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Choosing a Utility API: Why Bayou Is The Smart Arcadia Arc API Alternative

If your business needs utility data, picking the right provider directly impacts whether you can acquire and keep customers profitably. Authentication and data delivery issues cause customers to abandon your funnel, wasting acquisition spend. After signup, unreliable data and re-authentication hassles erode trust, driving churn and reducing lifetime value.

Utility data is also a hard problem to solve. You’re dealing with customers’ private information, and data policies and practices vary widely across utilities. The right utility API provider handles this complexity so your team can focus on your core business.

We recently published a multi-part series on key considerations when choosing a utility data provider, and this post applies that framework to compare Bayou to Arcadia’s utility API, often known as Arcadia Arc.

Arcadia vs. Bayou Utility API Comparison

Here’s a quick table detailing why Bayou should be your preferred Arcadia Arc alternative; we’ll examine each area in detail below. The differences impact your conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, development speed, and ability to scale profitably.

Category	Bayou	Arcadia
Broad Coverage	Electricity and gas data covering 66% of US meters with a target of 78% by March 2026 and a path to 100%. Every utility comes with instant authentication, data delivery, MFA support, and all available data types. This means instant interval data for 66% of US meters.	Electricity, gas, water, and other utility data covering 95% of US utility accounts. But that coverage comes with several caveats. Authentication times, data delivery times, and MFA support vary widely by utility and data type. This means instant interval data for about 23%* of US meters.
Frictionless Customer Experience	Simple embedded form to connect the customer’s utility accounts. All customers are authenticated in real-time. All data is delivered to you in under 1 minute. Full Multi-factor authentication support for all utilities where it’s required by that Bayou supports. (26 utilities covering 34% of US meters)	Embedded form to connect the customer’s utility accounts. About half of Arcadia’s supported utilities include “real-time” authentication via their RTCV tier. The rest can take up to 24 hours to authenticate. Actual stats are not published. Data delivery times vary. Arcadia claims data delivery times of “typically 5-10 minutes” for statement data after authentication and around 30 minutes for interval data, or 2 minutes in the limited cases where “Instant Intervals” are supported. Full Multi-factor authentication support is offered for 10 utilities covering 16% of US meters.
Reliability and Support	Overall success rate of 94.5%. Full transparency on success rates by utility. Direct support from our engineering team via slack, email, phone, or whatever works best for your team.	No reliability data published. Support via Zendesk ticketing system, email, or phone.
Developer-Friendly Experience	Options from point and click web app to full API integration. Self service product/API, coding quickstart takes less than 3 minutes and is free to try.	Options from no-code to full API integration. You must work with sales to get a key to try out the APIs.
Security	Publicly documented security practices covering credential and data protection, infrastructure hardening, and organizational security. Security-first engineering culture.	Limited documentation on security practices.
Total Cost of Ownership	Instant, reliable authentication and data converts more prospects in your funnel and keeps customers from churning. Open APIs and direct engineering support reduce development costs. Transparent pricing and published reliability metrics let you estimate TCO more accurately.	TCO is difficult to estimate due to gated APIs, unpublished reliability/speed metrics, undisclosed pricing, and inconsistent support tiers across utilities.

Wondering how Bayou stacks up against other Arcadia API competitors? We recently published a similar comparison focused on Bayou as a UtilityAPI alternative.

Broad Coverage

The right coverage unlocks your full addressable market. Consistent utility support for all your utilities enables you to build once and immediately serve customers across the country with a single experience. When your provider has a clear path to 100% coverage, you can plan your business expansion without worrying about juggling different utility data access methods.

Bayou provides instant electricity and gas data for most large US utilities, covering 66% of US meters today, with a public roadmap to support 78% by March 2026 (all large US utilities). Directionally Bayou will support 100% of US meters and start expanding coverage beyond the US (likely first in Canada) by the end of 2026.

Bayou’s coverage is built on a simple promise: instant and reliable. Every utility we support comes with instant authentication, instant data delivery, integrated Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) support, and robust reliability. If the utility offers gas or interval meter data, you get it – no exceptions. This gives you the complete picture of your customer’s energy usage, every time, with no surprises in your conversion funnel.

