Dear WW team, I guess I would be sensitive too to these comments, but they are not made in malice they are purely based in maths. I would hope these comments could really be helpful to you as you develop your business model.
As someone who helped setup the first internet banking services over 20 years ago and still a practicing engineer working on decarbonising the hard-to-decarbonise sectors, I do not think my opinions fall into the class of "whiney people who have no idea".
Rather consider the merit of my argument: there is a minimum size of solar array and/or battery below which it simply does not pay to use your service at the current price. That, I am afraid, is a cold, hard fact.
So either you find a way to make it cheaper for people like me, or you lose our business. That you run this forum means you do care about and consider the user community, but turning a blind eye to negative comments is how you will lose money. Face them head-on and you could find a way to keep these customers.
Consider for example that you can actually know our array sizes and charge by size. Yes this may mean that you don't break-even of every client in terms of the cost of your time, hosting or whatever, but if you separate your fixed from variable costs, you should know the "marginal cost" or each additional client and that will tell you that sometimes it is worth having clients who pay "less than cost", as it is better to have them than to not have them, as your fixed costs are not reduced if you lose them. It is a bit like how Easyjet and other will flog seats for £9.99, it is better than having an empty seat.
You guys do are doing a wonderful thing, and I think if you can scale the way I imagine, to millions of clients, then your £2 may be fine, as you should be able to get cheaper API-call fees at high volume, or you can get to the point where you have enough clients that you no longer need to ask for solar data for every single location, as there may be clients who share a location (or close enough). Or people could pay a lower rate for a less accurate forecast, just using the nearest spot on a grid you plot across the country for the forecasts.
Anyway, you know better than me how you could be imaginative on costs. If you do not imagine growth, that is fine too, just accept you will lose small users like me, that may be fine, I think you could have a decent business as anyone with a decent sized setup would be mad not to use a system like yours.
But please do not take our comments on this forum as mean-spirited, in fact I really really want you to thrive, this sort of joined up thinking is what the world needs as we will not invest in our grids at the pace needed.
Sincerely,
Jarrod
