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Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

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Re: Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

#31

Post by drewkim »

samwillis wrote: post #29
drewkim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I meant plaintext passwords are never persisted in a db anywhere. The only time passwords are decrypted are when they are used to programmatically log in, so they're never stored anywhere except in memory.

Out of interest what’s the architecture you have gone with for key rotation and storage, and where the encrypted passwords are stored. (Understand that as an very early stage startup you probably haven’t optimised all this yet) I know some other services that have had to go this route have used quite elaborate systems to ensure separation between keys, passwords and user details in the event of a hack.

We use a secret manager on our cloud platform for key storage, manually rotate keys (for now), and store encrypted passwords on a separate db.

Re: Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

#32

Post by drewkim »

worldmerge wrote: post #28

This product seems really cool! If I can request a utility, could you support National Grid https://www.nationalgridus.com ?

It's definitely on our roadmap...when we get to it largely depends on the needs of our early customers but know that we have it in mind!

Re: Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

#33

Post by samwillis »

drewkim wrote: post #31
samwillis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest what’s the architecture you have gone with for key rotation and storage, and where the encrypted passwords are stored. (Understand that as an very early stage startup you probably haven’t optimised all this yet) I know some other services that have had to go this route have used quite elaborate systems to ensure separation between keys, passwords and user details in the event of a hack.

We use a secret manager on our cloud platform for key storage, manually rotate keys (for now), and store encrypted passwords on a separate db.

Perfect. Thanks.

Re: Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

#35

Post by drewkim »

ok_dad wrote: post #34

How is this differentiated from UtilityAPI ( https://utilityapi.com/ ) or other similar products?

UtilityAPI and other products are built by energy companies, not tech companies. We've talked to developers who've used these platforms and they consistently mention an extremely poor developer experience; lack of clear documentation, difficulty in building integrations quickly, little to no support, etc. One example: we talked to a paying customer of UtilityAPI who asked for a specific feature, and UtilityAPI asked him to pay for the development costs of it.

We are software engineers by trade and know how to build a really good developer experience. We're focusing on ease-of-use from the start and will build a stellar engineering team that in turn will help us develop a higher quality product.

Re: Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

#37

Post by jdprgm »

Ha, I spent a few years around 2015 building exactly this for the first 50 or so largest US utilities on what eventually became https://www.arcadia.com/arc. Curious how you plan to compete. Good luck with the insane number of account edge cases that start popping up at scale and extremely finicky utility sites for scraping, it gets old fast.

Re: Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

#38

Post by melony »

drewkim wrote: post #35
ok_dad wrote: post #34

How is this differentiated from UtilityAPI ( https://utilityapi.com/ ) or other similar products?

UtilityAPI and other products are built by energy companies, not tech companies. We've talked to developers who've used these platforms and they consistently mention an extremely poor developer experience; lack of clear documentation, difficulty in building integrations quickly, little to no support, etc. One example: we talked to a paying customer of UtilityAPI who asked for a specific feature, and UtilityAPI asked…

The pricing feels really steep. For a consumer app where the API is called twice a day, it is almost 7 dollars per month alone. This is just for one user. At this price point it means this is inaccessible for anything other than enterprise apps.

Re: Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

#39

Post by melony »

jdprgm wrote: post #37

Ha, I spent a few years around 2015 building exactly this for the first 50 or so largest US utilities on what eventually became https://www.arcadia.com/arc . Curious how you plan to compete. Good luck with the insane number of account edge cases that start popping up at scale and extremely finicky utility sites for scraping, it gets old fast.

What's the pricing for arc?

Re: Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities

#40

Post by melony »

drewkim wrote: post #32
worldmerge wrote: post #28

This product seems really cool! If I can request a utility, could you support National Grid https://www.nationalgridus.com ?

It's definitely on our roadmap...when we get to it largely depends on the needs of our early customers but know that we have it in mind!

Do you have a developer sandbox with some example data? It's not feasible for the developer to create accounts with different providers if some are across the country.
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