EcoPing Is Evolving into CarbonRunner 🌱
We’ve made the decision to stop signups on EcoPing so we can focus all our efforts on CarbonRunner; our carbon-aware compute platform.
Why we're stopping signups...
We’ve decided to stop new signups for EcoPing. The platform will continue to run for existing users, but we’re no longer onboarding new customers and sites.
We want to focus fully on CarbonRunner. We believe it has far greater potential to reduce carbon emissions and to grow from a side project into a sustainable, impactful business.
EcoPing has been brilliant as a conversation starter and lead-gen tool, but CarbonRunner is where we can make a bigger difference.
What does CarbonRunner do?
CarbonRunner shifts compute like training AI models, CI/CD jobs like GitHub Actions to the lowest CO2 regions around the world in real-time.
For example... don't train your AI model in N. Virginia at 430gCO2e/kWh, run it in Paris, 24gCO2/kWh to save over 15 metric tonnes of CO2e, and $150k.
Doing so sees a 90% reduction in carbon emissions, 25% saving in cost and it's only a one-line code change.
Issues with EcoPing...
We’ve been lucky. EcoPing has run for years without us needing to push a single line of code. It’s been incredibly stable, thanks TypeScript.
But over time, things have changed.
AI crawlers and bot detection have become more aggressive. Services like Cloudflare now routinely block bots, including ours ,unless users manually allowlist them. That creates friction, and it breaks the simplicity we built EcoPing around.
What made EcoPing special was its non-invasive approach. We simply crawled your site, measured the total transfer size, and used that to estimate your website’s emissions.
But that approach depends on being able to access your site in the first place. And increasingly, we can’t.
Not all websites are made, or hosted, equally.
What can we use instead?
To my knowledge EcoPing is still the only app that tracks website carbon emissions over time.
But, you can get a great one-off report from the wonderful and original Website Carbon Calculator another alternative would be EcoGrader.
What did we learn?
First, it’s great to be part of a team. We were lucky enough to contribute to the early discussions around website carbon calculations as part of the Sustainable Web Design group, and we’re proud to have helped shape some of those foundational ideas.
Second, doing things differently doesn’t mean you’re doing them wrong. From day one, we took a location-based approach, looking at where your site’s resources were served from and the carbon intensity of the electricity powering those regions. We hooked it up to live grid data because we believed timing and geography mattered.
When we first introduced that idea years ago, it wasn’t widely accepted. But over time, that approach has gained traction, and we’re glad we stuck with it and continue to do it.
Are Website Carbon Emissions still important?
Yes, definitely!
It still makes a big difference is incredibly worth wile thing to do. Not only for a faster more performant point of view but to save CO2.
Edinburgh University recently saved 25 tonnes of CO2 annually because of better web design choices!
Can I buy EcoPing?
You sure can! We're going to keep it online for a bit longer and make sure the people using it are all happy, then we're going to turn it off.
EcoPing does cover costs and generates a bit of monthly revenue. Everyday new people view and signup for EcoPing, all organically. They join over 3,000+ customers tracking thousands of sites (and pages) every day. EcoPing would make for a wonderful lead generation tool.
It would be great for it to go to a new home. We would be happy to put your logo on the site and continue it. So if you're interested please feel free to drop me a message on LinkedIn and make me an offer.
Want to measure your GitHub Actions carbon emissions for free?
Just like EcoPing, CarbonRunner is easy to get up and running and start measuring your GitHub Actions emissions. And once you've measure you can see your impact over time.