Strandr bought LightingElf in October 2025 and folded it into Strandr. Strandr's own landing page says "there is no migration process needed," which in practice means your saved houses did not come along. You have 3 real places to rebuild: Strandr at $197 a year, LightQuoter free with a 2 percent fee on payments, or GlowBid from $299 a year at the founding price. Every price here was read on the vendor's own site on September 7, 2026.
Written by the GlowBid founder; prices checked on each vendor's site on September 7, 2026.
I run a permanent lighting company in Ottawa. This page is not a review of LightingElf, which cannot be opened today, so I will not pretend to know what your library looked like. What it is about is the rebuild, because every installer who changes tools does one. This page is about making the rebuild pay.
Where can a LightingElf shop rebuild?#
Three tools cover the ground LightingElf covered, and each one stops in a different place.
|
Strandr |
LightQuoter |
GlowBid |
| Price |
$197/yr, 7-day trial, 30-day money-back |
Free with a 2% fee on Stripe payments, or $497/yr at 0% |
$299/yr Core founding ($499 regular, $69/mo); 7-day trial, no card; 30-day money-back |
| LightingElf import |
None |
None |
None |
| Mockup |
On your photo, drag to place |
On Street View imagery, day and night preview |
On your photo, rendered from the drawn runs |
| Roofline measurement |
Separate free tool (Inchr), numbers moved by hand |
Satellite trace with pitch adjustment |
Drawn on the same photo, scaled from a known length, with a source and confidence tag |
| Priced quote |
No |
Per foot, install and takedown fees |
Rate card per foot by run type and product line, premiums, add-ons, minimum job |
| E-signature and deposit |
No |
Yes, Stripe |
Yes, Stripe, SHA-256 fingerprint on the signed PDF |
| Scheduling and crews |
No |
Crew calendar, routes, takedown scheduling |
Production board and crew app (Ultimate) |
| Multi-year agreements |
No |
1, 2 and 3-year contracts |
1, 3 or 5-season leases that create each season's install and takedown jobs |
| Available now |
Yes |
Yes |
Free tool now; full product November 1, 2026 |
What happened to LightingElf?#
Strandr acquired it in October 2025, and its landing page for former users sends them to Strandr rather than to a LightingElf login. The Strandr landing page for former users is short: sign up, upload a photo, "start designing in minutes." It lists what Strandr does (photo mockups, drag-and-drop placement, tablet presentations, exports, saved projects, Christmas and permanent lighting, browser-based on PC, Mac or iPad) and it does not mention importing anything. I read the page three times looking for an import step. There is none, and Strandr is not hiding that. "Strandr is a fresh start with better tools" is their line.
So the honest starting point is this: whichever tool you pick, you rebuild. The question is what the rebuild gives you back.
What do you keep, and what do you lose?#
You keep more than it feels like. Your photos are yours. Your customer list is in your phone, your email or your invoicing app. Your prices are in your head or a spreadsheet. Those three things are the whole input for any of the tools above.
What you lose is the drawn work: every house you laid out, and any material counts that came from those layouts. LightQuoter's page on the same topic describes LightingElf as a desktop tool for layout and material estimating. I cannot check that against the product itself, so take it as their description. If it matches how you used it, the thing to look for in a replacement is not a prettier mockup. It is a drawing that carries footage and a bill of materials, so that the next rebuild, if there ever is one, is the last.
Option 1: Strandr, the official successor#
Strandr is the tool Strandr wants you on, and it is a good mockup tool. $197 a year, 7-day trial, 30-day money-back, 1,700+ active contractors by their count, and a claimed two minutes to a finished mockup. It runs in a browser, saves projects as .strandr files, exports a proposal, and handles permanent lighting in the same tool. Measuring is a separate free tool called Inchr, which Strandr values at $197 a year and includes.
What it does not do, in Strandr's own words on its comparison post: "No built-in CRM or invoicing." "No phone support." "No offline mode." There is no rate card and no priced quote. Inchr measures on one screen and Strandr draws on another; the integration guide has you export the measurements "for reference" and upload the same photo twice. If you were happy quoting from a spreadsheet, Strandr is a fair landing spot and the cheapest one. I covered the seams in more detail on the Strandr alternative page.
Option 2: LightQuoter, free with a 2 percent fee#
LightQuoter covers the most ground of the three, and the free plan has no feature limits. Their home page lists satellite roofline measurement with pitch adjustment, Street View mockups with a day and night preview, per-foot pricing with install and takedown fees, 1, 2 and 3-year contracts, digital signatures, Stripe payments, a job pipeline, crew scheduling, route optimization, takedown scheduling and seasonal renewals. Unlimited quotes, jobs and users. No card at signup.
