, and it is not a ranking of which houses on a street are worth knocking first.

If you are searching "Hail Recon pricing" you probably want one of two things: a number, or permission to stop paying for a number you cannot verify. I can only help with the second honestly. Hail Recon, like most storm-mapping vendors, does not publish a public rate card. Pricing is quoted per territory, per seat, or per storm event depending on the plan, and contractors report it moving around based on how many states you want coverage in and how many users need logins. Anyone who gives you a hard dollar figure for Hail Recon is guessing. Treat that the same way you would treat a homeowner who says their neighbour got a roof for free.

What you can reason about is the shape of the bill, because hail-mapping subscriptions are almost all built the same way.

The four things a hail-mapping subscription is priced on

1. Geographic coverage. One metro, one state, or national. This is the single biggest lever. A crew working a 60-mile radius around Dallas pays differently than a crew that chases from Oklahoma into Kansas into Nebraska on the same subscription.

2. Seats and logins. Storm mapping tools are usually priced per user. A two-truck outfit and a twenty-rep outfit get very different quotes for the same swath data.

3. Historical depth and refresh rate. Do you get the last 12 months of swaths, or the last decade? Is the data updated within an hour of the storm, or the next morning? Faster and deeper costs more.

4. Report volume, sometimes. Some plans bundle a set number of property-level reports or exports per month and charge overage beyond that. This is where hail mapping starts to blur into per-report pricing, which is a different animal entirely — the same way Roofr's per-report model differs from a flat subscription.

If you want a structural comparison of how these vendors bill, HailTrace pricing is broken down the same way here. The pattern holds across the category.

What a hail swath does well

None of this is a knock. A hail swath is genuinely useful, and a storm-chasing crew that ignores it is leaving money on the table.

• It tells you whether to mobilize. A 2-inch swath through three suburbs is a different Tuesday than a 0.75-inch event that barely dented gutters.
• It gives you a defensible date of loss. When you sit at a kitchen table and say "hail hit this address on April 14," the swath is your evidence. That matters for the insurance conversation.
• It prioritises geography. If you have one crew and four storms in the region, the swath tells you which storm is worth the drive.
• It anchors the pitch. Homeowners remember storms. "The hail that came through on the 14th" is a real thing they experienced, and it opens doors.

That is the job. Hail mapping answers where and when. It does not answer which house.

Why area-wide hail cannot rank one house above its neighbour

Here is the part that costs storm chasers real money.

A hail swath is drawn at a scale that covers thousands of homes. Every house inside that polygon shares the same hail event. The 1970 ranch with a 22-year-old three-tab and the house next door that got a new architectural shingle roof in 2023 are both inside the same swath. The hail mapping tool cannot tell you which one needs a roofer, because from its point of view they are identical.

This is not a data quality problem you can fix by buying a better subscription. It is a structural limit. Hail fell on the area. It did not fall on one address and skip the next.

And yet storm-chasing lists routinely sort by hail size, which means the top of the list is just the centre of the swath — a geographic accident, not a signal about any individual roof. You end up knocking the middle of the polygon first because the mapping tool put it first, not because those houses need anything.

This is the same trap that makes neighbourhood hail a bad urgency score. If every home in your scan shares the trigger, the trigger cannot separate one door from the next. It belongs in the pitch. It does not belong in the ranking. I wrote about that distinction in more detail in how AI tools actually help after a hail event, and it is the single most common mistake I see in storm lead software.

Where per-roof assessment picks up

A hail swath tells you the storm happened. A per-roof read tells you what the storm did to this roof, and whether the roof was already a candidate before the storm arrived.

That is a different question, and it needs a different input: the actual imagery of the roof, read from above and from the street, scored against the houses either side of it. Roofbird does exactly this — how a roof gets scored from imagery is here — and the output is two separate numbers rather than one.

NEED is how badly the roof needs replacing, based on condition and roof age read off the shingles. NOW is whether anything is forcing a decision on this specific house: visible active damage like a tarp or missing shingles, hail damage read on this roof, a recent purchase, patching already attempted, or neighbours who have already re-roofed.

Neighbourhood hail deliberately does not raise NOW. It cannot, because it is shared. What raises NOW is evidence on the roof itself, or evidence on the street around it.

