For congregations, nonprofits & small businesses in New York
Your building is quietly overpaying for energy.
Free audits, rebates, and grants already exist for buildings like yours — they go unused because nobody has time to find them. Lightkeeper finds them, does the payback math in plain dollars, and hands your board a plan it can act on.
Free forever for houses of worship and nonprofits. $99 flat for small businesses. No commissions, no upsell.
This is what we do — drawn on one sheet
Specimen survey · mid-size congregation, Hudson Valley
Sheet E-1 · Findings
Finding 01 — Thermostat schedules
The building is heated as if it were full seven days a week. It is used on two.
saves $640/yr · costs $100 · pays back 2 months
Est. waste, this drawing
$2,140/yr
six findings + $400 in smaller items
Six findings, real math, no jargon. Your building’s version of this drawing comes from your actual bills — and for congregations and nonprofits it costs nothing. Read the full specimen plan.
$1,000–$3,000
is what a mid-size congregation typically loses to energy waste every year — old thermostats, unbooked free audits, a rate plan nobody has checked, rebates that expire unclaimed.
It comes out of a budget that is already in deficit. And it repeats annually until someone does the boring work. That someone is us.
About 15% of your energy budget buys nothing at all.
Every dollar of spend either keeps working for the mission or leaks out through old equipment, missed programs, and the wrong rate plan. The first job is measuring the leak — in dollars, not kilowatt-hours.
The specimen year: $13,800 of energy spend, of which $2,140 — about 15% — buys nothing at all. That share is typical of buildings that haven’t had an efficiency pass in the last decade.
One document your board can read aloud.
Your whole time investment: a fifteen-minute call, then three months of utility bills. Five days later you have a Payback Plan — a short, printed-out document, not a portal login. Read a complete specimen before you send us anything.
- 01
The headline number
What doing nothing costs you per year — the figure that gets a board to lean forward.
- 02
Usage baseline & rate-plan check
What you actually use, when, and whether you're on the wrong tariff. Misclassified rates are common and fixable with a letter.
- 03
Top 5 actions, ranked by payback
Each with the dollars saved, the upfront cost, the payback period, and the assumptions stated plainly.
- 04
Programs you already qualify for
Free utility audits, NYSERDA assistance, NYS Clean Heat rebates, interfaith energy initiatives — with the actual application links.
- 05
The stewardship line
CO₂ avoided, in tons and in trees — for congregations, framed as care of creation; for businesses, as a line for the annual report.
- 06
Follow-through
We don't hand you homework and vanish. We chase the audit booking, the rebate paperwork, the callback the utility never made.
From an actual plan
SpecimenYour year, drawn from your bills
The usage baseline, winter peaks and all — the first page of every Payback Plan, and the reason a rate-plan check often pays for the whole exercise.
Why Lightkeeper exists
“We are the treasurer’s energy staffer — the person on the org chart that no volunteer budgetcould ever afford.”
The free programs are funded. The rebates are real. Somebody just has to keep the light pointed at them.
Congregations & nonprofits
$0
not a trial — a pledge
Houses of worship, parishes, temples, mosques, and community nonprofits never pay. The paid tier and sponsors carry the cost, and the accounting is published quarterly.
Start your free planSmall businesses
$99 flat
on a written proposal — pay when we start
Same hunt, same math, same follow-through — for the shop, restaurant, or office paying commercial rates. If the plan doesn’t identify more than $99 in annual savings, we refund it.
Start your $99 plan100% of profits are reinvested in the service or donated to an environmental charity, published quarterly. Read the pledge.
Asked by every property committee so far
Q1What's the catch on the free tier?
There isn't one, and the accounting is public. Business-tier fees and sponsorships fund the work; profits are reinvested or donated, published quarterly. We take no commissions from installers, so no recommendation in your plan makes us money.
Q2Is this an energy audit?
It includes our desk review of your bills, but the bigger value is navigation: booking the free professional audits that already exist, stacking the rebates, checking your rate plan, and turning it all into one ranked list with the paperwork chased for you.
Q3What do you need from us?
Three months of utility bills (a photo or PDF is fine) and fifteen minutes with whoever pays them — treasurer, administrator, or property chair. That's the whole ask.
Q4What happens to our bills and account numbers?
They're stored in a private drive, used only to produce your plan, never shared or sold, and deleted after 12 months or whenever you ask.
The survey is free. The waste isn’t.
The waste doesn’t wait for a convenient year.
Three months of bills, fifteen minutes, five days. Then your board has a plan with real numbers in it.