Arcadia claims to cover 95% of US utility accounts and have additional global reach. For teams evaluating Arcadia Arc competitors like Bayou, it’s important to note that Arcadia’s coverage comes with significant variability. Support differs by utility in a few ways:

• Availability of interval data (about 20% of supported utilities)
• Speed of authentication and data delivery (more on these below)
• Support for utilities that offer or require MFA (more on this below)

In summary: while Arcadia’s API may have more top-line coverage, Bayou delivers instant coverage, comprehensive MFA support, and all available data types (bills, intervals, green button data, utility account) for 100% of our supported utilities – no exceptions, no variability. Read more on how to evaluate utility API coverage in our recent post on Coverage, Utility Bill Data, and Interval Meter Data.

Frictionless Customer Experience

Every second of friction in your utility connection flow directly impacts your bottom line. When customers authenticate their accounts, you’re asking for trust at a critical conversion moment – even brief delays cause prospects to abandon your funnel. And slow data delivery means you can’t present personalized offers while customers are still engaged. Solstice saw this firsthand: switching to instant authentication made their enrollment 82% faster and dramatically improved conversion rates.

Arcadia and Bayou handle the credential collection basics similarly, but critical differences emerge in authentication speed, data delivery speed, and Multi-Factor Authentication support – differences that directly impact your conversion rates and customer experience.

Speed of Authentication and Utility Bill/Interval Meter Data Delivery

Target instant authentication and under 60 seconds for data delivery to keep customers moving through your funnel.

Bayou’s approach: Instant authentication (typically under 15 seconds) and rapid data delivery (under 2 minutes for both bills and interval meter data) across all supported utilities. One consistent experience covering 66% of US meters today.

Arcadia’s approach: Arcadia has tiers of performance for both authentication and data delivery.

Authentication speed has two tiers::

• Standard tier: can take hours, and involve multiple asynchronous communications with the customer
• “RTCV” tier: Arcadia claims “real-time” credential validation

Data Delivery speed has one tier for bills and two tiers for smart meter data:

• Utility bill data typically takes 5-10 minutes and can be 30 minutes+
• Standard interval data delivery: 30 minutes or more
• “Instant Intervals”: 2 minutes or less for single-meter credential, longer for more meters.

This creates the scenarios shown in the table below, where even Arcadia’s best-case utilities (covering a small portion of the market) still require 5-10 minutes before you can present offers.

	Scenario	Coverage	Auth Time	Utility Data Delivery Time	Total Time to Present Offers
Arcadia Slowest Case	Standard Auth	About two thirds of supported utilities	Hours to days	Bills: 5-10 to 30+ min Intervals: 2 to 30+ min	Hours to days
Arcadia Mid Case	RTCV + Slower data delivery	About a quarter of supported utilities	“Real-time” (speed not published)	Bills: 5-10 to 30+ min Intervals: 2 to 30+ min when available	30+ minutes
Arcadia Fastest Case	RTCV + Fast data delivery	Fraction of supported utilities, covering about 23% of US electric meters	“Real-time” (speed not published)	Bills: 5-10 min Intervals: 2 min	5-10 minutes
Bayou	Instant auth, instant data delivery	All supported utilities, 66% of meters	Under 15 sec	Bills: Under 2 min Intervals: Under 2 min	Under 2 minutes

Note: While Arcadia’s documentation provides claimed timing benchmarks, we’ve heard from many customers evaluating both platforms that actual performance can be very different from the documentation. We encourage you to test both solutions with your specific utility mix and customer flow to validate real-world performance. (Sign up here for a free Bayou account and connect your first 10 customers free to evaluate the difference yourself.)

This variability has real costs. With Arcadia, half your customers may wait hours, and even best-case utilities require 5-10 minutes – enough time for prospects to abandon your funnel. Bayou’s utility bill API eliminates this uncertainty with sub-2-minute delivery of bills and intervals across all utilities.

