Zero Friction takes a unique software as a service (SaaS)-based approach to metering and billing for heat suppliers, solving major challenges posed by on-premises solutions: implementation can take years, and scaling is costly. Using Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other Azure services, Zero Friction created a platform that offers predictability, performance, and limitless scale with two apps: one that helps heat suppliers convert meter data into invoices, and another that helps end customers understand their energy consumption and make payments.
In 2018, three colleagues started their own metering and billing software company, putting their goal in the company name: Zero Friction. Wim Jacobs, Yoni Nijs, and Lars van Elewijck had all worked in the energy and utilities sector and understood the inefficiency that comes from hardware-based systems. On-premises metering and billing solutions could take years to implement, required a lot of customization, and lacked critical performance and scale. At the same time, the end customers paying their heating bills needed a simple, intuitive digital solution to understand their energy usage and payments.
Setting up shop in Ghent, Belgium, Zero Friction envisioned a SaaS platform that would help heat suppliers accurately, affordably, and predictably meter individual homes—and even multiple tenants within a larger building—without any on-premises server infrastructure. The platform would also give end customers clear and accurate billing statements, so they could easily understand their energy usage and pay for services. Yoni Nijs, Cofounder, CTO, and Product Lead at Zero Friction, says, “We wanted a solution that handled the complete meter-to-cash process.”
The company relied on a deep understanding of the local heating industry, along with cloud technologies, to bring that vision to life.
Bringing the heat to Europe
“To heat individual homes in Europe, we have something called ‘district heating networks,’” Nijs explains. “Instead of having a gas connection or gas supply, hot water is piped to an address, and a delivery set extracts and transfers the heat to the house’s internal circuit for heating the house and tap water.” For buildings with multiple tenants, like apartments or office buildings, European countries use a “collective energy system,” where a central boiler provides units with heat, and the total cost is divided between tenants in a number of possible ways, including by square footage, number of occupants, or individual tenant consumption.
Turning hot water in pipes into accurate, efficient metering and billing for Zero Friction’s 12,000 distinct connections required a massively scalable cloud platform. After exploring several offerings, Zero Friction settled on Azure Cosmos DB and architected two apps: a client app for metering and billing, and a customer portal for utility management.
“We’ve built a unique solution for our industry because we use a SaaS concept, which makes it very affordable and scalable.”
Yoni Nijs, Cofounder, CTO, and Product Lead, Zero Friction
One platform, two apps, seamless metering and billing
Most households have a metering device with four or five sensors, recording water temperatures, flow rates, and kilowatt usage. Each device records roughly 100 readings over a 24-hour period. Nijs says, “The system currently processes about 350,000 readings every night, and that number is growing. In total, since our founding, we have about 25 million readings processed and stored.”
Every night, those devices transmit data to one of Zero Friction’s metering endpoints for processing. The system calculates energy consumption, invoices clients, and stores the data in Azure Cosmos DB.
Using the flexible architecture of Azure, Zero Friction designed its app for heat suppliers in .NET Core with an architecture built on microservices. The app uses Azure Service Bus to enable communication between the microservices and billing, metering, and master data workflows. “This runs on top of virtual machine scale sets within Azure Service Fabric, which is linked to load balancers,” says Nijs.
The customer-facing portal is a serverless app that can scale to accommodate major spikes in traffic when customers sign in to pay their heat bills. The portal runs on the .NET web app, Blazor, which enables Zero Friction to code using C# instead of JavaScript. The portal is connected to other Azure microservices that synchronize all the APIs to the serverless Azure Cosmos DB instance. This allows Zero Friction to link or integrate the portal into legacy billing systems.
A predictable, always-on managed SaaS
Another benefit of Azure Cosmos DB was that Zero Friction could build its apps on a scalable NoSQL database. Because NoSQL databases are schema-less, Zero Friction can continuously adapt the database for the changings needs of its customers.
“By using Azure Cosmos DB, we can do upgrades and schema-less changes without any downtime, and that means that our system is always up and running,” Nijs says. “We were also drawn to the predictable SLAs and pricing of Azure Cosmos DB. We know upfront how much storage will be required to support a client. We can calculate how many meter readings our system will process. We know how long the data will be archived. We know how many invoices our system will create.” This makes storage costs and provisioning something that Zero Friction can easily forecast.
“A major factor in choosing Azure Cosmos DB is that it’s managed. Indexing, backups, log files—Microsoft essentially takes care of everything for us.”
Yoni Nijs, Cofounder, CTO, and Product Lead, Zero Friction
Fast success with Azure
In just three years, Zero Friction has expanded rapidly and found clients across Europe, including companies like EDF Luminus, BAM Energy Systems, and EQUANS. In total, 15 district heat suppliers, more than 20 collective energy groups, and roughly 12,000 distinct end customers use Zero Friction’s SaaS platform.
A planned solution evolution
In the future, Zero Friction plans to gain greater efficiency and cost-savings by going serverless on Azure Cosmos DB with its multitenant billing and metering solution.
Zero Friction also sees opportunities to tie in Azure Synapse Analytics for anomaly detection and forecasting. This would allow heat suppliers to detect problems faster, and would help customers in areas where people pay a fixed monthly amount for utilities and then receive bills at the end of the year for overages. These analytical predictions could help customers avoid a big bill later on—yet another example of Zero Friction living its mission of trouble-free, efficient metering and billing.
“Because we run on Azure, our software grows with our client. The growth is very predictable, so we know how much we need to provision ahead of time.”
Yoni Nijs, Cofounder, CTO, and Product Lead, Zero Friction
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