Volkskracht - Gas and power,
without the middle man
Volkskracht - ‘Volk’ meaning people and ‘Kracht’ meaning power - cuts out the middle man for consumers who are buying gas and power. We designed the product to be fully transparent about price structures, current market prices, and price history - as well as give consumers advice on whether to lock up the current price for a period of time or to remain flexible. Result? Saving Dutch households hundreds of euros per year.
Expertise
Design, Engineering, Product Strategy
Platforms
Web (iOS and Android are under development)
Deliverables
Prototype, MVP (V1.0 is under development)
Want to use?
Check out volkskracht.com
Set up your utilities in a matter of minutes and cancel anytime.
The current landscape of energy suppliers is stuck in a rut. Big bureaucratic companies are ruling the market. The goal of Volkskracht is to bring a fair offering to Dutch households. Anyone can sign up and buy their gas and power utilities via an intuitive and user friendly interface.
Challenge
Volkskracht wanted to offer subscription access to their license for purchasing gas and electricity at cost directly from the energy market - making high-priced energy companies redundant.
Approach
Prior to designing and developing Volkskracht, together with the CEO, the Eli5 team validated its proposition in the market. In this case, a simple landing page and a small ad budget were sufficient. The numbers clearly showed that it needed to be built, so we headed into prototyping. Eli5’s design team, under Jelle Bot’s lead, quickly turned this idea into a validated prototype, ready to be designed and developed in full.
Insight
One of Volkskracht’s biggest features is that it enables consumers to buy their own energy for wholesale prices. Nevertheless, only a small percentage of the users were interested in this. Most people, understandably, prefer ease of use. Based on this we created packages that allow users to leave the buying of energy up to Volkskracht, and give them full control over their energy usage.
Impact
Volkskracht is the first online-only energy company. By automating almost everything the company has drastically reduced business costs like offices and staff. Giving power back to the people ;-)
Volkskracht's technology specifications
We decided to bootstrap Volkskracht to maintain low costs and remain able to throw away the application if we needed to build something else. The current product that’s live is an MVP but we’re already working on an update together with iOS and Android apps.
Frameworks we’ve used
- Vue.js for the web application interface
- Laravel for backend
Top features
“Complying to regulatory pressure has been an analogue, unclear, and cumbersome process until now. The design of this solution is all created around the user and getting them as fast and smooth as possible from regulation to policy.”