But speed is only half the story – MFA support determines whether customers can authenticate at all.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA)

A utility API that doesn’t properly handle MFA will cause significant operational problems for your business including:

• Not being able to get utility data at all from utilities with mandatory MFA
• 30-50+% incremental customer drop-off during utility account authentication for utilities with optional MFA
• Constant support tickets from confused customers
• High churn from frequently requiring customers to re-authenticate in-order to get their utility data

This problem is rapidly expanding in an unpredictable way – Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) now affects over 41% of U.S. utility meters, with a growing portion under mandatory MFA. In 2025, PG&E, and FirstEnergy brought 12 million customers under MFA and Exelon enacted mandatory MFA for its 10 million customers (including ComEd and PECO), all with limited notice.

How Do These Utility APIs Handle MFA?

Bayou handles MFA for all our supported utilities using a unified solution, with 26 out of our 58 utilities currently requiring MFA. With our product, you get:

• Instant authentication: customers can complete the MFA process in 5 seconds or less
• Durable utility data access: Get customer data for 90+ days from a single authentication
• Automate re-authentication: Bayou detects and sends clear notifications to let your product know when customers need to re-authenticate, at scale

Arcadia’s MFA offering relies on multiple disparate MFA handling methods, each with different trade-offs and coverage limitations:

• Token Submission (only 10 electric utilities): Sessions “last 20 minutes to months” and Arcadia doesn’t disclose which utilities get which duration. As cited above, 20 minutes isn’t long enough to retrieve all the necessary data in many cases.
• MFA Opt-Out (only for optional MFA utilities that allow MFA to be turned off): Ask customers to disable MFA with their utility account entirely. Weakens security and customer trust.
• Guest Account Access (PG&E only): Requires manual steps per their documentation
• Manual Methods: Customers send bill copies for manual processing – slow and can’t include interval data.

These differences in authentication speed, data delivery, and MFA support are why many companies choose Bayou as an Arcadia API alternative. Get a full breakdown on how Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA) Impacts Utility API Access here, including what % of customers have MFA for each utility. And read more about other key factors to consider in our post on Customer Experience for Accessing Utility Data.

Reliability And Support

Reliability directly impacts your revenue. When authentication fails or data doesn’t arrive, customers drop out of your funnel or churn from your product. And when issues occur, the speed and quality of support determines whether they’re minor hiccups or major disruptions to your business.

Reliability

Bayou delivers exceptional reliability, with success rates approaching 100% for many utilities, including 99.9% at Xcel Energy, 98.8% at Eversource, and 97.6% at ComEd – major utilities serving millions of customers. Our median success rate across all utilities is 94.5% and detailed success rates for utilities are available on our utility support page and /utilities API endpoint.

This level of reliability comes from continuously monitoring utility websites, proactively adapting to changes, and implementing comprehensive data quality checks as part of meter data collection. (Learn more about our approach to reliability here.)

Arcadia does not disclose reliability metrics. However, their multiple fallback mechanisms suggest that their focus is not entirely on maximizing reliability for their faster authentication and data delivery paths.

Support

When utility connections break, speed matters. The difference between “fixed in an hour” and “escalated to engineering, ETA unknown” is the difference between a minor hiccup and lost customers.

Bayou’s approach: Direct access to the engineers who built the system. When you hit an issue, you’re not talking to a support rep reading from a script – you’re talking to someone who can actually fix it. We connect however works best for you: shared Slack channels, email, or phone. Our CEO’s contact info is literally printed in your terminal during the quickstart guide.

This isn’t just about being responsive – working closely with you gives us invaluable feedback that makes our product better. We want to hear when something breaks, what’s confusing, what’s missing. It’s a partnership, not a ticketing system.

We back this up with documented SLAs and business hours coverage, but in practice you’re usually getting much faster resolution because you’re talking directly to engineers who know the system inside and out.

Arcadia’s approach: Traditional support infrastructure with documented SLAs and tiered response times. You submit tickets through their Zendesk system or call a support line, where a customer service representative attempts to resolve your issue. If they can’t, it gets escalated to another team.

The practical difference: When a utility changes their login flow and breaks your integration, Bayou’s engineer can diagnose and quickly deploy a fix. With multi-layer escalation, that same issue can take days as it moves through support tiers – and every hour you’re waiting is an hour your customers can’t authenticate.

