Finturf, a contractor-facing financing platform, and Palmetto, a residential clean-energy marketplace, have partnered to add Palmetto's Comfort Plan to Finturf's lender network, the companies announced May 28 — a deal that gives contractors using Finturf's point-of-sale application access to a subscription-based HVAC financing structure alongside the conventional installment loans the platform already offers.
The partnership does not change how Finturf's core application works. Contractors already submit a single application that routes to multiple lenders in Finturf's network, choosing which approved offer to present to a homeowner. Palmetto's financing is now one of the options that can surface through that same workflow, rather than requiring a separate application or a separate sales conversation.
What HVAC Subscription Financing Adds to the Sale
The product at the center of the deal is Palmetto's Comfort Plan, a lease-style subscription Palmetto launched in October 2025. Rather than financing a system purchase with a fixed-term loan, Comfort Plan has the homeowner pay a flat monthly fee for a 10- to 12-year term that covers the equipment, installation, and ongoing maintenance and repairs, with no separate parts or labor charges during that period and no money down. Palmetto, not the homeowner, owns the system for the length of the term. At the end of the contract, the company says customers can buy out the equipment, renew at a reduced rate, or start a new lease on newer equipment.
Cinda Lawson, Finturf's head of lender partnerships, said the addition gives contractors a way to present financing built specifically around clean-energy and HVAC upgrades, rather than a general home-improvement loan, within the same application contractors already use. Machias Schoen, Palmetto's senior vice president and head of HVAC and heat pump, said the goal of the partnership was to fold Palmetto's financing into a single workflow that helps contractors move projects from estimate to installation with fewer separate steps.
How the Subscription Model Pays Contractors
Palmetto's pitch to contractors is structured around recurring revenue rather than a single transaction. The company says contractors who install a Comfort Plan system are assigned service rights for the 10- to 12-year term, get paid for performing the system's scheduled annual maintenance, and are positioned as the first call when the homeowner is ready to replace the equipment at the end of the lease — turning what would otherwise be a one-time installation into an ongoing service relationship. Palmetto says it works with roughly 200 contractors nationally, ranging from small local shops to larger multi-state operators, and that the Comfort Plan is available in all 50 states and Puerto Rico as a result.
A Maintenance Statistic Behind the Pitch
Finturf pointed to a separate data point that lends some context to the maintenance argument behind subscription financing. The DuraPlas 2026 Summer Cooling Report, a survey of 600 U.S. homeowners fielded in April by the HVAC and plastics manufacturer DuraPlas, found that 50% of homeowners have skipped HVAC maintenance to save money this year — a behavior that held roughly steady across income brackets and age groups, with the widest variation by region: 54% of homeowners in the West reported skipping maintenance, compared with 46% in the Northeast. DuraPlas President Paul Phillips said the finding reflects homeowners being pushed into a tradeoff between near-term comfort and long-term equipment reliability, citing it as part of the company's argument for components designed to reduce the cost consequences of deferred maintenance.
Palmetto's Broader Consumer Push
The partnership announcement arrived in the middle of a run of growth-oriented moves at Palmetto. The company named Loren Padelford, a former Shopify and BILL executive, as president of consumer energy on May 20, giving him oversight of Palmetto's platform strategy, marketing and contractor partnerships. Forbes profiled Padelford's mandate on May 28, the same day as the Finturf announcement, framing his goal as making clean-energy purchases — including HVAC upgrades — as simple to complete as booking a ride-share. Palmetto has described itself in its own materials as America's leading consumer energy platform, a characterization that reflects the company's marketing rather than an independently verified market-share ranking.
The 2026 HVAC financing gap, tthe price of modern, efficient HVAC equipment has climbed faster than the financing tools available to bridge it for many households — is the gap both companies are positioning this partnership to address. A subscription structure changes the shape of that gap rather than closing it outright: instead of homeowners needing to qualify for a multi-thousand-dollar loan or pay cash, they take on a long-term recurring payment obligation in exchange for never owning the equipment outright during the term.
