Roofr vs EagleView vs Hover: AI Roof Reports, Cost per Job, Turnaround

For most small roofers Roofr is the better buy on cost: $13 a report on a paid plan, $19 on its free plan. Hover charges $29 to $69 a roof ($9 to $49 on its $999-a-year Pro plan) and EagleView $24.25 to $87 by roof size, or $18 for its Bid Perfect report, which omits edge lengths.

Price is only half of it, so test each on three of your own roofs before committing, because accuracy drifts as roofs get more complex. Three different products also hide behind the names. Roofr and EagleView sell reports built from aerial imagery that you order from a desk. Hover builds its model from phone photos taken at the house, prices by facet count, and sells a yearly plan that changes the per-roof price: Pro costs $999 a year and takes $20 off every project, so it pays back only after 50 roofs. Roofr's $13 report needs a paid plan too.

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Prices below are USD figures read from each vendor's own pages in October 2026. Where a page conflicts with itself, or does not say, the text says so. The three-roof check further down takes a morning; for a longer test across five roofs, the five-roof accuracy tutorial goes further.

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Price, speed and file formats as each vendor publishes them

Four details deserve a closer read. First, EagleView's grid has four tier columns, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, and each row holds three prices and then "call for pricing". Read left to right, that puts the highest price on Bronze and leaves Platinum to a sales call, but the page never ties a figure to a tier in words, so budget at the highest figure in each row until a sales representative confirms yours. Second, Roofr's Measure+ price and some add-on prices appear in more than one version on the same page, so confirm before you subscribe. Third, Hover's line that roof measurements are "typically delivered within 1 hour" (a full exterior within 90 minutes) belongs to its paid expedite option; standard delivery is the table's 4 to 12 hours, which Hover says "may vary based on volume and complexity". Fourth, Hover's measurements page puts a scan at about five minutes at the house, and that time sits outside the turnaround.

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One more price point appeared while I was researching: RoofGenius lists instant satellite roof reports at $10 each on its home page, next to plans from $297 a month. I have not tested it and it sits outside the three-way comparison, but it shows how wide the market runs.

Cost per roof at 36, 120 and 360 reports a year

The reference roof is an average one: about six facets and 30 squares, which falls in Hover's middle tier and, on my reading of EagleView's size labels (20, 40 and over 40 squares), its medium size. These are annual costs for pay-as-you-go ordering plus any plan fee, with the all-in average per report in brackets.

Read the table for its crossovers. Roofr's Measure+ beats Starter only from about 19 reports a month, because $109 divided by the $6 saving is 18.2; at the page's $169 figure it would take 29 a month. Hover Pro beats Starter after 50 roofs a year, since $999 divided by $20 is 49.95. Hover Business never beats Pro on report price for an average roof: it charges $39 where Pro charges $29, and even on a complex roof it saves $10, so $2,000 of extra fee takes 200 complex roofs to recover. Business is bought for running up to ten organisations from one account, not for its report price.

Mix matters too. Suppose a month of 12 roofs splits into 4 simple, 6 average and 2 complex. Hover Starter costs 4 x $29 + 6 x $49 + 2 x $69 = $548, and Pro costs 4 x $9 + 6 x $29 + 2 x $49 = $308. Over a year that is $6,576 against $3,696 plus the $999 fee, so Pro saves $1,881. A firm that mostly quotes simple roofs gains most from a plan.

One more sum shows why price alone rarely decides. Say you order 10 reports a month and sell 4 of those roofs; that 40% is an assumption for the sum, not a statistic. At Roofr Starter a sold roof carries $47.50 of report cost, at Hover Pro about $93, and on EagleView's Premium report between $122.50 and $150. Even the highest is small against a roof that sells for thousands, which is why accuracy and speed deserve more of your attention than the last few dollars.

What each report is said to contain

On the pages I read, none of the three labels its measurement "AI". Roofr cites a multi-check system and a calculation formula. EagleView cites "1-Inch Accuracy" and "98%+" accuracy on property measurements. Hover cites "industry-leading accuracy" and patented technology. None gives an independent error rate. Treat those as claims. The accuracy test below is how you turn them into numbers. The measurement side is explained in the satellite-image quoting tutorial.

