How Ostrom built a powerful, all-in-one home energy management app using Enode

German energy challenger Ostrom was founded in January 2021 with the aim of upending Germany’s energy market. Providing innovative and customer-centric solutions was a key driving force for them, as they felt the market was lacking more flexible, easy-to-use, and digital-first alternatives.

Since then, they’ve been leading a change in the German market, being one of the first companies to offer dynamic pricing in the market. Their mission is to provide green electricity for all. And they’re leveraging tech to “keep things lean and simple” – so they can focus on addressing customers’ needs, while still offering fair prices.

To accelerate this mission and help consumers make the most of their dynamic pricing offering, Ostrom wanted to build a solution to help their users more easily track and flexibly manage energy consumption. That’s where Enode came in.

Challenge: making the most out of energy devices

With the rise of smart homes, electrification and increased awareness and interest in optimizing energy consumption, consumer energy devices have shot up in popularity. It’s no longer rare to see EVs, solar panels, HVACs and home batteries – or a combination of all – being used as part of a balanced household energy ecosystem.

But visualizing and managing the energy flow between multiple devices, as well as the grid is no simple feat. These systems rarely speak to each other, so what often happens is that you need to control each device through their own dedicated app. That’s far from the easy digital experience Ostrom wanted to offer.

Solution: a holistic approach to home energy management

To solve this, Ostrom turned to Enode. Enode offers an API integration that helps users connect and control energy devices across five categories (EVs, home chargers, HVACs, solar inverters, home batteries), covering a broad range of brands and models. With this integration, Ostrom customers can now seamlessly control all their energy devices and energy consumption through a single interface – the Ostrom app.

This lets Ostrom customers get a more detailed, holistic overview of their energy consumption and production – and they can all do it easily in the same place. Instead of juggling multiple apps to optimize energy usage for each device individually, they can optimize usage across all their different assets in the same place.

And of course, because Ostrom is their energy provider, customers can let Ostrom do the heavy lifting and optimize energy consumption on their behalf. Letting Ostrom do the job of helping them save more on the dynamic tariffs.

Going forward, Ostrom will be able to aggregate all their consumers’ devices into an Ostrom Virtual Power Plant (VPP) and shift when energy is consumed to better periods for the grid... and for their customers’ wallets.

Result: happy customers, increasingly better user experiences and a smart meter adoption wave

A quick look at Ostrom’s high Trustpilot score paints a clear picture: Ostrom customers love the service, and aren’t likely to leave any time soon. In fact, customers that have smart devices connected are even less likely to leave – with churn for that segment being 50% lower than average.

Ostrom customers are happy because they get a great service, easy and intuitive digital experiences, and a ton of helpful tools that let them better understand and control their energy consumption – and ultimately save a lot on their energy bills. Their dynamic pricing offering has created a shift in the market, opening the gates for a smart meter adoption wave in Germany.

“The Enode partnership helped us stick to our lean and simple approach, because it lets us tap into five different types of energy devices through a single integration.” said Marcus Vieira, CTO at Ostrom. “Their coverage, knowledge and ease-of-use was unparalleled.”

And talking about lean and simple – their integration with Enode was built and launched within a quarter.

Because the Ostrom team doesn’t have to spend any time building or maintaining the connections to a bunch of different devices, and their multiple makes and models, their team can focus on what really matters to them. That is, finding innovative solutions, strengthening their customer propositions and providing top-notch user experiences.