Watch Out for the 'Off-Grid' Problem Hiding in Your Business Model

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Key Takeaways

- Growth advantages can quickly become liabilities when customers exit faster than expected.

- Fixed costs don’t vanish — they become more painful as users leave.

A lot of leaders talk about economies of scale and network effects. It’s a clean story: more people means better unit economics, you amortize fixed costs and the system feels stronger. But there’s a version of that story that people avoid.

The same advantages that make a business model favorable can also flip when people start leaving. And if you don’t plan for that, you can wake up in a situation where the math that used to protect you is now what’s hurting you. The “off-grid problem” is a good way to see this dynamic in the real world. It’s not about ideology. It’s about the mechanics of who pays for fixed costs when the customer base changes.

What “off-grid” really means, and why it matters

Here’s the intuition.

In power, there’s a grid with fixed costs. Wires, maintenance, capacity planning, all the stuff that has to exist even if demand is a little lower this month. Retail electricity bills typically include some mix of a fixed charge and a usage-based charge, but either way, the system is trying to recover those costs across the customer base.

When more people stay on the grid, those fixed costs get spread across more people, and it’s easier for the system to work.

Now introduce solar and batteries. The customers who can afford solar and batteries can reduce their reliance on the grid or leave it more aggressively. The fixed costs do not disappear. They get spread across fewer people, and everyone else’s bills go up. You can see this in the NEM revisit, where regulators are explicitly debating how rooftop solar customers should pay their share of the grid’s fixed costs.

That’s the off-grid problem: the system gets worse for the people who stay because the people who leave were helping amortize the fixed costs. Once you see that, you start seeing it as a structure that can unwind.

And that’s the business lesson. This isn’t unique to power. It can happen any time your model depends on amortizing fixed costs, economies of scale or network effects.

The same advantage can turn into the inverse

This dynamic is simple.

If your business works because fixed costs are spread across a lot of users, then the risk is that the economics change for everyone else when enough people leave.

The product can get worse for the people who stay, or the cost can go up for the people who stay, and then churn is not just churn. It becomes a spiral.

DOE has described the ‘death spiral’ scenario in basically this exact form: customers defect, rates rise for those left and that drives more defection.

This is why I think leaders should pay attention to cost-sharing systems inside companies and industries.

It’s easy to build the growth story. It’s harder to build the unwind story. But if there’s a chance of market turmoil or just a shift in customer behavior, it’s worth thinking through whether it becomes rational to subsidize people to stay, just so it doesn’t allow the network effect or the economy of scale to unravel.

That word “subsidize” makes people uncomfortable because it sounds like charity, and by that I mean a rational decision to pay for stability when stability is the thing that keeps your model coherent.

When does it become rational to subsidize people to stay?

I recommend a simple framework. You do not need to overcomplicate it.

1. Identify what advantage is actually doing the work. Is the business model favorable because you’re amortizing fixed costs? Is it a network effect? Is it both?

2. Identify who is holding the system together. Who is producing positive externalities? Who makes the platform feel stable? Who makes the unit economics work? In power, it’s “more people on the grid” spreading fixed costs. In a business, it might be your highest-retention cohort, your best customers or the users who attract other users.

3. Ask what happens if those people leave. Does the product get worse for the people who stay? Does the cost go up for the people who stay? Do fixed costs get spread across fewer users in a way that makes the system feel worse?

4. Decide the conditions where you would pay for stability. This is the part most leaders avoid. But it’s the whole point. If you wait until the system is already unraveling, you’re negotiating from weakness. If you plan for it, you can make an explicit choice about what stability is worth to you.

The point is to be deliberate. Subsidizing can be rational when it prevents a spiral. It can also be irrational if you’re just delaying the inevitable. The way you avoid the wrong version is by being specific about the tr