Amber is an Aussie-owned electricity provider and a tech company on a mission to shift Australia to 100% renewables faster. We do this by rewarding customers with savings when they use energy when it’s greener and cheaper and by providing them with smart tech that makes doing this super simple. For those with solar and a battery, we also help you put energy back into the grid when it’s needed most - and get rewarded for it.
As Australia’s only true wholesale electricity provider for Aussie households, our app gives customers access to the real-time wholesale price of energy for their home, as well as how much renewable energy is in the grid.
With visibility over exactly what you’re paying at any given time and how much energy you’re using, Amber customers can take back control of energy usage and costs - whether you’re doing your laundry or charging your EV.
Customer features include:
- A detailed live price page, with specific callouts and notifications for when prices are extremely low, or unusually high, allowing you to plan your usage to make the most of cheaper, greener energy
- Separate live prices and forecast for your solar feed-in and controlled load usage
- Half-hourly usage data for each previous day
- A detailed breakdown of your electricity usage history, including daily usage graphs, daily costs, benchmarking against averages and the government’s Default Market Offer.
- The ability to track your performance over time with Amber, with averages of your wholesale price over a weekly, monthly, quarterly or six month window via the Your Week With Amber feature.
With Amber for EVs, Amber automatically finds the cheapest moments to charge your car, whether that's off your solar, when wholesale prices go negative and the grid pays you to plug in, or to get you the charge you need by morning as cheaply as possible.
Included in your subscription with a supported EV is:
- Ready-By: Need 80% by 7am? Set a target charge level and a deadline. Amber builds a plan using the cheapest available 5-minute price windows between now and your deadline to get the charge you need as cheaply as possible.
- Solar charging: Charge from your own excess solar, with no extra hardware needed. Amber reads data from your solar inverter directly to calculate what's spare and routes it to your car first. No compatible inverter? Amber falls back to a predictive model using your solar specs and weather data.
- Battery coordination: If you have a home battery, Amber keeps your EV and battery from competing.
- Price-based charging: Set a price threshold and Amber charges whenever the wholesale rate drops below it, including negative prices where you get paid to charge.
- Charging metrics: Track cost per session, solar usage, and more, all in one place.
With Amber for Batteries, home battery owners can accelerate payback on their home battery by combining Amber’s SmartShift™ battery automation and control features with our wholesale pricing.
Now, for the first time, battery owners can:
- Gain the control that they always wanted over their battery, with the power to export, charge and preserve their battery at the press of a button within the Amber app.
- Get paid the same feed-in tariffs that big fossil fuel generators earn, with wholesale FiTs that can reach $19/kWh and the ability to receive every cent that their energy is worth at the time it is exported.
- Boost their energy savings from their solar and battery with smart automation that continually hunts for the best prices to export and charge their battery.
- See the daily plan for their battery in the Amber app
The App is easy to use and its user interface is clear and overall well designed.Unfortunately it doesn’t deliver what it promises to do especially in the area of manual control where the communication with my battery (Sigenergy) keeps on glitching, forcing me to constantly monitoring the status via the mySigen App (super reliable). I’ve experienced a recurring issue where my dispatch energy manual command drops within the first 2-3 minutes while the Amber App is still showing it as active. On average I have to manually and the dispatch and start it over multiple times (5 or more) before it gets stable taking up significant time and potentially impacting on the chances to benefit from a FIT price spike.I’ve reported the issue to the Amber Dev Team but so far no solution has been implemented.Half of the time the Amber App is also loosing network connection displaying a red error message at the top.The solution I’m using is to quit the Amber App and start it over but is so frequent it begs the question on reliability
Really great experience so far
Mat Everywhere
I have both an Amber account and a PowerPal, and with the two together I’ve got a really great, clear picture of our household power consumption and have been able to make some smarter choices about when to start using the AC, when to cook, etc. Don’t get me wrong, being this granular isn’t a long-term strategy, but while the cost of living is astronomical and interest rates are high, every dollar counts. At a service level, I’m finding the rates particularly good for those who work from home, too. We use a steady stream of power during the day while most people are at work, so we benefit from better rates.WISH LIST:- Widgets! I mean, this should be a no brainer.- Finer rate notifications, so perhaps a high and low rate alert - Additional authorised contacts on accounts - A simplified ‘live rate’ and notification app for AppleTV. Would be really handy to get a little alert while I’m watching something if the power is high or low priced, and be able to quickly check the live rate between shows.
Good potential but Needs improvement
Hikiu
Early days but big potential. Customisable alerts, interactive usage graphs and more data analysis options would be very helpful. Currently the app functionality is a bit limited as well as the ability so see things like account details and billing dates. I hope this will all be rolled out soon.Another thing which I feel needs to be addressed. The wholesale price listed on the app is significantly higher than the AEMO 30 minute settlement price or even the 5 minute sport price. This price should show a breakdown of costs so we can understand what the charge is made up of. The network delivery charge and other components which are fixed costs should be made clear for example like a pie chart. This should not be that hard to do as the data required to make an overall price is there, this is just exposing those individual figures which make up the overall price.
Fantastic when it works
Chief 3867
In theory, this app and business model is fantastic, but the app is absolutely fraught with glitches. The manual control over the inverter frequently fails to respond. This is really annoying as the algorithm will start selling off your battery to the grid when you’re trying to conserve it for the night. I’ve got better things to do than constantly watch the app to monitor what the system is doing to ensure it is not selling off at negative prices. Automated solar curtailment is glitchy - it will sell your power off at negative one cent or sometimes more. It is impossible to contact anyone unless you want to sign up. Email responses are slow and only blame the inverter companies- the inverter companies blame Amber. No one wants to really help. Software updates have mixed results. Amber, please look after your current customers and fix the app. Please add a function to consume and store battery power for longer than just 2 hours.
New EV features:
- Ready-By charging lets you set a target level and deadline (eg. 80% by 7am) and Amber finds the cheapest charging plan to get you there.
- A new EV homepage, featuring a charging ring that shows your live battery level and what Amber is doing with your EV right now, plus an EV timeline that lets you see the EV charging plan for the next 24 hours.
Version 6.25.0
The developer, Amber Electric Pty Ltd, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Linked to You
The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:
Diagnostics
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Identifiers
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
