Octopus overtakes British Gas as Britain's largest household energy supplier(theguardian.com)

Octopus overtakes British Gas as Britain's largest household energy supplier

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/17/octopus-overtakes-british-gas-as-britains-largest-household-energy-supplier

5 comments

develatioanno scorso

I did an interview for a Senior Backend role with them. I’m very happy with how they managed the process. The interviews were technical, but in a practical way, not in the “let’s see if you can solve some leet code” way. Loved the guys I interviewed with. Loved the technical challenges they told me I’d be working on. I’m a little bit sad I wasn’t able to join them (despite them offering me the position) because they had a ridiculously restrictive contract (wasn’t allowed to have side projects, not even contribute to open source). I had to reject it :(

Not really sure why companies hurt themselves in this way.

4ndrewlanno scorso

Tech angle: They have an API customers can use to monitor prices and usage https://developer.octopus.energy/

dirousselanno scorso

So the story goes (I'm probably just regurgitating some marketing)...

The founder has a software background, and built out a software service to track energy usage and deliver data-driven pricing plans. But when he tried to sell it to the energy companies, it didn't find much demand for the software. So they setup their own energy supplier to prove how good it was. They now sell their software in mulitple countries.

As a customer, not only can I get an API key and retrive usage data. But I can also use an API to see what other pricing plans are available. And in the mobile app I get to the minute usage reporting.

theyknowitsxmasanno scorso

This is weird, I understand 6 companies drill and run the pipes in UK and government forces these middlemen to do the billing.

[deleted]anno scorso