Hover Pricing Explained for Roofing Contractors

Q: What does Hover cost?

A: Hover does not publish a rate card. Contractors report paying per project, per seat, or on an annual plan quoted over the phone, and the number moves with volume and how many people need access. If you want a flat figure before you talk to a rep, you will not get one off their website.

That is not a dodge on my part. It is the actual answer to "what does Hover cost," and it is the same answer you get for most of this category. EagleView runs the same play, which is why EagleView pricing for roofing contractors reads the way it does. Nobody in measurement publishes a menu, because the price depends on who you are and how much you buy.

So instead of inventing a number, here is what the bill is actually shaped like, who it fits, and the thing a measurement tool structurally cannot do for you.

What Hover actually is

Hover builds 3D models and measurements from photos. A homeowner or your rep walks the property with a phone, captures the elevations, and Hover turns that into a measured model you can use to quote, order materials, and show the homeowner what the new roof or siding will look like.

That is a real product solving a real problem. It is the problem of the job you are already standing at. You are on site, the homeowner is interested, and you need squares, pitch, and a visual before you leave the driveway.

Roofbird does not do that. Roofbird does not measure roofs for material orders and does not produce a 3D model. If you came here looking for a measurement tool, Hover is a legitimate answer and so is EagleView. If you want the honest side-by-side of who does what, this comparison of Hover alternatives for roofers covers the field properly.

This post is about the other half of the business: finding the next job. Keep reading if that is the half that is actually costing you money.

The tiers, and what each one is priced per

Hover's packaging generally falls into three shapes. I am describing the structure, not quoting rates, because the rates are quoted to you and change.

1. Per-project or per-report

You pay each time you capture and process a property. This is the model that makes sense if you do a handful of jobs a month and want zero commitment. The cost scales with your volume, which means your best month is also your most expensive month. Contractors who run this way tend to notice the bill right when work is good, which is an annoying time to notice a bill.

2. Per-seat subscription

You pay monthly for the number of users who need access. This fits a shop where several reps or estimators all need to capture and quote. The trap is the same trap as every per-seat tool: you pay for capacity you may not use in a slow quarter, and you hesitate to add a new rep because it adds a line item.

3. Annual or volume agreement

You commit to a term or a volume and get a better effective rate. This is where most established shops land, and it is where the pricing conversation stops being about a rate card and starts being a negotiation. If you are evaluating this against other measurement tools, EagleView alternatives for measurements and lead generation is the right comparison set, because those are the tools competing for the same line in your budget.

The pattern across all three: you pay per unit of work you have already won. Every dollar Hover charges you is attached to a property where a homeowner has already said yes to a conversation. That is a fine thing to pay for. It is also the definition of a cost that arrives after the hard part is done.

Why it is the right purchase for the job in front of you

If a homeowner is standing in the yard asking what the roof will look like, a measurement and visualisation tool earns its money in that conversation. It shortens the gap between "I'll get you a quote" and a signed contract. It reduces material waste on complex roofs. It gives your rep something to show instead of a clipboard.

Buy it for that. Buy it because the visual sells, because the measurements are more accurate than a rep with a tape and a pitch app, and because it makes your estimator faster.

Do not buy it expecting it to hand you a name and an address. That is not what it is priced to do, and no amount of tier-shopping changes that.

The structural gap: a measurement tool cannot find the next job

Here is the thing worth being blunt about. Hover's entire pricing model is built on a property that has already entered your pipeline. Somebody had to knock the door, answer the phone, or fill in a form before the measurement tool gets used.

So the question that decides your year is not "which measurement tool." It is "where did the address come from?"

If the answer is a shared lead marketplace, you already know the shape of that bill. The same lead sold to four contractors, a race to the phone, and a credit dispute when the homeowner was just kicking tyres. Roofbird compared with buying shared leads lays out exactly how that math works against you, and it is worth reading before you renew anything.

The alternative is sourcing your own doors from the neighbourhood itself. That is what Roofbird does, and it is a different category of purchase entirely.

What Roofbird does instead

You type a sentence. "Find me the worst roofs in 75216." "Houses where most of the neighbours have already re-roofed." "Which of these have a tarp on them?" Roofbird reads every roof in the area from satellite and ground-level imagery, ranks each one against the roofs either side of it, and answers in plain English.