The price is the fee. The free plan takes 2 percent of every payment collected through it, on top of Stripe's 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. Cash and cheque payments recorded by hand carry no fee. Pro is $497 a year and drops the platform fee to 0 percent; nothing else changes. LightQuoter's own math says Pro pays for itself at about $25,000 collected per season. Collect $60,000 through the free plan and you paid $1,200 for "free." That is not a trick, it is their model, and it is written on their page. I break the fee down at more dollar levels on the free Christmas light software page.
The other thing to know is where the pictures come from. LightQuoter measures from satellite imagery and builds mockups on Street View. Google's Maps terms restrict storing, modifying and deriving data from that imagery. How any vendor licenses that is between them and Google, and you should ask before you build a season on it. We chose the other road: GlowBid measures and draws only on photos you own, and the Street View preview in our app is a live look at the house that is never saved or measured.
Option 3: GlowBid, rebuild once and price from the drawing#
GlowBid is the tool I built so that one canvas gets you from a photo to a signed deposit. One canvas: upload your own photo, set the scale from a known length (a 36-inch door, a 16-foot garage door, a tape measurement), draw the runs by type. Roofline, ridge line, peak, ground, tree, jump. The drawing is the measurement, and the same drawing is the bill of materials and the price. Change a run and all three change.
Every run carries a source tag and a confidence level, and a run angled away from the camera gets a foreshortening warning so you type the real length. The quote PDF says photo measurements are estimates confirmed on site, because they are. From there: rate card pricing, e-signature on the customer's phone, Stripe deposit, invoice with partial payments. Pro adds the pipeline and follow-up texts; Ultimate adds the crew side. Core is $299 a year at the founding price, $499 regular, or $69 a month. Full details on the pricing page.
The free version of that canvas is live today at glowbid.io/tools/roofline-measure, no login until you export. If you are rebuilding anyway, rebuild there first and see whether the footage feels right before you pay anyone.
Rebuilding one house: a worked example#
Say your first rebuilt house is a seasonal C9 job on a bungalow with a long front roofline. Using GlowBid's default rate card (installers set their own; these are the starter numbers a new account opens with):
| Run |
Footage |
Rate |
Amount |
| Roofline |
150 ft |
$8/ft |
$1,200 |
| Ridge line |
40 ft |
$8/ft |
$320 |
| Peaks (2) |
40 ft |
$9/ft plus the 15% peak premium |
$414 |
| Jumps (3) |
10 ft |
$4/ft |
$40 |
| Timer |
1 |
$45 |
$45 |
| Total |
|
|
$2,019 |
That clears the $1,500 default minimum job, so no top-up. The default deposit is 30 percent, $605.70, collected through Stripe when the homeowner signs. Tax is whatever you set on the rate card. Time from photo to a sent quote, once your rate card exists, is about ten minutes, most of it drawing. You can price this house in the free tool right now and read the footage; the rate card and the quote need the full product.
From watching installers move between apps:
- Rebuilding the whole library in September. Rebuild each house when the customer re-books, not before. Half of any old library never calls again.
- Re-typing prices from memory. Write the rate card down once, per foot by run type, before you touch a photo. Our per-foot pricing guide is the worksheet.
- Trusting last year's footage. The old numbers came from a tool you cannot open. Re-measure from the photo and confirm on site. A foot short on a 150-foot run is six clips and a splice you did not bring.
- Using the Street View preview as the photo. In GlowBid it cannot be, on purpose. Take your own photo, straight on, in daylight, or ask the homeowner for one.
- Forgetting takedown. A seasonal quote without a takedown line is a January argument. Put it on the rate card as its own rate or a flat fee.
- Skipping the minimum job. Small jobs eat a crew morning. Set the minimum before the first quote goes out.
Who should choose Strandr or LightQuoter#
Choose Strandr if the mockup closes your jobs and your quoting, signing and payments already live somewhere you like. It is the cheapest mockup on the market and its exports look good on a tablet at the door. Choose LightQuoter if you want scheduling, routing and takedown planning in the same app today, you are comfortable with satellite and Street View as the source, and your collected volume is low enough that 2 percent costs less than a subscription. Both are real products with real customers.
Choose GlowBid if you want the drawing, the footage and the price to be one thing, on your own photos, with the agreement and the deposit attached.
Moving from LightingElf to GlowBid this week#
- Gather what you kept. Photos, customer list, your prices. Nothing from LightingElf is needed.
- Draw one house in the free tool. Roofline measure, no login. Set the reference length, draw the runs, read the footage. The measuring guide covers choosing a reference and handling foreshortening.
- Build the rate card. Fifteen minutes if you have the numbers. Per foot by run type and product line, premiums, add-ons, minimum job, deposit, tax.
- Quote the next real call. Photo, draw, price, send, sign, deposit. That first quote is the whole test.
- Rebuild the rest as they book. One house per re-book, never a weekend of data entry.
The founding price is $299 a year for Core and it locks while your subscription stays continuous. There are 100 founding places, a 7-day trial with no card, and a 30-day money-back window. Details on the pricing page.
