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
USD 54,000
Annual Savings in Infrastructure Costs- Cloud optimization and smarter resource utilizati
40%
Improvement in App Responsiveness- Faster backend processing reduced dashboard load times and el
10,000+
User Scalable Growth Foundation, Enabling Sustainable Expansion into New Regions
36×
faster throughput- reducing meter-data refresh time from minutes to seconds
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
per year cloud savings, freeing budget for growth initiatives
Built
Built for 1M users, with architecture designed to scale without performance trade-offs
Better
Better customer experience: smoother onboarding, clearer budgeting and greener-living adoption (CO₂
Build Facts
Platform
AWS Lambda
AWS Auto-Scaling Groups
Node.js Microservices
Amazon S3
CI/CD
Focus
Real-time smart-meter data ingestion
cost-efficient cloud architecture
multi-threaded processing
enhanced onboarding and user experience
Let’s talk, no strings attached.