Three things matter here, and none of them overlap with measurement:

1. It tells you which blocks are worth your morning before you scan anything. Search a town or a ZIP and Roofbird ranks the neighbourhoods in view by housing era, what share of roofs read as weathered, how many homes are actually there counted from building footprints, whether hail has hit in the last 12 months, and how walkable the block is. Scattered acreage on long driveways gets called out as bad canvassing even under a perfect storm, because a morning is measured in doors per hour. How Roofbird scores a roof from imagery walks through the method.

2. It separates NEED from NOW. NEED is how badly the roof needs replacing. NOW is whether anything is forcing a decision on this specific house: visible active damage, hail on this roof, a purchase in the last 18 months, patching already attempted, neighbours who have re-roofed. Neighbourhood hail deliberately does not raise the NOW score, because every home in the scan shares it and it cannot separate one door from the next. Most homes in a settled neighbourhood honestly have no trigger, and Roofbird says so rather than inventing urgency to look busy.

3. It hands you the homeowner. This is the payoff. Every lead carries the full property record for free as soon as it is scanned: owner name, whether they live there or it is an absentee or rental owner, estimated market value and confidence, year built, last sale date and price, beds and baths, living square footage, lot size, stories, garage, annual property tax, and mortgage lender. Roofbird also estimates owner equity, because equity is what decides whether someone can say yes. When the deed record cannot support an estimate, it says so instead of guessing.

Only the phone and email sit behind a one-click unlock. Every number is DNC-scrubbed and labelled: clear means it was checked against the federal Do Not Call registry and is safe for a manual sales call, DNC means do not call it, verify means the scrub could not confirm either way. Manual dialling only, no texts, no auto-dialler. A lookup that finds no contact never costs a credit. How homeowner contact details and DNC screening work covers the labelling in detail.

The pricing difference, stated plainly

Roofbird's own pricing is published, so I can be exact about it:

• Free trial: 10 credits, no credit card, no expiry.
• Hunter: $199/mo for 350 credits a month. Top-ups are $25 for 37.
• Hunter Pro: $499/mo for 1,000 credits a month. Top-ups are $25 for 50.

Free on every plan including the trial: asking, searching, sorting, saving lists, and scanning new ground and ranking every roof in it, at any size. Unlimited service areas.

Credits are spent only on acting: reading a roof properly, both photographs and the property record together, is 1 credit per 8 roofs. The owner's name, phone and email is 1 credit per 2 roofs. Opening a house completely is 1 credit.

There is no quota and no per-lead fee. Roofs already replaced, the wrong material for the shop, or not homes at all are read, labelled as exactly that, and kept out of the way. Knowing which quarter of a street is dead is worth as much as knowing which quarter is hot, and you are not billed for either. What a Roofbird credit actually buys has the full breakdown.

So which do you buy

They are not competing purchases, and treating them as an either/or is how shops end up with a measurement tool and an empty pipeline.

• Buy Hover if your bottleneck is quoting and selling the jobs already in front of you, and you want a 3D model and a visual to close them.
• Buy Roofbird if your bottleneck is that there are not enough jobs in front of you, and you are tired of paying for shared leads.
• Buy both if you are a normal roofing company with both problems, which is most of them. They sit in different lines of the budget and they answer different questions.

If you want to see the sourcing half without signing up, look at a live scored area and read the verdicts on real roofs. If you want the whole feature set before you decide, the full feature list is there. And if you are already running a CRM and want to know whether the leads sitting in it are worth anything, scoring the leads already in your CRM is probably the fastest win available to you this week.

Next steps

1. Get a real Hover quote. Ask what the per-project rate is at your actual monthly volume, what the per-seat rate is, and what the annual commitment discount looks like. Ask what happens if you do half the volume you projected.
2. Count your sourcing cost separately. Add up what you spent last year on shared leads and divide by jobs closed. That number is what Roofbird is competing against, not Hover.
3. Run one block through Roofbird free. Ten credits, no card. Pick a ZIP you work and see whether the ranked list matches your gut about which streets are worth knocking.
4. Check the contact labels before you dial. Clear means DNC-scrubbed and safe for a manual call. Verify means treat it as unknown. DNC means leave it alone.

Measurement closes the job you have. Sourcing finds the job you do not. Most contractors need both, and confusing one for the other is an expensive habit.