drewkim

5 ms·

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by drewkim 5y ago
That's a great idea! We've identified a use case with solar companies for aiding in sales...this is a great additional case.
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by drewkim 5y ago
They're listed on the bottom of our home page
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by drewkim 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback! To answer your questions: - Myself and my co-founder - Credentials aren't stored in plaintext and the encryption key isn't universally available; "peeking" at the db is quite difficult - Data (I&
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by drewkim 5y ago
This is also what we've encountered so far...though it's probably safe to assume at least a few providers have looser security protocols.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Thanks for the great advice! We've created more detailed responses, so hopefully there's now a clearer picture of the output for each endpoint. We've added the more implementation-heavy recommendations (like changing the requ
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by drewkim 5y ago
You nailed it! First guarantee is that nobody is manually going in and poking around your account details since the process you've described happens entirely programmatically. Now, we could program our system to do things other than wh
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by drewkim 5y ago
Here's the guide to using sandbox mode: https://pelm.readme.io/reference/sandbox-mode
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by drewkim 5y ago
We're excited for the challenge! Arc was released after we'd already been working on this for a while so it did take us a bit by surprise. We'll compete by focusing on building an amazing team and a high quality product.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Arcadia requires their customers to sign NDAs and locks them into yearlong contracts, so we don't have an accurate picture. However, we've been told that our pricing is more competitive than theirs.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Personal use is totally okay and we'd love to here your feedback!
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by drewkim 5y ago
We do! You can call our endpoints with a "sandbox" header to get mock data. I realize this isn't outlined in our docs--we'll fix that ASAP and I'll comment here when it's done.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback; as an early stage startup with two employees, we'll often miss things here and there, so I appreciate the callout for how we can improve our docs. While we may not be established right now and have some work to
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by drewkim 5y ago
That makes sense; we'll need to think more about pricing consumer differently than enterprise because we've heard that our pricing is actually quite low for enterprise. Appreciate the perspective!
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by drewkim 5y ago
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 documentat
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by drewkim 5y ago
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!
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by drewkim 5y ago
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.
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by drewkim 5y ago
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.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Ah, nice! Getting all of Exelon for the cost of one would be quite awesome. We'll dig into it.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Gotcha. Makes sense to keep things simple. You're not the first person to suggest a blog for marketing purposes...seems like something we should invest in!
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by drewkim 5y ago
Would love to hear about your experience when you do so!
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by drewkim 5y ago
Ah, it's the burger menu with broken links! It shouldn't show up unless the browser window is a certain width, but we'll look into scrapping it completely.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Pelm is free up to 100 API calls and 10 active end users per month! I believe this should be enough to cover the home use case.
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by drewkim 5y ago
I did not; thanks for the heads up!
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by drewkim 5y ago
Correct, we'll have a ComEd integration soon
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by drewkim 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback—we'll have a list of utilities we support up shortly. Which links in particular are broken/where did you see that tagline? I thought we combed through pretty thoroughly but maybe not.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Great callout. Passwords are encrypted using a 256-bit AES cipher and are never persisted or shown to developers in plaintext. We currently support PG&E and SCE with a ComEd integration landing within the week.
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by drewkim 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We had optimism that people would poke around the website more, but I guess we shouldn't assume that.
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Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities(pelm.com)
101 points by drewkim 5y ago|88 comments