What's the difference between Alva Essential (free) and Autopilot?

Basic gives you manual control and safety features. Autopilot adds the intelligence that generates real savings.

Every Alva LINK works out of the box with Alva Essential, this was crucial for us when building the Alva Link: Basic is not a crippled trial. It's a real product tier. Here's the honest distinction:

Alva Essential (free)

• Manual time-based scheduling — you set rules like "run heat pump in economy mode between 23:00–06:00"
• Fuse protection and load balancing — prevents your main fuse from tripping when multiple high-power devices run simultaneously
• Local device monitoring — see the current state of your connected devices in the app
• Bridge mode — expose your energy hardware to Home Assistant, Homey or others for custom automations
• Remote temperature control — adjust heat pump or boiler setpoints from the app

Alva Autopilot (€4.99/month or €49/year) ★:

• ★ Automatic price optimization — continuously shifts consumption to the cheapest hours, recalculated against live day-ahead and intraday spot prices
• ★ Weather-predictive control — pre-heats before cold snaps, charges batteries before cloudy days
• ★ Thermal learning model — maps your home's specific heat loss curve over weeks, getting sharper with every passing day
• ★ Cloud-connected EV scheduling — vehicle API integration (Tesla, VW, BMW, etc.) for state-of-charge-aware charging with "ready by" times
• ★ Battery arbitrage — charge from grid at low/negative prices, discharge during peaks, with battery-health-aware cycling
• ★ Multi-asset coordination — holistic optimization across all connected devices, not individual schedules
• ★ Monthly savings dashboard — shows exactly what Autopilot saved versus what you would have paid
• ★ Continuous algorithm updates — new optimization strategies delivered over-the-air

Why this split is honest: Everything behind the Autopilot paywall genuinely costs Alva money to deliver — electricity price forecast APIs, weather data services, vehicle manufacturer API access, cloud compute for optimization algorithms, and ML model training. The free tier runs locally on the device with minimal cloud dependency. We're not gating features artificially. We're reflecting real operating costs.

The math: Autopilot costs €49/year. A single heat pump with Autopilot saves €122–€282/year. The subscription pays for itself every month. If it didn't, we wouldn't expect you to keep it.