WonderWatt - How do they make Money? - Battery Discharge Octopus Agile

@Wonder Watt

I am just trying to search for ways to automate my Solar and Batteries to make use of Octopus Agile and during my search I have seen the easy way is to just sign up for your service.

No where that I can find is anything on how you will (rightly) make a living from such a service.

Any chance of letting me know what you are thinking about?

Anyone else know the answer?

The other option seems to be Home Assistant and learning how to set that up....

Any other easy options? Is GivEnergy going to to do anything with Octopus?

Answers on a postcard - many thanks in advance..

I have no idea how they make money at Wonderwatt. But they have a good product which is easy to use and setup. I presume they will have to setup some sort of subscription service.

I personally went through the Trauma of setting up HA on my home pc, which took me about 3 attempts. Once you do that predbat is a lot easier.

But wonderwatt was always my backup plan.

Hook unfortunately the fact that Wonderwatt only support single inverters meant I couldn't use them (two Gen 1 hybrids) so I went down the HA route, found the speaktothegeek videos, wrote and painfully debugged my own givtcp automations, then found predbat.
Of course once started on the home automation route I've been done more, added more power monitors such as my ASHP and old FIT array, giving me more useful information that I never had before.

Now that Wonderwatt supports Agile, I would say for most people, as long as they are OK with it being a cloud service and don't want to get into home automation, its a great solution and very easy to setup and use.

Would be fair that they setup a subscription service - or get enough customers that GivEnergy buy them out as a value-add service.

Yeah, we currently don't make money.

But in exchange, at this stage, we want to listen to customer feedback and build an easy-to-use cloud-based alternative to what otherwise would need to involve a lot of HA stuff. And cool as that is, it is not for everyone.

In the meantime, spreading the word and getting more people's feedback would be appreciated, thank you!

We do iterate on features and fixes pretty frequently, we have a solid CI/CD pipeline set up.

Wonder Watt Yep fully understand that you don't make any money and I am interested in how you plan to..

🙂

OK I get it if you don't want to say but I will give you a chance. Would you hint at your plans?

M_J We're exploring multiple options, of which a monthly sub might be the simplest.

If we do, it will be under £5/month.

Does that help? 😉

Wonder Watt
Discounted for beta testers???😂🤣😂

Wonder Watt Thank you yes it does (a bit) I am trying to wade through the various Octopus Solar and Battery Tariffs doing crap man Maths to see how best to use what I have...

At the Moment I am Octopus "Go EV" and will use Octopus "Outgoing Fixed Lite" as a stop gap until I work out if there is a better option. Alas my EV Charger and Car is not "Intelligent Octopus Go" compliant.

The man Maths is blowing my mind at the moment and if I can use Wonder Watt to help me achieve greater savings above and beyond the £5 subscription then it is a no brainer.

I certainly want you to make a living and if I can do that and gain myself a bit, then great Win Win for us both...

M_J man Maths? I hope that's not something like man flu!? Because that would be serious! 😜

Wonder Watt I have set up a separate thread on the security risks of handing control to such as folk as yourself and I was wondering if you have had a PenTest undertaken on your set up? Or an outside security test /audit.

Your short paragraph on data security on your web site could mean a variety of things...

Also happy for you to comment on worse case risks on the other thread...

I tried to get HA going on a Raspberry Pi but after a couple of days, gave up. The Pi was far too slow.

When I moved to Agile I had a look at Predbat and also Wonderwatt.
I started beta testing with Wonderwatt because it is real easy to use and no hardware to setup.

Predbat looks interesting but I have to bear in mind that whatever I setup has to be usable by others in the house.

My Energy Optimiser (MyEO) might also be worth a look. Very similar functionality to Wonder Watt, as I understand it, though I haven't tried WW yet. Works pretty well for me as a "more or less fit and forget" solution, developer is active on issues that come up, and it currently has a £5/mo subscription model after a 10 day trial. It certainly puts more emphasis on data security, but I don't what the difference is in practice.

It's doing the job for me at least until I start tinkering with PredBat...

It certainly puts more emphasis on data security

Josephiah It’s interesting you mention that. We have the same levels of encryption in place when it comes to data security, and there’s a section in our FAQ on it.

Interestingly MyEO has rolled its own authentication mechanism, which we’ve deliberately not done, as that does open up another vector of attack.

Which is why we’ve gone with a well-established Identity Provider with Google auth logins - no point reinventing the wheel when there are good and proven secure solutions out there.

Wonder Watt yep, could well be entirely a matter of presentation and my impressions, rather than anything more substantial.

I have tried both Wonderwat & MyEo

• MyEo. It was probably just my failure to understand, but MyEo left my system in in stange configurations on a number of occasions.
• WonderWatt seems much simpler to use, and I understand what It & I are doing. So far Wonderwatt has worked as expected every time.