Developer-Friendly Experience

Your developers shouldn’t be energy data API experts. They should be building your product.

Developer experience isn’t a feature at Bayou – it’s our core product philosophy. We run regular hackathons and pair-program with developers to refine every step of our integration.

Deploy to Production in One Afternoon

Bayou:

• Self-service product access – no sales calls required. Test with fake data or up to 10 real customer utility accounts for free, then simple usage-based pricing after that.
• Quickstart guide that gets you from sign-up to authenticated customer in under three minutes
• Robust Documentation & Error Handling: Clear docs, comprehensive API references, and intuitive error messages.

Arcadia: Sales engagement required before API access. Schedule demo, discuss terms, get provisioned. First API call in 1-2 weeks, then integration work begins.

One Simple Integration for All Your Utilities

Bayou: One authentication flow that’s consistently fast and reliable across all utilities, with a unified data model. This is a big reason companies choose Bayou as an Arcadia API alternative – write it once, deploy everywhere.

Arcadia: Different code paths for RTCV vs Standard auth, four MFA approaches (detailed in friction-less customer experience section) and async vs real-time data delivery. Your codebase needs conditional logic for different utility tiers – and that complexity compounds as utilities change.

Set It and Forget It

Bayou: 94.5% reliability means utility data doesn’t interrupt your sprints or pull developers off roadmap work. When utilities change their login flow or add new data requirements, we handle it – no code changes needed on your end.

Arcadia: Unpublished reliability and greater complexity mean allocating ongoing sprint budget to utility data maintenance. When utilities change authentication methods or data formats, you’re evaluating which tier applies and potentially updating your integration.

The bottom line: With Bayou, you deploy to production quickly with one simple integration that becomes reliable infrastructure for all your utilities. With Arcadia you’re gated by sales on API access, build disparate logic for different utility scenarios, and manage compounding complexity as utilities evolve and reliability issues arise.

Security

Security in utility data is non-negotiable – you’re handling credentials that access customers’ personal information. A breach would damage customer trust and could shut down operations entirely.

Bayou’s security is built and maintained by our world-class US-based engineering team, who treat it as a core engineering priority, not a compliance checkbox. Our public documentation lets you verify our approach and confidently answer questions from your team or customers.

Credential Protection

Our system ensures that once credentials are saved, they can never be read by a human – not by Bayou’s support team, someone from your company, or even the customer:

• Credentials are immediately encrypted using AWS KMS, with private keys stored on hardware security modules that can never be accessed directly
• Only essential platform components can request decryption via strict access control lists
• Platform partitioning isolates elevated permissions from customer-facing applications – even if our frontend is breached, customer credentials stay safe

Infrastructure Security

Beyond credential encryption, we practice defense in depth across our platform and organization::

• HTTPS with modern encryption algorithms, DNS CAA to restrict certificate authorities, and HSTS preload in major browsers
• Protection against email impersonation (DMARC, SPF, DKIM)
• Protection against cross-site attacks (CSPs, same-site cookies, CSRF tokens)
• Continuous library updates and team-wide cybersecurity training with mandatory password managers and 2FA

Arcadia provides limited public documentation on how they protect utility credentials or how they keep their organization as a whole secure.

Total Cost of Ownership

Bayou’s pricing is transparent: $24 per customer meter per year with your first 10 customers free. Arcadia doesn’t publish pricing.

Beyond pricing, Bayou’s value shows up in two ways: growing revenue and keeping your team focused.

Instant, reliable authentication with robust MFA support means you win more customers. Consistent meter data collection and delivery combined with durable 90+ day MFA sessions reduces customer pain points, allowing you to keep more customers.

Your team can stay focused on your core business because Bayou offers one simple integration for all your utilities with high reliability – shielding you from firefighting utility data issues.

Companies choose Bayou to grow faster across more markets while their team stays focused on their core business. As a reliable Arcadia API alternative, Bayou helps you avoid slower growth and constant distractions that pull focus from what actually differentiates your product. Read more about our approach to TCO in our recent deep dive on the Total Cost Of Ownership For Getting Meter Data.