EagleView's $18 Bid Perfect: what it leaves out and when it is enough

EagleView's cheapest roof product is easy to miss on its pricing grid. Bid Perfect lists at $18 on every tier, under Roofr's $19 Starter report. Its page describes top-down and side-angle imagery, pitch distribution, facet count, total area in squares and a waste factor for steep slopes only, and calls the data preliminary. It lists no ridge, hip, valley, rake or eave lengths, and those are the figures behind the ridge cap, starter strip, drip edge and ice-and-water lines on a material order. So it prices a bid; it does not build an order.

That suggests a two-step route for a roofer who wants to stay with EagleView. Say you bid 10 average roofs a month and sell 4. Bid Perfect on all 10 costs $180, and a Premium report on the 4 you sell adds $196 to $240, so the month costs $376 to $420. Premium on all 10 would be $490 to $600, so the two steps save $114 to $180 a month against EagleView alone. Against Roofr's free plan, at $190 for ten full reports, the two-step route still costs about twice as much. EagleView's page does not say whether a Bid Perfect fee counts towards a later Premium report on the same address, so ask before you build a process around it.

Bid Perfect therefore fits a narrow case: your job software or your supplier already works with EagleView reports, and you want the cost of the bids you lose kept down. If nothing ties you to EagleView, a full report from a cheaper source does the same bid job and leaves you with the edge lengths when the customer signs.

ESX, XML and PDF: which file reaches your estimating tool

A PDF is for reading and for attaching to a proposal. ESX is the file Xactimate reads, so it matters if your insurance or restoration estimates are built there; XML and JSON matter if software imports measurements automatically. The vendors differ sharply. Hover's Starter plan is limited to PDF and ESX, while Pro and above add XLS, XML, JSON, SKP, DWG and DXF. Roofr sells ESX as an extra $10 to $12 a report. EagleView's pages mention ESX files for Xactimate under its Eagleview One platform and say it integrates with leading CRM systems, without naming them.

So check the destination first. AccuLynx's home page lists EagleView among its integrations, Jobber's roofing page describes an EagleView integration for measurements, and EagleView's own home page shows ServiceTitan, AccuLynx, JobNimbus and JobTread among its partners. Its pricing page adds that you "may qualify for reduced pricing" when you buy through an integration partner, so ask your job software's support team what a report costs from inside it before you compare list prices. Roofr's reports feed its own CRM and proposals. If you already run job software, find out which report vendor it connects to before you compare prices; the CRM versus field app tutorial covers those systems. After the report arrives, the roofing takeoff tutorial shows how to turn squares and waste into an order.

A three-roof accuracy test you can run in a morning

Choose three roofs you can check on the ground or from drawings, one per complexity tier: simple (up to four facets), average (five to eight) and complex (nine or more). Those match Hover's own tiers and give the test some range.

1. Get your own figures. Tape or laser the footprint including the overhang, read the pitch with a level or pitch gauge, and count the facets. Area is footprint times the slope factor, which is the square root of 1 plus the pitch fraction squared: 1.118 at 6/12 and 1.202 at 8/12.
2. Order the same address from every vendor on the same day, and write down when each report arrived.
3. Compare area, pitch, facet count and the ridge, hip, valley, eave and rake lengths.
4. Convert errors into shingles: with three bundles to a square (check your product), each 1% of a 30-square roof is about one bundle.
5. Apply pass marks. Mine, not a vendor's: area within 3% on simple roofs, 4% on average, 5% on complex; pitch exactly right; lengths within 5%.

Here is the footprint check worked for Roof A in the example below. The footprint with overhangs is 52 ft by 32 ft, which is 1,664 sq ft. At 6/12 the slope factor is 1.118, so the roof area is about 1,860 sq ft, or 18.6 squares. Any report between 18.0 and 19.2 squares passes the 3% mark; one that says 20.0 does not.

The same roof gives a two-minute check on lengths. If it is a plain gable with the ridge running along the 52 ft side, each slope is 16 ft of run times 1.118, or 17.9 ft long. The ridge should read 52 ft, the eaves 104 ft (two runs of 52) and the rakes about 72 ft (four slopes of 17.9). A report that shows hips or valleys on a plain gable has misread the outline, and a report whose eaves total is 20% off has probably clipped an overhang. You are not auditing the vendor's software; you are checking that the numbers you will order from describe the roof you will stand on.

These are illustrative results for three unnamed sources, so no vendor is being scored here.

