| Hi Drew and Edmund, I'm a FE developer on Arc (Arcadia’s API Platform), and I was surprised to see how similar Pelm was to some of the projects I've worked on, considering the release of Arc "took you by surprise." Your designs on your website look very close to the design of our connect widget and even has the same copy. For example, this is the Arcadia landing page: https://i.imgur.com/FkPq6S5.png
While this is the landing page on your website: https://i.imgur.com/dVVOSqD.png It gets worse on the "success" screen: https://i.imgur.com/kzgyTwv.png I'd like to view this as a coincidence, but I viewed your Pelm-Connect repo and thought the documentation looked familiar:
https://i.imgur.com/hYWIk6d.png I looked at the commit history in the git repo, and found it was copied from our documentation:
https://i.imgur.com/DF8aqFl.png
https://github.com/Pelm-Technologies/react-pelm-connect/comm...
https://github.com/Pelm-Technologies/react-pelm-connect/comm... Our whole team has worked hard on our API for months, so it's really disheartening to see it copied like this. If anyone is interested in Arc, which supports 125 utilities and has had people working on the utility data problem for 5 years, you can sign up at https://arc.arcadia.com/signup. |
Regarding the similarity in design, I believe this is a result of both of our products finding inspiration in Plaid. Plaid has played an insurmountable role in the fintech boom, and I’m sure most could understand why companies like Pelm and Arcadia would look up to them for inspiration.
Regarding the similar copy in our documentation, this was something Pelm could have handled better. Our intention was to find a template as a starting point to work off of, and in hindsight, we should have just started from scratch. We’ve completely rewritten our Pelm Connect documentation.
Please understand that we had no malicious intentions and did not mean to discredit the hard work of Arcadia. We believe that Pelm and Arcadia have the same goal of democratizing access to energy data in service of making the world more sustainable. We’re excited that competition in the space will spur innovation and help us move closer to solving a dire problem.