Hugo Energy
Smart Metering at Scale Saves $54K and Runs 36× Faster
Hugo Energy + Systango: a faster, scalable smart-meter app with real-time insights, smoother onboarding, and greener-living features.
Outcome Snapshot
36×
faster batch processing (from ~23 hours to ~5 minutes)
$54,000
annual cloud savings (monthly ~$7k → ~$2k)
Built to scale
to 1 million users without performance trade-offs
Improved
onboarding & UX for budgets, tariff switching, CO₂ goals and offsets
Client
Hugo Energy is a UK energy-tech app that connects to smart meters to visualise electricity and gas usage daily, weekly, monthly and annually. Users set budgets, track CO₂ emissions, receive cost alerts, compare tariffs and purchase carbon offsets.
Challenge
Rapid growth exposed limitations in the legacy architecture: slow batch jobs, rising cloud costs, and friction in onboarding. Hugo needed a modernised platform that ingests smart-meter data in near real-time, scales efficiently and improves customer experience across devices.
Objectives
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Enhance data accuracy with modernised pipelines for real-time meter ingestion
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Improve onboarding flow for sign-up, tariff switching, CO₂ offset purchase and budgeting
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Optimise backend performance by replacing long-running scripts with rapid, multi-threaded services
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Ensure multi-device compatibility with a consistent cross-platform app
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Scale efficiently to support up to 1 million users
Secure and archive data with reliable long-term storage and auto-scaling
What We Built
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Modern data pipeline: migrated legacy PHP scripts to AWS Lambda with multi-threaded processing to slash batch times
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Auto-scaling microservices on AWS for flexible, resilient performance
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Ionic frontend optimisation: refined UI/UX for onboarding, energy analytics, CO₂ offsets, budgets and tariff comparison
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Robust data archival: structured, secure storage across real-time and archival layers
Third-party integrations: smart data collectors, energy suppliers and payment gateways
Impact
36×
faster processing, enabling near real-time insights for users and operations
$54k/year
cloud savings, freeing budget for growth initiatives
Built for 1M users
with architecture designed to scale without performance trade-offs
Better customer experience
smoother onboarding, clearer budgeting and greener-living adoption (CO₂ goals, offsets)
Build Facts
Platform
Web Application
Focus
Smart Data Providers
Payment Gateways
Energy Suppliers
Let’s talk, no strings attached.