The pattern to look for is error growing with complexity. Source A is fine on A and B and fails on C at 5.7%. Source C fails B, and the cause is a one-step pitch misread, which brings us to the commonest way a report goes wrong. The practical outcome is a two-source rule: use the cheap report for simple roofs and the dearer one for complex ones. Hover's own pricing by facet count and EagleView's by roof size lean that way already.

Lining up three reports with an AI assistant

Copying a dozen figures from three reports into one table is the dull part of the test, and a general assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini can do it from the reports' summary pages. Paste the totals in as text rather than uploading whole reports, and give it your field figures in the same message.

Below are the summary figures from three roof measurement reports for the
same address, followed by my own field measurements. Build one table: a row
for each measure (total area in squares, predominant pitch, facet count,
ridges and hips, valleys, eaves, rakes) and a column for each source. Add a
column per source showing its difference from my field figure in percent,
to one decimal place. Use only the numbers given. If a source does not give
a figure, write "not given". Do not add waste and do not round areas.
Field: 31.2 squares, 6/12, 7 facets, ridges and hips 96 ft, valleys 18 ft,
eaves 142 ft, rakes 38 ft.
Source A: [paste summary]
Source B: [paste summary]
Source C: [paste summary]

For Roof B, a typical reply is a tidy table with Source A at +2.2%, Source C at +4.5% and "not given" against one source's rakes, which is the right answer when a summary page leaves a figure out. The error worth expecting sits in the area row. Source B printed two areas, the measured 31.4 squares and an order quantity with waste added, and the assistant picked the second, so it showed Source B as nearly 11% over when it was 0.6% over. "Do not add waste" does not stop a model choosing the wrong printed number, so tick every figure in the table against the page it came from before you score anything.

Where the photo scan changes your day

A Hover measurement starts with someone taking photos of the house with the Hover app, which Hover's pages say takes about five minutes and needs no ladder. Its plan table lists "Invite to scan" on every plan, described as a way to "invite homeowners to scan and generate models automatically". The page does not show what the homeowner has to do, so try it with a patient customer before you rely on it in a busy week. Either way, the work begins on site or with the homeowner's help. An imagery report is ordered online from your desk. That difference matters when you quote from a phone call at 7 p.m., and it matters when a homeowner is away for the week.

It also changes what "turnaround" means. For Roofr and EagleView it runs from the order. For Hover it runs from the scan, so the clock for a quote promised on the doorstep is the scan plus the plan's hours. Put the full path in your own test log: order or scan time, delivery time, and the time you sent the proposal.

A storm surge: 40 reports in a week

Hail changes the arithmetic. Say you order 40 average-roof reports in one week and nothing for the rest of the month. At Roofr Starter that is 40 x $19 = $760, delivered within 24 hours. Measure+ for that month would cost $109 plus 40 x $13 = $629 if the monthly figure holds, saving $131 and cutting the wait to six hours, provided you can start and stop the plan month to month, which the page does not say. Buying the same speed on Starter means its $15 six-hour upgrade on every report, $1,360 for the 40, so a month of Measure+ is the cheaper way to buy speed in a surge. At Hover Starter it is 40 x $49 = $1,960, while Pro adds $999 for the year and costs 40 x $29 = $1,160, so $2,159 in total: a bad deal for one surge, a good one only if the plan pays back across the year. EagleView would be 40 x $49 to $60, or $1,960 to $2,400, and its home page carries a testimonial about ordering 20 to 40 reports at a time and getting them back in one to two hours.

The lesson is to look at the volume you actually order in the busiest month, not at the yearly average. For the lead side of the same week, the storm lead triage tutorial covers how to sort and follow up the enquiries that drive those orders.

How a pitch error inflates the shingle order

Area grows with pitch, so a pitch misread flows straight into the squares. On Roof B, 6/12 has a slope factor of 1.118 and 7/12 has 1.158, a 3.6% increase. A misread from 6/12 to 8/12 on Roof A would take the area from 18.6 to 20.0 squares, 7.5% more. That is 1.4 squares, roughly four to five extra bundles, before waste.

Two habits catch it. Compare the report's pitch to a gauge reading from the first site visit, and run the footprint sum above for any roof over about 20 squares; the sum takes two minutes. When a report is out by more than your tolerance, ask for it to be re-checked before ordering, and keep a note of which source and which roof type produced it. After ten such notes you will know which report to trust for which job.

