EVNotify - Birthday

More than 2 years ago - the 4th of Juli 2017, the very first official version of EVNotify was available for the public.

Even when the first version was very basic - compared to the current version - it took months of active development to create it. It was a hard time and I was nearly giving up.

But then, many of you, encouraged me to try harder - and I finally made it.

This was not only something - it was the beginning of something huge.

EVNotify was originally created by me because I wanted to solve the problem, that the Hyundai IONIQ Electric does not come with an app here in Germany to allow remote monitoring of your state of charge.

I read about many people complaining about this, but no one really tried to do something to solve this issue.

So even before I decided to really buy an own Ioniq, I decided to try to solve this issue.

It was a very long and hard time. At the beginning of the development of EVNotify I was only 19 years old and just started my apprenticeship as a software developer.

I never thought that I could make this - and especially I never thought about, that EVNotify would be such as successful application.

More and more people used EVNotify and I added more and more features over the time.

Currently, there are several projects related to EVNotify. The server, the app, the web interface, the PlugAndPlay version, Python version, and more to come.

I created and still maintaining it in my free time. For free. Open-Source.

It was my goal to create something useful, that everybody can use. It was never my goal to make money out of it.

However, EVNotify has grown a lot since this. Even me.

Today is my birthday. I’m now 22 years old 🎉

I learned a lot from EVNotify. And that is way more worth than any money.

Day by day people are using EVNotify to make their daily life easier. This makes me really happy.

Currently, EVNotify has more than 3.500 registered users and it’s growing everyday.

At the early stages, I was happy, when I saw a request incoming, manually logged via console logging statements. If I would have this still today, the server would explode, I guess ;)

In average, EVNotify processes more than 60 requests per second! 24 / 7.

At peak times, these increase to several hundreds!

Even when I’m really happy to see, how many of you are using it, it created new problems.

I had to adjust the server architecture to still be able to process all this data and requests. It was very challenging but I made it.

Since the very beginning I payed everything by my own. All the server costs, licenses, hardware costs. This is a lot of money. But every cent is well invested.

I learned so much during coding this project. Via Slack or other channels I created a very friendly community and today, even others are contributing to the source code of EVNotify.

In these 2 years, so many features has been introduced, so many will be added very soon. It would be to long, to list them all here.

But just a reminder: EVNotify started as an idea. With one commit. One data, the state of charged, that can be read out. One car that was supported. One button that manually activated the monitoring.

Today, it has nearly 2.000 commits across all the repositories, nearly 20 different data fields, that are extracted, nearly 10 different supported cars and different mechanisms to watch and handle the monitoring automatically.

This would not be possible without you! Everyone that is using EVNotify. Everyone that encouraged me to develop and maintain EVNotify, even in my free time. And it would not be possible without donations.

Remember: There is no free product. Even when it’s free.