Friday Night Pint

Pourl

Understanding that you are working for free at the moment and appreciating what you have done and are doing to make my life easier with my solar it occurred that the least I could do was buy you a cheeky one.

If you set up a route I am happy to bung you a fiver for a beer this weekend!
Who knows I might not be alone??

Capt_Rich

Seconded

admin

Very kind of you all, thank you, much appreciated, but you're helping by testing and suggesting new features and helping make Wonder Watt a better product and spread the word. 🤗

Would love to hear some thoughts on the best way to transition to a monthly sub, just to gauge users' appetite, if/when we do, we want to do this transparently and with plenty of advance time, but equally engage with you on this.

Pourl

Might there be an issue with monthly sub where some users will switch from Agile to Flux over the summer losing you income? Or are you happy with seasonal sales? ATM I am likely to stick with Agile thru the year but not sure how many others will. Maybe an annual fee might work better.

Capt_Rich

I’m likely to change from agile to flux for the the summer months, however I intend to still use WW to schedule the flux export, therefore a monthly subscription would be appropriate

nbullus

I agree that at some point you need to cover your costs and starting make a living out of this service.

Other services such as MyEo charge around £5 a month for the full service, but I've not used any others to compare how they differ. I personally would decide on a cut-off date once you feel you have a stable product and start charging for the service for those joining after the cut-off. Also people may be drawn in by offering a short free trial for users to try your service out before committing.

For those early adopters that joined before the cut-off, it would be nice to let them stay signed up without charge as a thank you for providing feedback, testing the service out across many tariffs/configurations, identifying bugs, sorting out operational issues and generally making the service fit for purpose. I work in software testing and this is a common practice we see all the time to gain valuable feedback on Beta products before going to market as a "paid for" service.

I would also add some "How to" demo videos on your YouTube channel to show people how they can get the most out of their tariffs using your service. Maybe show a typical setup for Flux, Agile and some of the other more popular tariffs.

admin

nbullus Yeah, I think free trial with a straightforward monthly sub seems the easiest to implement.

Tiered pricing for different features becomes incredibly messy.

I think a discount for users that joined before a certain date makes sense too, we'll have to think of something that makes sense in the long run.

perfrank

I like the service and will gladly pay for it.

But I dont think this should be a fixed rate. Living in DK without possibilities for Agile, Octopus and other UK specific services, which - according to this blog - take the majority of the ressources, I think it would be fair with a graduated fee. But I am not blind to the fact, that it would simplify billing. Just a thought from chilly Denmark😊

psiloc

If you're after honest opinions... I've got leased solar PV so I can't make any use of export and I use WW in probably the most basic way: the predictive off-peak charging based on solar forecast. I'm a happy user and think the product is great, but it would honestly have to be very cheap for me to continue with a paid subscription 😬

It's not at all because I have any sort of issue with the product or the service (in fact I have recommended it to a few people), it's just simple economics that it probably doesn't actually have the ability to save me much money in my personal situation.

I would personally simply manually set the battery charge level to 100% over winter, and 0% over summer, which are of course the most extreme periods for saving money. And I might simply gamble with 50% over spring and autumn. Nowhere near as elegant as WW of course, and it would be completely wrong on some days sure, but it gets me most of the way there. Even on days where this calculation was totally ineffective I don't see it wasting enough money that a monthly subscription to something makes much sense. If you see what I'm getting at.

Perhaps I'm just not actually the target audience since I would know how and why to set the charge target myself. As much as I enjoy the ease of WW, this part of the solar stuff is purely financially driven for me since I am creating the green energy for me or my neighbours no matter what.

Basically I think I agree with @perfrank that there should be tiers of some sort if possible. I understand the hesitation to complicate the service with different options though