That last one is the close nobody talks about. If both houses either side of a property have visibly gone new and this one has not, that is the strongest social proof in the trade, and it is visible from a ground-level photo. A hail swath will never surface it. A per-roof read surfaces it by default.

The honest split of labour

Run both. They do different jobs.

1. Use the hail map to pick the storm. The US hail map and NOAA's storm data tell you where to point the trucks this week.
2. Use per-roof scoring to pick the doors. Once you are in the neighbourhood, the swath is done talking. What you need now is which houses on this block read as weathered, which have active damage visible, and which are surrounded by freshly re-roofed neighbours.
3. Check what the imagery can actually see. Not every roof can be judged from the road. Tree canopy, setback, and angle all matter, and a tool that pretends otherwise is lying to you. What satellite and street-level imagery can and cannot detect on a hail-damaged roof is worth ten minutes before you trust any score.
4. Get the homeowner, not just the house. This is where the storm-chasing workflow usually falls apart. You have a hot roof and no name. Roofbird shows the full property record free on every scanned lead — owner name, owner-occupied or absentee, estimated market value, year built, last sale, beds and baths, lot size, taxes, and an owner-equity estimate, because equity is what decides whether someone can say yes. Only the phone and email sit behind a one-click unlock, and every number is DNC-scrubbed and labelled clear, DNC, or verify. Manual dialling only. How contact details and DNC screening work is here.

That is the payoff. A hail swath gets you to the right zip code. A per-roof read plus the homeowner's own contact details gets you to the right door with a name to ask for.

What this costs, on the Roofbird side

One meter: credits. Looking is free, acting costs.

• Free trial: 10 credits, no credit card, no expiry.
• Hunter: $199/mo, 350 credits a month. Top-ups $25 for 37.
• Hunter Pro: $499/mo, 1,000 credits a month. Top-ups $25 for 50.
• Free on every plan: asking questions, searching, sorting, saving named lists, and scanning new ground at any size. Unlimited service areas.

Credits are spent on reading a roof properly — both photographs plus the property record in one go, 1 credit per 8 roofs — on the owner's name, phone and email at 1 credit per 2 roofs, and on opening a house completely at 1 credit. A lookup that finds no contact never costs a credit. What a credit buys is spelled out here.

Compare that to a hail-mapping subscription, where you pay for the swath whether or not it produces a single door, plus whatever you pay per report or per lead on top. The model is different, and for a lot of crews the difference is the whole margin.

Next steps

1. Get a current quote from your hail-mapping vendor and write down what it actually covers: which states, how many seats, how fast the refresh, and how many reports before overage. Most contractors have never done this exercise and are surprised by the answer.
2. Pick your next storm from the swath. That part works.
3. Once you are in the neighbourhood, stop sorting by hail size. Sort by what is on the roof and what is on the street around it.
4. Sign up for the free trial, scan a block you already know, and check the scores against what you find at the doors. That is the only test that matters.

FAQ

Q: Does Hail Recon publish its pricing? A: No. Like most hail-mapping vendors, Hail Recon quotes per territory and per seat rather than publishing a rate card, so the figure you get depends on coverage area, number of users, and plan tier. Any specific number you see quoted online should be treated as a reported range, not a published price.

Q: Can a hail map tell me which houses need a new roof? A: No, and it is not designed to. A hail swath covers thousands of homes that all shared the same event, so it cannot distinguish a 22-year-old three-tab from a roof replaced two years ago. It answers where and when hail fell, not which individual roof is a candidate.

Q: Why doesn't neighbourhood hail raise a lead's urgency score? A: Because every home in the scan shares it, so it cannot separate one door from the next. Roofbird's NOW score is driven by evidence specific to the property — visible active damage, hail read on that roof, a recent purchase, attempted patching, or neighbours who have already re-roofed.

Q: Do I need both a hail map and per-roof scoring? A: Yes, and they do different jobs. The hail map tells you which storm is worth mobilising for. Per-roof scoring tells you which doors on the block are worth knocking once you are there. Dropping either one leaves money on the table.

Q: Does Roofbird replace my hail-mapping subscription? A: Not exactly. Roofbird reads individual roofs from imagery, ranks them against their neighbours, and surfaces the homeowner's DNC-scrubbed contact details. It does not replace swath-level storm data for deciding where to mobilise. Most crews run both and use each for what it is good at.