Yayzy Footprint Calculator 12+

The best thing to come out of open banking yet!

An essential app for those trying to do their bit for the planet, Yayzy is a fantastically innovative use of open banking to identify and track the carbon footprint of your lifestyle and mitigate it through lifestyle changes, better consumer choices and high quality offsets. The app is still in development but has progressed with impressive speed in the last few months and, from the sound of things, there are plans to take it a lot further. Having spoken with the developers, it is clear there is a very ideologically driven team behind this offering and I am excited, and encouraged, to see what the end result will be. In the meantime, I encourage new users to be patient, give feedback, and enjoy Yayzy’s steady advance towards achieving its full potential.

Very blunt instrument

I am an environmentally aware individual. I make a lot of choices based on a fair understanding of growing, processing and shipping impact. The problem is that this app just looks as some very broad categories and decides my carbon footprint from that. My utilities bills are higher because I use an 100% green electricity provider. I know my gas can’t be carbon free, as biogas is still very niche and requires land to support it. I eat meat once a week and spend £35 on 3 bottles of quality English wine instead of 6 bottle of Australian wine.

None of this can be accounted for in the App and it just seems to be a sales tactic to try to get you to offset your carbon footprint. Well carbon offsetting is a dubious method to making you feel less guilty. Instead try investing your money in more insulation for your house, maybe buy some solar panels, definitely buy an electric car (as they are way better than ICE cars) and if you don’t have space or money for the last two invest directly in a company that is creating green energy.

Developer Response ,

Hi Avid Radio 6 Listener,

Firstly, thanks for your feedback. YAYZY is still in beta and we’re iterating the app constantly so your feedback will help us make it better. Very soon your green electricity provider would be reflecting accordingly within YAYZY.

The YAYZY Carbon Footprint Algorithm reads payment data and assigns a carbon emission intensity factor on a product, company or subcategory basis. Currently, payment data does not have information on a product level but we’re working very hard on innovative ways to get product level data to increase the accuracy of the estimation. While it would be easy to request our users to input that information, we want to make it effortless and automatic to track and reduce your impact. Lot of exciting functionality coming soon.

Our true north star is to help our customers reduce their impact on the environment. We’re also going to soon release functionality that suggest activities based on consumer spending behaviour to help our customers reduce their carbon footprint. It would be great to show you our beta version and get your feedback.

You’re welcome to join our feedback slack channel to help us improve the YAYZY app, please drop us a mail on hello@yayzy.com mail if this may be of interest to you.

Best,
The YAYZY team

An app with great purpose

From my personal experience the Yayzy team is totally committed to their mission and personally invested in its success. Great strides have been made in the early months to resolve the challenges of launching a quite complex App. Recent updates have resolved early issues with open banking links and app compatibility with different iPhone versions. Yayzy is already well differentiated from would-be competitors, the gap can only increase as more functionality comes on stream. Most definitely the go to app for anyone wanting to carbon offset their expenditure