EskomSePush (ESP), the ubiquitous load-shedding app, has successfully transformed its core mission in 2025, a year characterized by the near disappearance of power cuts. With only eight days of load-shedding this year (down from 284 days in 2023), ESP’s founders, Herman Maritz and Dan Southwood-Wells, have solidified the app’s pivot towards becoming a vital interactive community notice board and support system.
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“We never set out to build a tool that depends on South Africa suffering,” said Maritz, highlighting the team’s focus on local utility beyond electricity cuts.
The current reprieve from power cuts has allowed the team to completely re-engineer the app around local life with the launch of ESP Version 5.
- Suburban Focus: The app was rewired around actual suburbs and areas, moving away from legacy load-shedding blocks. Maritz explained, “Load-shedding still works exactly the same, but now your schedule, local chats and outage reports all live under the same place name: the place you actually live, work and complain about.”
- Advanced Moderation: ESP Chats offers significant advantages over platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. It ensures user phone numbers remain private, operates without manual moderator “despots,” and utilizes AI for first-pass moderation and message summarization, preventing users from having to scroll through hundreds of irrelevant replies.
- This adaptation has turned ESP Chats into the default way people check on any local issue, including electricity faults, water interruptions, fibre cuts, and dead traffic lights.
Despite the drop in national load-shedding, ESP maintains a large and loyal following:
- Daily Users: On quiet days, ESP averages around 300,000 daily users, climbing to roughly 500,000 daily users during major local events like big weather incidents, or water and electricity outages.
- Peak Traffic: The highest traffic occurred in February 2025, when a brief return to Stage 6 load-shedding pushed the user count to 3.2 million.
- App Downloads: Total downloads on the Google Play Store alone grew from 8.8 million at the start of 2025 to 9.8 million in early December, with the app boasting a 4.69 rating based on over 230,000 reviews.
Maritz noted that current users are more deeply engaged in local threads, observing “more first-time chatters and more replies being marked as helpful,” suggesting people are actively assisting one another.
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The ESP team is currently working on several key features to expand the app’s utility:
- Richer Area Pages: Creating “area Wikipedias” which serve as a single page per suburb for load-shedding, load reduction, municipal faults, and key local events.
- Better Maps and Context: Enabling users to visualize who else nearby is affected by an outage, providing community context beyond personal impact.
- Service Delivery Insights: Introducing user-friendly statistics showing the frequency and duration of unplanned outages in an area, tracking changes over time.
Additionally, ESP plans to open source some of its map data so external developers can build new tools. Maritz confirmed that their crowdsourced outage API is now a meaningful part of the business, with plans to expand the app to help utilities and businesses react faster when infrastructure fails.
“Our job now is to keep ESP useful, fast and friendly in that world with less panic and more ‘I know what’s going on, and I know my neighbours have my back’,” Maritz concluded.
