Residential heat pump financing: subscriptions, lease-to-own, and everything in between.

The three shapes of residential heat-pump financing

A homeowner facing a $15,000–$20,000 heat pump install has three functionally different ways to pay for it without cash on the barrelhead. They’re easy to confuse because the marketing language overlaps — everyone says “no upfront cost” and “affordable monthly payment” — but the mechanics diverge sharply.

• Subscription (a service, not an asset). A third party owns the heat pump. You pay a monthly fee that bundles equipment, installation, ongoing maintenance, and repairs. You never own the system, and end-of-term you renew, buy it out, or start a new plan. Tax credits and utility rebates flow to the equipment owner, not you.
• Lease-to-own (a credit product with a heat pump attached). A finance company advances the money to buy a heat pump from a contractor of your choice. You pay it back over 24–48 months and own the equipment at the end. Maintenance and repairs are on you. Federal tax credits are typically available to you as the equipment owner.
• Energy-savings-based / pay-if-you-save (the model that mostly left the residential market). A company installs weatherization and equipment at no upfront cost, and the homeowner pays it back only if measured energy savings show up. Sealed was the highest-profile firm doing this at residential scale; it exited that business in March 2024 (details below).

The three answers are not equivalent. A subscription is closer to renting comfort than to owning equipment; a lease-to-own program is a consumer loan wrapped around HVAC; and the pay-if-you-save model was closer to a performance contract. Getting the right shape for the right household is more consequential than picking between two names inside the same shape.

Palmetto and Tetra: the same subscription, two go-to-market faces

These are the two names most often confused. It turns out they aren’t actually two competing offerings — they’re one product with a divided front end. Tetra’s leasing page states directly that its heat-pump leases are “owned and financed by Palmetto” (Tetra leasing). Palmetto owns the equipment, finances the deal, and books the monthly revenue; Tetra installs and services the system on the ground and functions as one of Palmetto’s installation partners.

The product itself — Palmetto’s Comfort Plan — is a residential HVAC subscription that started publicly in fall 2025. Palmetto’s press release describes it as the “first-of-its-kind subscription for home comfort systems,” available nationally plus Puerto Rico as of October 16, 2025, with $0 down and 10-year or 12-year plans that bundle equipment, installation, maintenance, and repairs for the life of the plan (Palmetto press release). Palmetto’s product page adds that at the end of the term the customer can renew the plan, purchase the equipment, or roll into a new plan with a 25% loyalty credit (Palmetto Comfort Plan).

Tetra’s side of the same offering is available in a much narrower geography — its own FAQ states that Tetra directly services buildings with four or fewer units, and its locations page lists Massachusetts, New York, and Georgia (Tetra FAQ; Tetra locations). Outside those states, a Palmetto Comfort Plan is fulfilled by a different installer under the same underlying financing.

The subscription structure is worth stating in plain terms because it’s different from a loan. As the equipment owner, Palmetto claims the federal tax credits and utility rebates, and those savings are priced into the monthly fee — the homeowner is buying comfort as a service, not the physical unit. That’s a strong fit for people who don’t want to think about the system for 10 years and who value the “one number, forever” simplicity. It’s a poor fit for people who plan to sell the house in three years and don’t want a service contract riding along with the property.

Breeze Lease Purchase: credit access, not a service

Breeze Lease Purchase is fundamentally a different animal. Operated by Okinus Credit Solutions from Pelham, Georgia since 2004, Breeze is a lease-to-own financing program that gives homeowners instant approvals of $9,000–$18,000 for HVAC and heat-pump purchases, with terms up to 48 months (Breeze Lease Purchase; Breeze — About).

Two things distinguish Breeze from Palmetto/Tetra:

• It’s a credit product, not a service bundle. Breeze doesn’t own the equipment long-term, doesn’t bundle installation, and doesn’t bundle ongoing maintenance or repairs. It advances the money for a heat pump purchased from one of Breeze’s referred contractors (Breeze consumer information; Breeze contractor partners).
• The audience is different. Breeze’s pitch is instant approval and access to financing for households that wouldn’t clear a traditional prime lender’s bar. That’s a legitimate and useful product, but it competes against home-equity products and prime consumer HVAC loans on cost, not against subscription plans on convenience.

