Edbert

English · Deutsch · The English version is authoritative.

Edbert is a tariff editor and price service for smart-home systems. You describe your electricity tariff once (fixed, market-indexed, or time-variable with windows, weekdays and holidays) and Edbert delivers the resulting prices as a time series to your smart-home backend: as a Home Assistant sensor or over MQTT.

Status: draft. The rule engine (0.1.a), the price series with grid fee (0.1.b) the tariff editor in the browser (0.1.c) and the MQTT publisher with Home Assistant discovery (0.1.e) work. A native Home Assistant integration does not exist yet. See the roadmap.

The tariff editor

pip install -e ".[ui]"
python -m edbert ui --data-dir edbert_data

Open http://localhost:8501. Four steps (base price, time windows, further costs, advanced), live price curve, price at a given time, check against a real invoice, copy a catalog tariff, import JSON. English and German. See the user manual.

Publish over MQTT

pip install -e ".[mqtt]"
python -m edbert publish --data-dir edbert_data

Sends the prices of the tariffs listed in publish.json (current price, today, tomorrow, optional forecast) as retained MQTT topics with Home Assistant discovery. Market prices come from the same chain as in Earnie (ENTSO-E with a token, Energy-Charts, aWATTar). See Publishing.

Try it

pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m edbert price --tariff examples/spot_evening_surcharge_cap.json     --at 2026-12-15T18:00 --tz Europe/Vienna --epex 10
python -m edbert --lang de price --tariff examples/fixed_day_night.json     --at 2026-12-25T12:00 --tz Europe/Berlin --land DE --region BY
python -m pytest

The first command prints the price of one slot with the steps (base price, applied rule, floor/cap, VAT). Tariffs with weekday rules need --land and --region, because holidays can change the result; without them the command stops with an error instead of guessing. python -m edbert schema prints the JSON Schema of a tariff.

python -m edbert series --tariff examples/spot_evening_surcharge_cap.json \
    --grid-fee examples/grid_fee_modul3_example.json \
    --from 2026-12-15T00:00 --to 2026-12-16T00:00 --tz Europe/Vienna \
    --market-csv tests/fixtures/market_2026-12-15.csv --resolution 60

series prints prices over a time range (15, 30 or 60 minutes) from day-ahead prices in a CSV (timestamp,cent_kwh per quarter hour), optionally with a grid fee. Missing market prices stop the command with an error. Warnings go to stderr.

Why?

Many tariffs cannot be described by a single "ct/kWh" field:

• night tariffs and weekend prices (peak/off-peak), summer midday windows
• market price with markups, price cap and floor
• time-variable grid fees (§14a EnWG module 3: high, standard and low tariff)
• feed-in with "no remuneration at negative prices"
• public holidays that count like a Sunday

Edbert models this with a few building blocks, without hand-written JSON, and shows you the price curve immediately, before you use it.

Planned features

Feature	Description
Tariff editor	Guided form in four steps, price curve preview, warning for rules that never apply, invoice check against a real invoice
Multilingual	UI and user manual in German and English
Rule engine	Base price + time rules (months, weekdays, time of day, holidays), floor/cap, VAT, grid fee
Price series	Calculated prices for a selectable horizon (15, 30 or 60 minutes), for import and feed-in
Output	Home Assistant sensors (raw_today, raw_tomorrow, forecast) and MQTT (retained, with HA discovery)
Import	Catalog tariff as template, JSON file, price series (CSV), later a price-sheet assistant
Holidays	From the holidays library (DE/AT/CH by federal state or canton), offline

Non-goals: comparing or brokering tariffs, creating invoices, controlling devices. Edbert only delivers prices.

Relation to Earnie

Edbert is a stand-alone tool that is also used by Earnie, an optimizer for home batteries, PV and loads. You do not need Earnie to use Edbert.

Catalog and contributions

Edbert has a curated catalog of tariffs (DE/AT/CH). You can always create your own tariffs. Access to the community catalog and its updates is available to users

• who have contributed a tariff themselves (for a limited time), or
• who pay a small one-time fee.

A yearly subscription for automatic catalog updates is planned for later. The software itself always works, also without catalog access.

Only tariffs that are not tailored to one person are collected, and only without personal data (no postal code, name, meter number, free text or consumption data). Upload is voluntary, with a preview of the exact content. This describes the planned behavior, not a binding offer. Details: CONTRIBUTING.md and catalog/README.md.

License

The code is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0: source available; use for private, scientific, charitable and other non-commercial purposes is allowed; commercial use requires a separate license. This is not an open-source license in the OSI sense ("source-available").

LICENSE and NOTICE apply to the code. The tariff catalog and tariff contributions are covered by separate terms and a privacy notice. These legal texts are written per country in the national language (Germany and Austria: German; Switzerland: German) and are published here only after legal review; until then there is neither catalog access nor upload.

Roadmap

Step	Content
T1	Rule engine, tariff fields, user_tariffs.json, holidays, multilingual foundation
T2	Grid-fee rules and tariff_price_series (the single interface to the price series)
T3	Editor and import (template, JSON file)
T3b	MQTT publisher, market price chain, forecast (mirror, hold, key-gated plug-in)
T4	Contribution path and signed catalog access
later	Price-sheet assistant, output for evcc/EMHASS/Predbat, prices per meter

The format is described in docs/spec/tariff-format.md and docs/spec/publishing.md; examples are in examples/. User manuals: docs/user/en/.