Civic tech — 2024

Dalameter — make it happen

Municipal billing is broken. Dalameter makes your dispute impossible to ignore.

The gap

South African municipalities overbill. It’s not an edge case. It’s routine. And the dispute process is designed to exhaust you into giving up: the right form, the right office, the right reference number, repeated until you pay the wrong amount just to make it stop.

Dalameter was built for that gap. Between “this is wrong” and “I can prove it, formally, in a way you have to respond to.”

How it works
Photograph your meter
Dalameter timestamps and stores the reading with a SHA-256 hash. The evidence chain is tamper-evident.
Repeat monthly
Every reading builds the chain. The longer the history, the stronger the case.
Receive a wrong bill
Dalameter compares your logged readings to the billed amount and flags the discrepancy.
Auto-generate the dispute
Dalameter drafts the formal dispute letter, formatted for the specific municipality, citing your evidence chain by hash.
Send it
The municipality has a legal obligation to respond to a properly lodged dispute with documented evidence.
Dalameter mobile app
The evidence chain

SHA-256 is a cryptographic hash function. When Dalameter logs a meter reading, it generates a unique hash of the image and timestamp. If anything changes, the hash changes. That makes the evidence tamper-evident: you can prove the reading was logged at that time, and that it hasn’t been altered.

This matters in formal dispute proceedings. “I took a photo” is not evidence. “Here is a timestamped, hashed, unaltered photographic record of the meter reading on this date” is.

Architecture
Mobile app
Flutter PWA
Offline-capable
Camera integration
SHA-256 hashing client-side
Web dashboard
Next.js
Supabase backend
Evidence chain viewer
Dispute letter generator
Backend
Supabase (Postgres + Storage)
Evidence chain: SHA-256 + timestamps
Municipality database (SA)
Auto-letter templating
Where it’s at

Dalameter is in active development. The SHA-256 evidence chain is built and working. The Flutter app handles meter reading capture and local storage. The dispute letter generator drafts correctly for major South African municipalities.

Beta access is pending final testing of the chain verification layer. If you’re a South African resident dealing with municipal billing issues and want to be in the beta, get in touch.

Get beta access