So my vote is for WonderWatt

Thanks for the responses and alternatives, for those using Wonder Watt I am guessing you think you easily make more than the possible £5 monthly charge for the service?

Anyone done any math on what it returns to you and happy to share here?

M_J Just another thing to throw in, which may be a bit harder to quantify in terms of hard savings is effectively a time saving in management/admin and less babysitting.

I am using MyEO which is regularly updated and on Agile I saved £300 last month compared to the Flex tariff. I would happily pay more than £5/month.

downfield Really don't tell them that PIKE...

😉

But thanks for the info...

Wonder Watt announced a new subscription charge today https://www.wonderwatt.com/wonderwatt-introducing-our-subscription-model/

TLDR existing users will be charged £5.33/pcm on a quarterly basis

With current Flux rates I can only make around £64 year on peak time export, so it probably doesn’t make sense for me to continue. If I get a larger system, or if I start using Agile, I’ll look at it again. Thanks for the service over the last year or so Wonder Watt and best of luck.

Time to try Octopus R&D scheduler or HomeAssistant.
HA was cheap for me as my son had a Pi he was not using

pwdst

Oh dear what a shame, I was hoping they would continue with the current functions for free and add a fee paying solution with extras for those that want it. £5.33 a month = £63.96 a year. This would be on top of any energy bill. The GE app and Cloud can do these things for free, just a bit of manual work.

So not sure I will continue going forward (I will have a think).
what a shame as I have recommended WW to loads of people and also given them loads of praise. I tried MyEO (the free period) and that was very buggy and did not do what I wanted it to, so was not willing to pay for that either.

Avenir I guess I could use it for 3 months in the summer. Shame that monthly billing isn't an option.

It’s still quite cheap really. Doesn’t look like it’s being priced to make money.

They must have been swallowing the cloud costs for a while. If I didn’t use predbat I’d use it.

I have been manually managing my Agile rates and apart from if I was on holiday I don't think it would cover the cost with any slight benefit of wonder watt.

YMMV but the cost benefits don't stack up for me.

Doing a bit of man maths, as from October the average house will consume £1717 of energy, so as a percentage of that, Wonderwatt will charge 3.75%. If you take it that around only half that bill will be electric, then that equates to 7.5%. A fair chunk!
Of course every household is different and many on here are big users of lecky, but also many on here are solar and battery users, so their very electric bill are reduced anyway, making Wonderwatt's percentage even greater, especially since there are other methods of controlling your system, like HA, Inverter app, Octopus r&d and the GE portal.
I know, I know, there's the convenience of the Wonderwatt system, but there's really only one thing to consider. Does the annual cost outweigh the the savings made from other methods that are free(ish), and is the saving actually worthwhile?

TimHutchings there's the convenience of the Wonderwatt system,

That for some will be well worth it, but for me the cost just won't be recovered.

Good luck to them as I admire folk setting up new business.

@Wonder Watt new charges will be around 5p per day if you take it across a year. As an IOG customer I sell/export at a fixed 15p p/kWh. I buy/charge at 7p p/kWh.
Charge from 23:30 to 01:30 (say 10kW so -70p),
Sell 10kW between 01:30 and 03:30 (so +£1.50)
Charge 10kW by 05:30 (-70p)
.... miraculously leaving a 10p p/d profit... half for me, half for WW. No idea where they got their pricing model from :-)
On a serious note:
if you are an IOG customer there is arguably no better automated solution and the WW cost is well worth it IMO
if you are IOG but don't use Smart Charging then R&D Labs is a tolerable, albeit sometimes flakey free alternative

@Wonder Watt, I was hoping there was going to be a two tier system as they introduce more settings or improve the options etc. I am happy with how it works today and would be happy to pay say £3 a month, if you need more settings or want to increase your automation then £5.33 would be good.

JayC68 Unless I'm reading it wrong, £5.33 per month is £63.96 a year divided by 365 equals 17.5p per day, not 5p. 🤔

TimHutchings you are embarressingly correct and worse still the 'edit window' for my post has past.
The 17.5p per day that you accurately call out goes to emphasise the point you made earlier - with your accurate man maths - on the cost/benefit. I agree with you.
Only those that regularly (five plus a week) benefit from daytime IOG slots could get into profit IF they always sell what they put into the battery during those. And unless you are prepared to get into the world of current clamps with Home Assistant WW IOG is really the only seamless way to go at present.
Homebridge will no doubt improve for those that won't/can't yaml on Home Assistant but that will only take a small percentage of the WW market. If WW have a window of opportunity globally until Giv/Gro and Octopus catch up... and the latter is clearly not far off the first release looking at Schedules on their R&D platform.

BTW for a one off lifetime payment of £10 if I remember correctly you can get an android app that will schedule for you especially if you just need the same time slots.

