[pfarnsworth]

This sounds interesting, because as someone from the West, I have no concept of what it means to "buy" water. We completely take for granted the fact that every single house has access to clean water. One thing, in SF I am also paying more for water than electricity, it comes out to about $60/month for water and $45/month for electricity.

How do you protect customers from sellers who have poor quality or poisonous water who try to game your system? Do you do water testing as well?

[anusridharan]

That's a great question. Right now we manually take water samples and get it tested in a lab. Over time, as IoT devices get cheaper, we believe the water quality testing will be done at the source, online, and in real time. This makes it much harder to game the system.

Additionally, we track the GPS location of the truck with the water to make sure clean water is filled up at the source and the same water is delivered to the consumers.

[pfarnsworth]

What's to stop another truck with bad and cheaper water from coming and filling up the truck that's being tracked? I imagine if the prices are higher, there's a lot of incentive to commit fraud, especially on something as short-lived as a water supply.

[ada1981]

Perhaps randomized sampling / testing. You'd want to be a highly rated supplier so as not to compromise future sales.