Inspiration
The idea for future-roof was born in my own family. When my parent's house was to be renovated, we thought of installing both a photovoltaic system and a heat pump, to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. Since I have always been passionate about renewable energy, I took on the task of planning.
What quickly became clear was that most installation companies are focused on promoting and selling their own products. What was missing was an independent and accessible way to truly understand the savings potential of one’s own home – without having to rely on expensive professional energy consultants.
Questions like “Will a heat pump even work in an older house without modern insulation?” or “Will the overall costs outweigh the benefits?” remained unclear. On top of that, today’s heat pump market is huge, often overwhelming, and hard to understand for non-experts.
I realized that homeowners lack low-threshold, transparent tools that make it possible to explore their own energy transition without requiring deep technical knowledge. Only if homeowners can easily and clearly assess their options will more people feel empowered to embrace renewable energy.
What it does
future-roof provides homeowners with a holistic simulation of their energy system. It combines rooftop solar potential analysis with precise PV yield forecasts, and extends this with calculations for battery storage, EV chargers, and heat pumps.
The app makes it easy to understand not just the technical feasibility, but also the economic viability of each configuration – all without needing prior expert knowledge.
How we built it
The app was designed to be as simple as possible, without requiring user registration. One key challenge was handling in-app purchases for the Premium analysis:
- Consumables would have been easy to implement, but they don’t allow purchase restoration.
- Non-consumables couldn’t natively be tied to parameters like an address ID, which would have meant a user could unlock unlimited addresses with just one purchase.
The breakthrough came with RevenueCat, because they provide a system of anonymized user IDs. This allowed me to build a solution where purchases can be uniquely tied to specific addresses – and restored even after a reinstall – all without forcing users to create an account.
Challenges we ran into
- Designing an intuitive user experience while dealing with a very technical subject matter.
- Managing the complexity of edge cases in user behavior – what feels simple to me as a developer may not always feel obvious to new users.
- Ensuring transparency and accuracy while keeping the interface clean and approachable.
Accomplishments that we are proud of
- My first app release
- Successfully combining roof analysis, PV yield forecasting, battery storage, EV chargers, and heat pump planning into one compact, user-friendly app – something that had not been done in this form for non-experts.
- Building a purchase system that works without login, yet still allows for reliable restoration after reinstall.
What we learned
- There are countless edge cases in how users interact with the app. Designing for clarity and simplicity while covering complex scenarios is a constant balancing act.
- What feels intuitive to me as a developer can sometimes be confusing to others – user feedback is invaluable.
What’s next for future-roof
The app is just at the beginning. Many more features are planned for the future, such as:
- Expanding device databases for even more realistic comparisons.
- Adding advanced financial simulations.
- Improving visualizations for he roof analysis to get more insights about module configuration and placement
future-roof has one mission: to make renewable energy transparent, understandable, and accessible for every homeowner.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.