Dynamic tariff customers are supposed to tune out. Ours open the app 23 times a month.

tl;dr. The conventional wisdom in energy product circles is that dynamic tariff customers poke at the app for a week out of novelty and then forget it exists. Pstryk's data says the opposite. Our users open the app around 23 times a month, the app served roughly 159,000 sessions in December 2025, and 22 percent of our customers arrived through other customers referring them. Engagement is not the problem. Here is what our customers actually look at, why I think the engagement holds, and what it means if you are building a dynamic tariff product.

Before we launched, I lost count of how many people in the energy product world told me the same thing. Dynamic tariff customers, they said, will check the app obsessively for the first week, fascinated by the idea that electricity has a price that moves, and then they will tune out. The novelty wears off, the chart becomes wallpaper, and you are left with a product nobody opens. Build automation, they said, because you cannot count on the customer to ever look again.

It is a confident, repeated, and apparently sensible claim. It is also, at least for us, wrong.

What engagement actually looks like

Our users open the Pstryk app on average 23 times a month. That is not a launch-week spike that decays into nothing. That is a customer checking in most days, sometimes more than once, month after month. In December 2025 the app served around 159,000 sessions. These are not the numbers of a product that gets installed, admired, and abandoned.

The number that surprised me most was not the visit frequency though. It was that 22 percent of our customers came to us through other customers, via our member-get-member referral program. More than one in five new customers arrived because an existing one recommended us. You do not refer your energy provider to a friend out of mild satisfaction. Referral at that rate is what happens when a product is doing something a person actively wants to talk about, and it is the cleanest signal I have that the engagement is positive rather than anxious.

So the disengagement thesis did not survive contact with our own analytics. The interesting question stopped being "how do we get customers to look" and became "why do they keep looking, and what are they looking at."

What they are actually looking at

This is the part that matters for anyone building in this space, because high engagement on its own tells you a customer opens the app, not why.

Here is one of our customers describing it in their own words: "The app is well-designed and easy to use, with real-time energy usage monitoring. Charts accurately display the total cost of electricity used."

Read that carefully, because it is more precise than a compliment. The two things they name are real-time energy usage monitoring and the total cost of electricity used. They are not describing a forward price curve that they study every evening to decide when to run the dishwasher. They are describing consumption and cost. What they came back for, 23 times a month, is the answer to a question every household quietly carries: how much am I using right now, and what is it costing me.

That distinction is the whole game. There is a difference between pricing transparency, which is showing the customer what electricity will cost at each hour tomorrow, and cost transparency, which is showing the customer what their energy is actually doing to their wallet right now. The conventional wisdom assumed customers want the former and will get bored of it. Our data suggests they want the latter and do not get bored of it at all, because their consumption is a living thing that changes every day, and watching it is genuinely useful rather than a chore.

Why I think the engagement holds

I want to be careful here, because the visit numbers are measured and the reasons are my interpretation. With that caveat, here is what I think is going on.

The first driver is that a dynamic tariff makes the bill alive. On a flat tariff there is nothing to check. Your rate is your rate, the bill arrives once a month, and the app would have nothing to tell you that you do not already know. A dynamic tariff turns the bill into something that moves with your behavior and with the market, and the moment a number moves, people want to watch it. We did not have to manufacture a reason to open the app. The tariff structure created one.

The second driver is specific to this part of the world and this moment. Households in Poland and across CEE went through an energy price shock that made everyone bill-conscious in a way they were not five years earlier. When people have recently watched their energy costs spike, a tool that shows them exactly where their money is going is not a novelty, it is reassurance. Real-time cost feedback lands differently with an audience that has reason to care about the number.

The third driver is simply that real-time feedback is intrinsically engaging in a way a monthly statement never is. A static bill is an autopsy. Real-time consumption is a heartbeat. People check heartbeats.

None of this means the conventional wisdom is stupid. It may well be correct in markets with stable prices and customers who never felt an energy shock. But it is not a law of nature, and it was not true for us.

Engagement is an asset, not a vanity metric

It would be easy to file 23 visits a month under "nice to have" and move on. That would be a mistake, because in this product the engagement is doing real commercial work.

The referral number is the proof. A customer who opens the app 23 times a month and sees their costs laid out clearly is a customer who understands the value they are getting, and a customer who understands their value is a customer who refers. The 22 percent of customers arriving through member-get-member is not a separate marketing achievement sitting next to the engagement number. It is downstream of it. Engagement builds the understanding, the understanding builds the trust, and the trust is what gets shared with a friend. In a market where acquiring an energy customer is expensive, a fifth of your growth coming from your own engaged base is a structural advantage, not a line item.

This is the part the disengagement thesis misses entirely. It treats app engagement as a cost center to be designed around. For us it has been a growth engine to be fed.

What this means if you are building a dynamic tariff

A few things I would tell anyone building in this space, now that I have our numbers in front of me rather than the received wisdom.

Do not design for disengagement before you have evidence of it. The assumption that customers will tune out becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you build a thin app on the strength of it. Build the thing worth opening, then measure whether they open it. We were told they would not, and they do.

Make cost and consumption the center of the product, not the forward price curve. The price curve is real and it matters for the automation underneath, but it is not what most customers come back to look at. They come back for what they are using and what it costs. Put that front and center, make it accurate, make it real-time, and the engagement follows.

Treat automation and engagement as partners, not substitutes. The standard advice, build automation so the customer never has to look, is half right. Automation absolutely should be doing the optimization work in the background, because most value gets captured while the customer is asleep. But that is not a reason to neglect the app, because the app is where trust gets built and referrals get born. You want the automation working and the customer engaged. Those are not in tension.

The short version

We were told dynamic tariff customers would lose interest. Ours open the app around 23 times a month, generated roughly 159,000 sessions in December 2025, and refer their friends at a rate that produced 22 percent of our customer base. The lesson is not that the conventional wisdom is always wrong. It is that engagement in this category is earned, not assumed, and the thing that earns it is showing people their own consumption and cost clearly and in real time. Do that, and the customer keeps coming back. Do it well enough, and they bring someone with them.

If you are building a dynamic tariff or any consumer energy product and trying to figure out what your own engagement should look like, it is one of the things I work on with founders through the consulting page. The shortest version of the advice is to measure before you assume, and to build the cost and consumption view as if it is the product, because for the customer it largely is.