Smart charge your EV using real dynamic prices

An end-to-end B2B2C product case study solving dynamic EV charging adoption: featuring market research, regulatory data analysis, prioritized roadmap trade-offs, and an interactive prototype.

First marketComEd / Illinois, USA
DeliverablesBrief · Personas · Interviews · Roadmap · Click-dummy

Flexy's utility-facing case study: what it does for your customers, your program, and your rollout.

Introduction to Flexy case study
Prototype

A full coded phone-frame prototype covering the entire MVP flow: discovering Flexy through a ComEd email, installing it, connecting a ComEd account, an intro carousel, connecting an EV (brand selection → manufacturer login → permissions, matching how Smartcar-style integrations actually work), setting charging preferences, and the live Price & Cost and Smart Charging dashboards.

This is a full interactive click-dummy. Open it full-screen for the real experience on your phone.

Prototype

Flexy for Utilities - your team's operator dashboard, tracking enrollment, aggregated flexible capacity, dispatch reliability, consumer savings, and cost-avoided reporting.

This is the operator dashboard your team would use. Open it full-screen for the real experience on your phone.

The short version
Flexy shows what electricity costs right now and automatically shifts EV charging into the cheapest hours.
Flexy is a white-label layer you hand to your customers: it turns your dynamic or Time-of-Use rate into something they actually act on, showing them live prices and shifting their EV charging into your cheapest, lowest-strain hours automatically.
Problem & positioning

Market signal

  • US residential electricity prices are up nearly 40% since 2021, the fastest period of price growth on record (Fortune, May 2026).
  • Bill shock is real and widespread: 68% of Americans say their household finances are strained by home energy costs, and 22% admit they don't even know how their electricity bill is calculated (Consumer Reports, Nov. 2025; Arbor survey, 2025).
  • ~70-73% of US residential meters are already smart, but that data rarely turns into action.
  • ComEd runs an hourly Real-Time Pricing program today and is finalizing a Time-of-Use rate for 2026, after a pilot that cut peak demand 6.5-9.7% each summer.
  • Consumer anxiety around TOU is documented: 93% of energy bill payers are loss-averse, meaning they weigh the risk of a higher bill more heavily than the promise of savings - a real psychological barrier to TOU adoption (Nicolson et al., Energy Research & Social Science).

Positioning

Flexy is not a utility and doesn't replace yours. It's a companion app your utility can offer alongside your existing account: it shows what electricity costs right now, in plain terms, and shifts your EV charging into the cheapest hours automatically. You keep your existing utility account and rate plan - Flexy just makes the dynamic-pricing part usable day to day.

Market signal

  • ComEd is finalizing a mandatory residential Time-of-Use rate for 2026, after a voluntary Hourly Pricing pilot that cut peak demand 6.5-9.7% each summer - but enrollment on that existing voluntary rate sits at ~38,591 customers, a small fraction of the eligible base.
  • SEPA's 2023 Utility Transformation Profile, surveying 100+ utility members representing over half of US customer accounts, found 71% already offer a time-of-day rate and 19% offer real-time pricing (SEPA, 2023).
  • The gap between offering a dynamic rate and customers actually engaging with it is an adoption barrier. 93% of energy bill payers are loss-averse, weighing the risk of a higher bill more heavily than the promise of savings (Nicolson et al., Energy Research & Social Science).

Positioning

Flexy isn't a utility and doesn't compete with yours. It's a white-label plug-in layer you hand to your own customers (B2B2C), the same model Optiwatt and WeaveGrid already run with US utilities. ComEd/Illinois is Flexy's first pilot market - the closest US equivalent to Octopus Agile in the UK or Tibber in the Nordics: a dynamic tariff with real potential to benefit enrolled customers, if they have a way to act on it. Flexy is built to be handed to any utility running a comparable dynamic or TOU rate, not only ComEd.

TAM / SAM / SOM - sized to the pilot

Sized tightly to the ComEd pilot rather than a speculative national number, using ComEd's and the Illinois Commerce Commission's own filings where possible.