A season's returns log shows which report to trust

The three-roof test happens once; a returns log runs all season and costs nothing. For every job, write down the report's squares, the waste factor you used, the bundles you ordered and the bundles left over or short at the end. Here are the three test roofs as they would read if each had been ordered from the report that measured it worst, at three bundles a square and $45 a bundle (both example figures).

Fifteen spare bundles across three roofs is $675 sitting in the yard or going back on the supplier's restocking terms. One job proves nothing; twenty jobs in the log show whether the leftovers follow one source or one roof type. When a pattern shows, change the waste factor you apply to that source, or send that roof type to the other source, rather than arguing with a vendor over a single report. Log shortfalls too, and give them more weight than surpluses: a short order means a second delivery charge and a crew waiting for bundles.

Choosing by the work you do

The decision rule I would use for a small roofer: start with the cheapest per-report option on simple and average roofs, run the three-roof test once, and keep a second source for the complex roofs where the cheap one fails. Re-run the test each spring, because vendors change imagery and pricing.

Roof report questions owners ask before they order a batch

Is a $13 roof report as accurate as a $60 one?

Price does not predict accuracy, and none of the three vendors' pages I read gives an independent error rate. Roofs with many facets, dormers and mixed pitches are where reports drift. Run the three-roof test on your own jobs: a cheap report that passes your tolerance on simple roofs and fails on complex ones can still be the right choice for simple work.

Do I need an ESX file with the report?

Only if your estimating or insurance work runs through Xactimate, which reads ESX files. Roofr sells the ESX file as an extra $10 to $12 per report, Hover's Starter plan includes ESX with PDF, and EagleView's page mentions ESX under its Eagleview One platform. If you write estimates by hand from a PDF, skip it.

When does a subscription beat paying per report?

Roofr's Measure+ saves $6 a report against Starter, so on its $109 monthly figure it needs about 19 reports a month to pay for itself on price alone. Hover Pro saves $20 a roof for $999 a year, which pays back after 50 roofs. Below those volumes, paying per report is cheaper, unless you want the faster turnaround that comes with the plan.

What if a report turns out to be wrong?

I could not find a re-measure or credit policy on the pages I read for any of the three. Roofr guarantees delivery times to paid subscribers, which is about speed, not accuracy. So ask before you rely on one, and keep your own check: compare the report's area to a quick footprint-times-slope sum, and confirm the pitch on site before ordering materials for any roof over about 20 squares.

Further reads

• Instant Roof Estimates on Your Website: Do They Win More Jobs? — Whether instant website estimates win more roofing jobs.
• Which AI Tools Do Roofers Need? Measurements, Calls, Estimates — The wider set of AI tools a roofer needs.
• Roofers AI: What a Starter Setup Costs for a Small Roofing Company — What a small roofer pays for a first set of AI tools.
• AI Automation for Roofers: Six Workflows Worth Setting Up First — Call answering, estimate follow-up, measurements, instant estimates, inspection reports and job close: what each costs, how to start and what to watch.
• AccuLynx vs JobNimbus for a Small Roofer: What to Ask About AI — AccuLynx and JobNimbus are sold by quote. A five-person crew's question list, with Roofr and Jobber prices to hold their quotes against.
• CompanyCam Alternatives for Roofers: AI Photo Reports and Checklists — Mitti, Fieldwire, GoAudits, Jobber, Housecall Pro and a DIY AI workflow scored against CompanyCam on photo reports, checklists, AI and cost for a small roofer.
• Painting Estimating Software: Which Ones Use AI and What They Cost — Seven tools compared on measurement, photos, price book and proposals, with a worked monthly bill and the minutes each must save to pay off.
• Siding Contractor Software: What to Pay For and Where AI Helps — CRM, estimating, measurement and photo software for a small siding firm compared on price, with a worked five-person choice and the AI that earns its place.
• Window Measurement App: Measure and Quote on the Doorstep With AI Help — Windowmaker Measure, PrefMeasure, DoorWin, Aufmaß App and others compared, with a phone-against-laser test and a survey sign-off for installers.
• Roofr's AI Receptionist: Is the Add-On Worth It for a Small Roofer? — What Roofr's AI Receptionist does, how its two pricing pages differ, a missed-storm-call payback sum and five test calls before you pay.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Roofr home, pricing and measurements pages; Hover pricing, measurements and roofing-measurements pages; EagleView home, pricing and residential property reports for construction pages; RoofGenius home page; AccuLynx home page; Jobber roofing page (all read October 2026).