What to do when i'm off supply on PAYG

The numbers of customers who are still on Apollo has been dropping rapidly recently as OVO has managed to resolve several migration blockers. The remaining blockers are being worked on as a priority.

Getting rid of the legacy Apollo billing system and moving ALL customers (regardless of brand) over to the scratch-built Orion billing platform has been a major project for OVO in recent years. Apollo caused OVO far too many problems and OVO ultimately decided enough was enough - IIRC Ofgem agreed that getting rid of it would help solve those old issues from back in the day, but that doing so would not be an overnight job.

The intricate details of Apollo have never really discussed on the Forum, certainly not in the four years I’ve been on here at least. There may have been some early stuff but at the time when the Forum first launched, it was probably getting close to the point where OVO was starting to consider a replacement billing system. I know that because some of the highly active threads on here from the early days heavily discussed the “new billing platform” - we never used to reveal the codenames back then - and to be completely honest, the trail kinda went cold after that. This was all before my time though so I’m unable to say much from my own experience - I switched to OVO in 2020 when Orion had already been made the default system for new customers.

The reason web portal access was discontinued for Apollo was ultimately down to security concerns - long story short there was a security issue with it and arguably it wasn’t worth spending any more developer time on it given the fact it was ultimately under sunset anyway.

The web portal for Orion is scratch-built - just like Orion itself - and therefore cannot just be plugged into any old billing system. It works with Orion and Orion only.

One thing is confirmed though - Apollo WILL be permanently decommissioned and shut down once the last customer has been migrated. I imagine OVO will then terminate the contract with its developer/supplier/vendor once they’ve backed up the final state. No-one else is being added to Apollo anymore.

I would imagine that once the entire Apollo → Orion Migration is done and everything has been cleaned up, the entire matter will eventually succumb to the sands of time.

As for the OVO Top-Up App, it’s actually managed by Paypoint (just like the Boost Top-Up app was) and runs Paypoint written code - not OVO written code. The reason it looks and feels identical is because that’s what Paypoint does for all of the apps they manage - they all use a shared core/engine.

Can you see a banner reading Emergency contact info … at the top of this page? It lists all the channels open to you, including through the social media team who are usually quick and effective, also at weekends. You shouldn’t have to stay cold if a bit of discretionary credit would tide you over. Give them a chance to help you.