TAM
3.3M

ComEd residential customers in Northern Illinois - the full addressable base if Flexy were offered to every ComEd household.1

SAM
~38.6K+

Residential customers already on ComEd's Hourly (Real-Time) Pricing program as of 2023 - the segment already living with a dynamic tariff, before the mandatory 2026 Time-of-Use rollout expands this pool.2

SOM
~1%

Of ComEd residential customers currently on a dynamic rate - roughly the realistic early-adopter slice for a first-year pilot cohort within that program.3

  1. ComEd System Facts Sheet: "3.8 million customers in Northern Illinois, 3.3 million residential, 500,000 business and government." Source (ComEd, PDF) - primary source, independently fetched and confirmed.
  2. "Commonwealth Edison Company's Hourly Pricing 2023 Annual Report," filed with the Illinois Commerce Commission, Docket P2015-0602, reports 38,591 Hourly Pricing participants in 2023. Source (ICC docket filing, PDF) - a primary regulatory filing; figure sourced via search summary of the filing rather than independently re-extracted from the PDF text, flagged here for transparency. ICC Docket 24-0378 separately confirms ComEd is required to launch a mandatory residential Time-of-Use rate in 2026, which will substantially expand this SAM.
  3. ~1% figure per testimony referenced in ICC hourly-pricing proceedings, describing enrollment as a small fraction of the eligible residential base - used here as a conservative, sourced starting point for pilot-year adoption, not a Flexy-specific projection.

TAM / SAM / SOM - sized to Flexy's actual customer

Flexy's paying customer in this model is the utility, not the household - so this is sized by utility count, not resident count, using EIA and SEPA data.

TAM
~3,000

US electric utilities nationwide - the full population Flexy's white-label model could in principle serve.1

SAM
~168

US investor-owned utilities, serving ~72% of US electricity customers - large enough to run a program like ComEd's, and the closest fit to Flexy's B2B2C model.1

SOM
1-3

Pilot utility partnerships targeted in year one, following the ComEd model, before expanding to additional dynamic-rate utilities.3

  1. EIA, "Investor-owned utilities served 72% of U.S. electricity customers in 2017": ~3,000 total US electric utilities, of which 168 are investor-owned. Source (EIA, Today in Energy) - primary source, independently fetched and confirmed. Figure is from 2017, the most recent EIA breakdown found; utility count is stable over time and unlikely to have shifted materially.
  2. Inference: SEPA's 2023 Utility Transformation Profile found 71% of its ~100+ surveyed utility members already offer a time-of-day rate and 19% offer real-time pricing (SEPA, 2023). Applied here only to size the SAM as "utilities large enough to plausibly run this kind of program," not as a claim that 71% of all 168 IOUs specifically have a live dynamic rate today - the survey sample and the IOU population overlap but aren't identical.
  3. Assumption: 1-3 partnerships is a conservative, sourced-nowhere starting estimate for a first-year enterprise sales motion in this space, comparable in scale to how a young entrant like Optiwatt or WeaveGrid would realistically ramp utility partnerships, not a projection tied to a specific pipeline.

Competitive landscape

CompanyModelGap Flexy targets
Tibber (EU)Retail energy supplier + appIs the utility, not a plug-in; Flexy can't and doesn't try to be a supplier
Octopus / Kraken (UK)Retail supplier, auto-scheduled EV chargingSame as above; supplier-owned, not partner-distributed
Ohme (UK)Hardware + app, cross-supplierEV charging only, no price/consumption layer
Jedlix (NL)B2B2C, partners with automakers/utilitiesClosest business-model match, but EV charging only
Optiwatt (US)Utility white-label, EV + HVAC schedulingClosest direct US competitor; no combined price + consumption view
WeaveGrid (US)Utility-partnered managed EV chargingVery close to Flexy's model; EV-focused only
Emporia (US)Hardware + app, consumption + schedulingRequires buying hardware; not utility-distributed
Span / Sense (US)Premium smart panel hardwareSense is pivoting to utility-licensed software, validating Flexy's model

No single US player currently combines live dynamic-price visibility, real-time consumption, and hardware-agnostic EV charging in one utility-distributed layer. That combination is Flexy's bet.

No single US vendor currently combines live dynamic-price visibility, real-time consumption, and hardware-agnostic EV charging in one white-label layer - Optiwatt and WeaveGrid are the closest peer set, and both are EV-only. That gap is Flexy's pitch to you.

The household journey

The journey your customers get

1. Understand what you're paying

Price & Cost view: yesterday / today / tomorrow / monthly / annual

2. Understand your usage

Real-time consumption view (standard residential load profile for MVP)

3. Optimize day-to-day

Smart EV charging against the live ComEd tariff

Research
Marcus Webb
42, Naperville IL · The Accidental Peak Charger
"I plug in when I get home. I don't have time to think about electricity prices."
JTBD

Charge his EV at the lowest possible cost without thinking about pricing himself.

Flexy feature

Smart EV charging, Custom settings mode

Priya Raman
55, Oak Park IL · The TOU Skeptic
"I don't want to gamble on a new rate plan and end up paying more."
JTBD

A clear before/after comparison based on her real usage before switching rate plans.

Flexy feature

Price & Cost view with Time-of-Use comparison toggle

Devon Michaels
34, Evanston IL · The Overwhelmed Watcher
"Checking prices feels like a part-time job."
JTBD

Automatic EV charging plus clear usage visibility, without manual price-watching.

