August update

A few weeks since whatwatercosts.org went public, here's what's changed.

We've add 315 more utilities!

...and we're adding more. Our current goal is to cover all utilities over 10k people served. Expect the pace of coverage to pick up in the coming weeks.

We now capture the full OWRS-style rate structure

Extraction used to capture just the residential tariff. We've pivoted to capture every customer class in a source document — commercial, industrial, irrigation, and more — not just residential, following the Open Water Rates Specification (OWRS) shape. Each class is tagged with a controlled-vocabulary type and, for residential, we still deterministically reconstruct the simple tariff our bill calculator and validation checks expect, so nothing downstream broke.

This means the underlying data is richer than what shows up in the benchmark bill on the site today — full meter tables, all customer classes, not just the single-family rate. Big thanks to California Data Collaborative for their work on OWRS years ago. Data standards matter!

A public data feed is coming soon

With the OWRS pivot in place, we're preparing to publish that full rate structure as an open, paginated JSON feed, not just the narrow residential number we display, but the whole multi-class structure per utility, in the OWRS shape. We're finishing up documentation and a stable pagination format before calling it public; expect this to go live soon.

Website changes

• Map view. The homepage now has a Table/Map toggle — a dot map of utilities, sized by population and colored by benchmark bill.
• Population filter. The homepage now defaults to utilities serving 10,000+ people, cutting noise from very small systems while still letting you widen the filter.
• New submission flow. A dedicated /submit page now is available for folks who want to submit a rate sheet. We'll run these through our pipeline before publishing.
• This blog. You're reading it!

More to come as extraction coverage grows and the data feed goes live.