If you move roofing or solar leads at volume, you've already hit the wall: a raw lead is a name and an address, and that's worthless until somebody figures out the roof, the property, the owner, and the storm history. So you go shopping for an API. And you find two kinds, neither of which was built for what you're doing.
This is a buyer's guide to roof-measurement and property-data APIs for lead generation. We'll be factual about the tradeoffs, then show you where a per-call enrichment API fits — because the buying criteria for a high-volume lead operation are different from the criteria for a single contractor ordering one report.
The two kinds of API you'll find
Roof measurement APIs — EagleView, Hover, and similar — are excellent at one thing: turning a roof into geometry. Area, pitch, facets, linear footage. They were built for the contractor who has already sold the job and needs a precise takeoff. The pricing and the workflow reflect that. You're often looking at credit packs, annual commitments, enterprise minimums, or a photo-capture flow that needs the homeowner to walk the property with a phone.
Property data APIs — the ATTOM-style providers — are excellent at a different thing: parcels, ownership, assessed values, sale history at national scale. Also built for a different buyer: data teams, lenders, proptech platforms. Enterprise contracts, annual minimums, and you're paying for a broad property record, not a roofing-ready lead.
Both are good products. Neither answers the question a lead operation actually asks, which is: *given this one address, is this a lead worth selling, and what do I know about it — right now, at intake, for a price that works at thousands of addresses a month?*
The dimensions that actually matter to a volume buyer
When you're enriching leads at scale, five things decide whether an API earns its place in your stack.
1. Pricing model
Not the headline rate — the *model*. Credits expire. Annual minimums mean you pay for volume you didn't use. Enterprise contracts mean a procurement cycle before you can test anything. For a lead business whose volume swings with the storm season, committed minimums are a tax on your slow months.
RoofTap's /v1/enrich API is per call, $3.95, no contract, no credits, no minimum. The rate drops as you scale, and it drops automatically — you don't renegotiate:
| Monthly volume | Price per call |
|---|---|
| Up to 5,000 | $3.95 |
| 5,000 to 15,000 | $3.25 |
| 15,000 to 30,000 | $2.45 |
| 30,000+ | $1.95 |
2. Data breadth
A roof-measurement API gives you the roof. A property-data API gives you the parcel. To build a sellable lead you need both, plus storm history, plus — increasingly — solar potential. That's three or four vendors, three or four integrations, three or four invoices, and you're the one stitching them together at intake.
One `/v1/enrich` call returns all of it from a single address:
- Roof (paid layer): area, pitch, facet count, linear feet of eaves, rakes, ridges, hips, and valleys, complexity score, material takeoff, and a bid range — the measurement step, folded in.
- Property and owner (paid layer): year built, roof age, owner-occupied and owner-match flags, lot and living area, last sale, a fresh-mover flag, and assessed value.
- Solar (paid layer): kW potential, annual kWh, panel count.
- Imagery (paid layer): the picture to go with the numbers.
- Storm and claim-window (free, every call): last hail, 5-year hail count, max wind, and whether the address sits inside an open insurance claim window.
- Hazard risk and neighborhood (free, every call): property-level risk and area context.
The storm, hazard, and neighborhood layers come on every call at no charge. That alone qualifies or kills a lead before you've paid for anything.
3. Speed at intake
This is the one most buyers underweight. If your enrichment takes minutes, it can't run *during* lead intake — it runs in a batch later, which means the lead is already cold or already routed before you know what it's worth. A measurement vendor that needs a homeowner to capture photos can't run at intake at all.
`/v1/enrich` returns in about 3 to 6 seconds, with no homeowner photo flow — no app to download, no involvement from the homeowner. That's fast enough to fire on form submission and route the lead based on the answer.
4. Accuracy and coverage you don't pay for when it's wrong
Coverage is roughly 95% of U.S. single-family homes. The part that matters for a volume buyer is what happens on the misses: when confidence is low, the response comes back `billable: false`. You don't pay for data we won't stand behind. Most measurement and property APIs bill you for the lookup regardless of confidence — at scale, that's real money spent on garbage rows.
5. No homeowner in the loop
Worth stating plainly because it changes what's possible. A photo-capture measurement flow requires the homeowner to participate, which means it can only run on leads that have already raised their hand. An address-only API runs on *any* address — including the cold ones sitting in your database. (More on that in bulk lead reactivation.)
At a glance
| Dimension | Roof measurement API | Property data API | RoofTap /v1/enrich |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Credits / minimums | Enterprise contract | Per call, no minimum |
| Roof geometry | Yes | No | Yes |
| Property + owner | No | Yes | Yes |
| Storm + claim window | No | No | Yes (free) |
| Solar potential | No | Sometimes | Yes |
| Speed at intake | Minutes / photo flow | Seconds | ~3–6s |
| Pay on low-confidence | Usually yes | Usually yes | No (`billable:false`) |
| Homeowner photos | Often required | No | No |
This isn't a knock on the enterprise APIs. If you need survey-grade geometry for permitting, the dedicated measurement vendors are the right call. The point is that *lead generation* has different requirements than *job production*, and the buyer's guide for one isn't the buyer's guide for the other.
A worked example: 20,000 addresses a month
Say you're a mid-size aggregator enriching 20,000 addresses a month. At that volume you're in the $2.45 tier.
20,000 × $2.45 = $49,000/month to enrich every address with roof, property, owner, storm, and solar — one integration, one invoice, real-time at intake.
Now price the alternative honestly. A measurement vendor at enterprise pricing plus a property-data contract plus a hail-data feed plus a solar tool: four contracts, four integrations, and minimums on most of them. Even if each individual lookup looked cheaper on paper, the committed minimums and the engineering cost of stitching four feeds together at intake usually erase the difference — and you still don't get the result in 3–6 seconds.
Then factor the part the per-call model hands you for free: any address that comes back `billable: false` costs you nothing, and the storm/claim-window layer arrives on all 20,000 calls at no charge. For a lead operation, qualifying or killing a lead before you've spent a dollar is the whole game. The margin math on enriched leads walks through what that $2.45 turns into on resale.
How to choose
Match the API to the job. Buying for job production — you've sold the work and need a precise takeoff or a clean property record — the dedicated measurement and property-data vendors are built for you. Buying for lead generation at volume — you need to qualify, enrich, and route thousands of addresses in real time without a procurement cycle — you want a per-call enrichment API that returns the whole answer in one request.
Start with one address. The /v1/enrich endpoint takes an address and returns a ready-to-sell lead in 3–6 seconds; the API and integrations overview shows how it drops into an existing intake flow. No contract, no minimum, and you don't pay when we're not confident. One address in, a qualified lead out.