At Sense we make a home energy monitor that provides real-time appliance-level monitoring using machine learning. Hardware is indeed hard as everyone said it would be!
$165 will get you an emporia with 16 sensors so you don't need any AI trying to decipher your usage, compared to $300 for yours that only gives you sensors for your main feed.
Considering it's trivial to find schematics online showing how to wire a clamp current meter into an esp32, what have you found to be difficult about the hardware? I would expect the AI detection of individual appliances would be the hard part.
Do you have any plans regarding always on load? So hard to track it down…