Both work in Indiana. The right answer depends on how long your evenings are dark, and whether you want lighting outside the holidays at all.
The question comes up on nearly every Indiana site visit. Should this be a seasonal install, or a permanent system?
Start with what each one actually is. Seasonal holiday lighting is a service. We supply commercial-grade LED strands, install them for the season, service them if something fails, then remove and store them. Every year is a fresh install, and every year you can change the design.
Permanent lighting is a fixed installation. A slim aluminum channel is mounted once along the roofline, with individually addressable RGB LEDs inside it, controlled from a phone app. It stays up year-round. The channel is designed to read as trim during the day rather than as lighting.
In Indiana the case for permanent systems is stronger than people assume, and the reason is daylight rather than snow. Indiana evenings are dark early from October through March. That is roughly six months where exterior lighting is genuinely useful, not just festive. A permanent system in warm white does everyday architectural lighting for that entire stretch, then becomes holiday color when you want it, then becomes team colors or a single accent for an event, all without another install.
Weather does factor in, but less dramatically than expected. The channels are weather-rated for the freeze-thaw cycling that defines an Indiana winter, which is the actual stress case here, more so than raw cold. Central and southern Indiana properties run a permanent system essentially uninterrupted year-round. Northern Indiana properties in the lake-effect snowbelt may occasionally have a run partially obscured during a heavy snow event, which clears on its own.
Seasonal lighting still makes better sense in plenty of cases. If you want a substantially different look each year, if the property includes heavy tree and landscape work that a roofline channel cannot address, if you are in a rental or planning to move, or if you simply want holiday lighting and nothing else, the seasonal service is the correct product. There is no penalty for choosing it.
The most common mistake is choosing on price alone in either direction. A permanent system is a larger one-time investment against no annual install cost. A seasonal program is a smaller recurring cost with full design flexibility. Neither is universally cheaper over any given horizon, and the honest answer depends on how many years you intend to keep doing it.
What we would actually recommend: think first about whether you want exterior lighting in February and September, not just December. If the answer is yes, look seriously at permanent. If the answer is no, the seasonal program is the better fit, and we will say so.