Built to Outlast: Designing Products for the Long Haul
“So what happens if you ever go out of business?”
We heard this question a lot when we started building SPAN. It’s a fair one, and equally important for Pila.
When software becomes central to your physical product, customers are making a big bet on continuity. Too many “smart” devices have proven fragile when the app, cloud, or company falters. For critical energy equipment, that’s not acceptable.
The Cloud connection is a feature, not a dependency. Our view: if the internet drops, the lights (and you’re control over them) shouldn’t. This is a core thesis behind how we’re building Pila.
When “smart” turns into e-waste
You’ve seen the headlines. An app shuts down and suddenly that premium device becomes a useless brick — From EV chargers, to smart pet collars, to smart lights, to camping battery systems, to $800 kids toys. Even when the hardware remains perfectly capable, policy or business decisions can strand customers.
Occasionally, hobbyists revive products with open firmware or clever workarounds. But more often, the gear goes to a landfill and people grudgingly switch ecosystems.
A recent anecdote shared by our Cloud Software Engineer, Niko: His friend tried to remotely monitor a Thanksgiving turkey with a $199 “smart” thermometer… only to find the company had pulled the app from app stores.
This is the default consumer IoT playbook: A cheap terminal in your home connected to a $2 consumer Wi-Fi radio, streaming your data to some distant Cloud. And all of this wrapped in a 1 year warranty. It’s basically the opposite of “infrastructure-grade.”
Look, building physical products is hard. Building lasting companies is hard. As we prepare to ship our first generation of products to customers very soon, we think about this a lot. Pila is committed to ensuring our customers see the benefit for the whole product lifetime, full stop.
Energy products ≠ Consumer gadgets
Grid-connected batteries, power control, and home energy management are reliability equipment. They need to make sound decisions locally to protect people, food, comfort, and safety — especially when the network is down.
Plus, smart batteries are already actively making the power grid better by shifting loads, smoothing peaks, and riding through voltage fluctuations.
Homeowners and grid operators alike need to be able to depend on this tech with the same uptime as a full-scale power plant if we’re going to avoid overbuilding extra generation (with our collective power bills rising to cover the cost).
This “infrastructure-grade” mentality was deeply ingrained on the Tesla Energy team. Powerwall setups had to work in remote places with no connectivity. The system shipped with local setup and monitoring by necessity, and this local APIs seeded a thriving community of power users.
We’re carrying that lesson forward at Pila.
“ … just 6.4% degradation after seven years, averaging 0.7 cycles per day. I reckon that’s excellent. ”
Pila design principles: Infrastructure-grade + Fail-functional
1. Local-first, cloud-assisted
Pila works as a complete system with or without Internet. The Cloud makes Pila smarter — augmenting our energy optimization algorithms and data insights, plus providing software updates and remote support.
Outages used to be the only resilience story. Today, resilience also means operational continuity: safe decisions and comfortable living even when connectivity is messy, when your utility is stressed, or when software elsewhere misbehaves. That’s why Pila’s energy optimization is done locally at the edge, with the cloud as a multiplier.
If your Wi-Fi or various Cloud servers have a bad day, your energy independence doesn’t. All Pila products are designed with:
Powerful on-device intelligence that drives system decisions about safety, comfort, and power control
Local setup and control that is always possible to use without app dependencies
Open local interfaces so integrators and power users can automate without round-trips to the cloud
2. App-optional UX
We get it. Not everyone wants another app. We designed Pila with a touchscreen and local interactions that make everyday use straightforward. The Pila App is great for remote monitoring, convenient setup, and understanding your data at a deep level. What it’s not: A hard requirement to keep things working.
3. Evergreen hardware, software that improves
We design for a long service life: robust enclosures, coatings, reliability testing, and components chosen for the environments we actually see in the field. Over-the-air updates add capabilities over time — with staged rollouts, safe rollback paths, and auditability.
But smarter over time isn’t just “really good software.” You need hardware planned for software growth from day one of the design process — compute, memory, radios, peripherals, and interfaces designed from day one to evolve, plus extra compute and memory, updatable peripherals, flexible interfaces, and more.
It ain’t easy! Few products truly achieve “smarter over time” – probably fewer than one per product category.
Tesla EV
Apple iPhone
Nest Learning Thermostat
Our team has put in tremendous effort to be among this class: Hardware that’s uniquely smarter over time.
Pila Mesh Battery
4. Communication that doesn’t quit
Home internet is surprisingly fragile — whether daily dropouts or a tree branch taking out the power & internet lines coming into your home during the next wind storm.
Pila is cellular-backed. If your ISP blips, you still have reliable remote access to control your energy.
If everything goes offline, Pila always stays in a safe, predictable local mode. Our Battery Mesh Network ensures all Pila devices stay connected to one another and rapidly respond together as a fleet to shift energy usage, manage power spikes, and continue monitoring for anomalies across your loads and electrical system.
The bonus: No need to painstakingly re-pair every device when you change your home Wi-Fi password.
5. Standards and interoperability
Local interoperability matters. We aim to be good citizens in the home energy ecosystem — friendly with Home Assistant, aligned with emerging standards (e.g., Matter for local control), and able to speak open protocols where it makes sense. Standards are a hedge against vendor lock-in and a gift to future you.
We’re excited to be participating in the discussions and aligning our roadmap to ensure Pila stays compatible with the leading ones. As the industry coalesces around Matter, OCPP, and other protocols, we’re committed to making Pila a system that plays well with others today and tomorrow.
6. Bankable-by-design
Energy products routinely carry long hardware warranties — solar panels at 25 years, inverters and home batteries at 10–15. Consumer gadgets, by contrast, are lucky to get a year or two. We’re building Pila to sit firmly in the energy category, not the gadget one. Pila carries a standard, transparent 5-year product warranty, already outpacing consumer-grade packs, paired with a 10-year battery cycle life tested for real-world duty cycles.
“What happens if Pila ever… disappears?”
Customers deserve a concrete answer, and we’re making ours public.
The Pila Customer Continuity Pledge
Rest assured, we’re building Pila for the long term. But if Pila’s cloud services were ever sunset, we commit to:
Keep the essentials local. Core functions work fully offline: charge/discharge logic, appliance protection, outage behavior, and everyday control.
Publish local control docs. Local APIs and user guides remain available so you can manage your system and data.
Enable data export. You can take your history and device configuration with you.
Transparency + notice. If we ever needed to sunset services, customers will be notified as soon as practical, with clear guidance and tools to transition.
Ship a final “offline-complete” firmware. A last update ensures the product remains usable without cloud services.
Repairability support. Manuals and repair instructions will remain accessible, so hardware is never stranded.
You shouldn’t have to ask “what could happen in 10 years?” — it should be clear and obvious from day one.