The downside is it is Android only and the android device has to stay at the house / WiFi network when you want the schedule to run.

An old phone or tablet is suggested.

I won't link here but searching will find it.

There are other options, but WW is slick and easier to use I guess.

JayC68 if you are an IOG customer there is arguably no better automated solution and the WW cost is well worth it IMO

Unless you have a gen-1, the inverter has multiple charge/discharge slots, so don't need WW to anything ?
(Presumably you have an AIO if you can charge/discharge at 5kW.)

Though the ability to adjust charge/discharge power is missing.

The new Beta scheduler in the portal will likely cover a fair few use cases for multi charge slots.

hoggy Where is that, on the GE portal?

CW yes, (portal > edit dashboard > smart tariffs beta (at the bottom))

DD you are correct on the AIO and indeed the 'need'... I simply prefer the WW GUI; it is cleaner and more intuitive to use: the read/writes in particular are far less fussy and the why Giv removed think scrolling up and down the page is preferable I'll never know.
WW have spoilt us all really: we've got used to it being free and enjoyed the offering, tolerated the hiccups and are now grimacing at a price of a decent meal out... and I include myself in that statement.

hoggy great find. Thank you.

hoggy Have you tried using this yet? I took a look and it seems to miss out after 16:00 today and 05:00 tomorrow? BTW I'm on flux so the cheap rate is between 02:00 - 05:00, so just wondering if this works with this tariff

CW no I havnt, I was on Intelligent Flux until today now moving back to Intelligent GO for winter so no need for this.

JayC68 thank you for your support. Without users’ feedback we wouldn’t be where we are.

It’s been tricky to make this decision. But unless we can monetise the service from B2B (which we are still looking at too), it’s currently a loss leader. This isn’t going to make us rich. And it doesn’t need to be.

And for the price of a pint per month, we can keep adding features and supporting our user base. And that’s what we want to keep doing.

hoggy The new Beta scheduler in the portal

Ah so that's why the "normal" smart tariffs card is broken.

Are these people EVER going to learn about working on live production systems? Doesn't seem like it.....

Wonder Watt

Thank you for the reply and your thoughts. I am still undecided. I would love it if you charged say £3 for those using the current basic service and have been with WW for sometime. Charge more if customers wanted the new things they suggest and your planed new roll outs etc. A two tier system would in my opinion be a better option.

Would your business decision still make sense if 30 or 50% of people left when you brought in charging?
Would you still attract new customers.
Customers are very understanding when it’s free, when they are paying for a service they expect much much more, especially when the first thing goes wrong or an outage etc.

Please don’t do £5.33, make it a whole number £5, then decide when you increase the price in the future to increase by say 50p or £1

Daveb01 Please don’t do £5.33, make it a whole number £5

I believe that is because they are charging quarterly @ £15.99/quarter. The price for new users will also be £6/pcm or £18/quarter.
The reason for charging quarterly is to reduce transaction costs per their blog post.

Avenir If it's consecutive months, the 3-month sub should work for you. It's not necessarily tied to yearly quarters. So you could do Jun/Jul/Aug for example.

4 x £18 = £72per year, which is roughly the same money as a HA green assuming you buy a new green every year not every 3 years.

Feels a bit much tbh 30/year with an uplift for advanced features to somewhere around £50 to £75 seems a lot more likely to retain user mass.

kram advanced features

Thanks for your thoughts. It's difficult to segment into what constitutes advanced features or not. Also, it tends to complicate the code base and UI with permission-based checks as to what is or is not available based on subscription.

We'd rather keep building and adding value without creating multiple tiers of functionality.

Wonder Watt

Absolutely your call, having been there myself I was just highlighting that the price point you’ve chosen seems thst it has a reasonable chance of discouraging users to stay.

Genuine point, have you considered a further discount for a year in advance?

kram Genuine point, have you considered a further discount for a year in advance?

Yeah that’s an excellent point, and something that we may well introduce. Thanks!

Wonder Watt Post updated here with discounted annual subscription details.

https://www.wonderwatt.com/wonderwatt-introducing-our-subscription-model/

Strange. My Wonderwatt trial subscription has now expired (and it didn't try charging my battery yesterday, AFAICT) but today it's trying to charge the battery again?

Not showing the in the wonderwatt log, though. Confused!

rjp Thanks, we'll take a look, schedules should be paused. What's your WattID pls?

Update: OK - identified issue, specific Agile end scenario didn't take into account the Pause Automations flag. Fix shortly, apologies!

rjp Shouldn't be happening anymore now on v0.5.822. Thanks!

4 hour problem solving service!
That’s how WW make (or should make) money!

A plus and a gold star.

Wonder Watt
Oops.
Happened again last night on 0.5.826
ID: beautiful-rule
I'll revoke the API token which should hopefully solve it.

rjp Thanks again, fix on the way.