magthor

I was lucky enough to attend classes by Susan Eggers and Hank Levy in UW's professional master's program back in 2002. Not only amazing researchers but also great teachers.

I just signed up for the $29/mo plan. I appreciate that I immediately received the June and July newsletters. In the July one, there is a good idea that is very relevant to my wife's business (she owns a chain of hair salons). Thanks for making this, it's really cool!

Congrats, Arango! We recently ported a large rethinkdb app to arango and it has been a joy to use. AQL is awesome.

In my view Florida would be better served by deregulating their electricity markets (as 16 other states/territories have done) and allow 3rd party suppliers to compete for business. Then consumers who want solar (or other forms of green power) can buy it directly without having to put panels on their roof that will obsolete in a few years.

Hi HN--remember us? We were one of the finalists in the ApplyHN runoff back in April, a couple weeks after we first came up with the idea for Utiliz. Now we're live (launched last week) and have been busy signing up our first wave of customers. The consumer-facing site you see is backed by our internal admin site, a workflow/mechanical turk/queue management system that help us manage our suppliers, plans, customers and enrollments. We're in a boring industry but using exciting tech: the sites are written in Go and backed by RethinkDB. We use the amazing Caddy server for automatic TLS & reverse proxy, Chargebee & Stripe for subscription management, LiveAgent for chat/help desk and its integration with Twilio for our call center. Our architecture is the opposite of microservices, an approach I like to call BAB ("big ass binary") - everything including code for both sites, all css, js, images etc are all bundled into our Go binary, making deployments and rollbacks a breeze. Everything runs on Vultr. We're currently saving our customers between 15-30% on their electricity generation depending on their location and usage. Are you an HNer in Connecticut or New York who pays more than $100/mo for electricity? We can save you money. Use code HACKERNEWS to save 15% on your first year subscription through 9/30.

Lately I've just been throwing everything behind Caddy (caddyserver.com) in reverse proxy mode. This is all you need in your Caddyfile to get automatic TLS. It's genius.

<hostname> { tls <your email> proxy / localhost:<port> }

Chatmasta, you are 100% correct. There may be times where the best rate we can find is publicly available but the service aspect will retain customers in this case, especially as we are charging a reasonable flat fee. However as we are a broker we have access to private rates and as our book grows so will our ability to negotiate discounts thus making us more sticky. A core part of the beta is a 'how much did I save' feature which will make cancelling a tough choice. Thanks for your comments!

Hi chatmasta, Kevin from Utiliz here. How did your business do? Splitting savings is always a hard pricing model to sell. Our unique angle is that we don't just switch customers to the best plan once, we remain their agent, track the market daily and switch them whenever a new opportunity comes up. We do that in return for a low, transparent, annual fee from our customers instead of taking a hidden spread on the rate. In deregulated states one can almost always find short term 3-6 month rates lower than the incumbent's rate, often as much as 20-30% cheaper, so our service can pay for itself in as little as one month. Brokers who can bring large aggregated loads can negotiate better than retail rates, even with their supplier commission. Because we will be a zero-commission broker for the suppliers (we're paid by our own customers), as we scale we'll be able to negotiate even lower rates for our customers. Not sure how long ago you were looking at this space but many suppliers now have some mechanism to help with automation of bulk switching and for those that don't we are building the tech.