Flexy feature

Smart EV charging (Max Savings) + informational consumption view

Jenna Alvarez & Sam Kim
39 & 41, Schaumburg IL · The Multi-EV Household
"Coordinating two cars' charging schedules around one price feed is like a logistics puzzle we didn't sign up for."
JTBD

Sequence and optimize two EVs against live pricing without manual coordination.

Flexy feature

Smart EV charging with multiple vehicles and per-vehicle preferences

What synthetic interviews surfaced

All four personas were interviewed with the same 7-question guide (AI-generated, in-character, grounded strictly in each persona's brief and real ComEd/Illinois data, explicitly flagged as synthetic, not real user data). Three cross-cutting themes emerged and directly shaped the roadmap:

01

Transparency is required, even when automation is welcomed

Every persona who liked EV automation still wanted visibility into why a decision was made, not a black box.

02

Readiness beats savings

Users are anxious about the car not being ready. Readiness had to outrank maximum savings by default.

03

Willingness to pay splits along B2B2C lines

Highest-pain personas would pay directly; others only if ComEd bundles it for free. This validated the B2B2C model.

Prioritized roadmap

NOW MVP

Price & Cost view (redesigned, combined)
ICE 8.0 · Priya & Marcus JTBDs, bill-shock problem
Smart EV charging - Custom settings & Max savings
ICE 8.0 · Marcus, Devon, Jenna & Sam JTBDs

NEXT Post-validation

"Here's what we did and why" transparency digest
ICE 7.0 · trust-requires-transparency theme
Monthly EV charging budget cap
ICE 6.3 · borrowed from real Home Assistant/Tibber project

LATER Vision

Negative-price handling
Edge case, rare on ComEd's retail pricing
Charging efficiency/loss tracking
Trust-building, not essential for MVP
Multi-EV voltage/capacity protection
Real constraint, deferred past MVP
General appliance automation
Requires per-appliance integrations, explicitly descoped
Multi-utility / multi-market expansion
Client-acquisition motion once ComEd is proven

A product decision worth showing

The two EV charging modes originally differed by whether a deadline existed at all. That was wrong: every persona interview showed a household always knows when it needs the car. I corrected both modes to require a ready-by time, and redefined the real difference as depth of configuration, full manual control (Custom settings) versus minimal input with sensible defaults (Max savings), validated directly against Marcus and Jenna & Sam (who wanted control) versus Devon (who explicitly wanted the opposite).

Limitations

A polished demo and a shippable product are different things. A few gaps commonly named by AI-prototyping practitioners, applied honestly to Flexy:

A working demo isn't 10% of the way to done

  • Stakeholders often see a polished AI-built demo and assume it's nearly finished, when the actual engineering (backend, auth, data persistence, real integrations) hasn't started.
  • The Price & Cost screen's pricing is real - it pulls live prices from ComEd's public Hourly Pricing API. Everything else isn't: no backend, no ComEd account login, no live Smartcar/EV API, and the consumption line is an illustrative shape, not metered usage.
Source: Kyros, "From Prototype to Production"

Automated design still needs real users

  • AI-generated screens can miss hierarchy, spacing, and comprehension issues that only real usability testing surfaces.
  • Flexy's personas and interviews are synthetic and internally consistent, but untested against an actual person clicking through the flow.
Source: Parallel, "AI-Powered Prototyping for UI/UX Design"

Happy-path only, no edge cases

  • AI-built prototypes handle the intended flow well but typically skip error states.
  • Flexy's click-dummy shows the ideal path only - no failed ComEd login, stale price feed, or EV dropping connection mid-session.
Source: CodeConductor, "Vibe Coding for PMs"

Prototype code isn't production code

  • Both of Flexy's click-dummies are static HTML/CSS/JS - no data layer, security review, or compliance pass, relevant since a real version would handle utility account data and OAuth tokens to EV manufacturer APIs.
  • Multiple rounds of AI-assisted fixes and rewrites went into prototype.html (2,000+ lines) without an independent review pass.
Sources: monday.com, "Vibe coding for product managers", Edwin Chen (Surge AI), on Lenny's Podcast

Compliance and reporting can't be designed from outside

  • The Compliance & Reporting view is an explicit placeholder. Its field list depends on which regulator a given utility answers to and what its existing filing process already produces, which is a conversation with a utility partner rather than something guessable from outside.
  • Every figure elsewhere on the dashboard is sample data, stated in a banner on the screen itself.
Full documentation

For anyone interested in documents on product development, platform and technical integration, go-to-market, or product analytics, get in touch.