Availability is broad but not universal — Breeze’s own consumer page excludes New Jersey, D.C., Wyoming, Hawaii, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and it lists customer service phone hours rather than 24/7 support (Breeze consumer information). For a homeowner who wants to own a heat pump, pay for it over three to four years, and handle maintenance separately, Breeze slots in where a traditional loan would. For a homeowner who wants somebody else to run the equipment, it doesn’t.

Sealed: the pay-if-you-save model that left residential

Sealed is worth naming explicitly because it comes up in almost every conversation about residential heat-pump financing — and because its old product is still findable online even though the company no longer offers it. Sealed spent roughly a decade running a direct-to-consumer service under which a homeowner paid nothing upfront for weatherization and a heat pump; Sealed underwrote the project against predicted energy savings, and the homeowner’s payments were tied to whether those savings actually materialized.

In March 2024, Sealed publicly pivoted. The company shut down that direct-to-consumer offering and re-launched as Sealed Pro, a business-to-business software platform that fronts rebate cash to HVAC and weatherization contractors and processes utility and government rebates on their behalf (Sealed Pro announcement). Canary Media’s contemporaneous reporting confirms the change: Sealed dropped “its consumer-facing business” of weatherizing homes and installing heat pumps, and now assumes risk on the rebate side of the transaction rather than on the homeowner’s long-term energy bill (Canary Media).

A handful of Sealed’s older marketing pages describing the discontinued homeowner offering are still live at legacy URLs, and they continue to describe zero-down bundled installations. Those pages are stale — the current Sealed does not finance, install, or maintain heat pumps for individual homeowners. Any comparison of active 2026 residential financing options should treat Sealed as a former direct-to-consumer financier that has left the residential market, not as an active fourth option alongside Palmetto/Tetra and Breeze.

Side by side: what actually gets bundled

The chart below shows what each residential option actually covers — the difference between them is less about monthly payment size and more about which parts of the heat-pump lifecycle are on the homeowner’s plate versus somebody else’s. Compare it against the same chart in the commercial HPaaS piece: the residential subscription (Palmetto/Tetra) and the commercial HPaaS model (BlocPower) look structurally similar; the credit products don’t.

Matching the shape to the household

The right answer depends less on the monthly payment and more on the household’s time horizon, tax situation, credit access, and appetite for equipment ownership.

• You expect to stay in the home 10+ years, don’t want to think about the HVAC system, and don’t need the tax credit personally. A subscription like Palmetto/Tetra’s Comfort Plan is designed for this profile. The equipment owner claims incentives and prices them into the monthly, and the homeowner buys off the risk of a $6,000 compressor replacement in year eight.
• You want to own the equipment, plan to use the federal 25C tax credit or a state/utility rebate yourself, and can absorb a 24- to 48-month payment. A lease-to-own product like Breeze, or a straight home-equity or HVAC loan, keeps you as the equipment owner and keeps the incentives in your hands.
• You’re selling in three years. A subscription is usually the worst fit — assignability to the buyer is a common friction point, and a lease-to-own or short-term loan can be paid off at closing.
• You’d qualify for a prime rate at a bank or credit union. A conventional loan is almost always cheaper than any bundled program — the price of “convenience” in a subscription is real, and it’s the trade-off for offloading equipment risk.

None of this is financial advice. The one durable heuristic: read the whole contract, not the monthly number. The end-of-term clause, the assignment terms if you sell the house, the maintenance-response commitments, and who owns the tax credits are where the actual economics of a decade-long agreement live.

Bottom line

Residential heat-pump financing in 2026 is a smaller market than the marketing traffic implies. Palmetto (in partnership with Tetra as its installation face) is running the only fully-bundled subscription with national footprint. Breeze is a lease-to-own credit product for households that value approval speed and access more than bundled services. Sealed — the highest-profile prior name in the space — is no longer in the consumer market at all. Traditional loans and home-equity financing continue to be the cheapest path for households with prime credit and enough headroom to own and maintain the equipment themselves. The trick isn’t picking a “best” provider; it’s matching the right shape of contract to the right household.

For the broader Energy as a Service model — how whole-building energy contracts are structured for large properties, and how they compare with the narrower heat-pump-only subscription seen here — see the Energy as a Service piece. The commercial HPaaS piece is the direct multifamily and commercial counterpart to this one.