So just realized what Griddy is. I actually looked into it a few years back and wisely decided against it. Griddy isn't actually an energy company. It's more like Uber for electricity. In Texas, anybody that wants to can start up their own electric company, agree to purchase blocks of power from energy wholesalers, and sell it to consumers at an agreed upon rate. Green Energy Exchange has agreed to sell me electricity at $.068/kw.* That was presumably what GEX determined would be profitable. I'm guessing that they missed the mark this month, but they were likely well ahead of the game for most of the time. It's not going to bankrupt them or anything.
Griddy is actually a collective. For $10/mo you pool with everybody else to buy energy at the wholesale rate, which is in a constant state of flux. That wholesale rate changes every 5 minutes. Most of the time it'll be below what most people are paying, certainly below my .068, but sometimes it can go a lot higher. In this case that wholesale rate went from about $.03 to $9.0. I hate to put it this way, but these people kind of got what they signed on for. This isn't Griddy's fault. They signed on to fluctuating energy prices in exchange for saving a few bucks a month.
Moreover, since Griddy is entirely app based, you view your bill in realtime. A Griddy customer can go to the app and see what they're using and what they're paying at any time (which is why we were so quick to hear about this). When it went up to $9/kw they probably should have just shut the whole house down. They were armed with the knowledge that it probably wasn't the best time to be doing laundry or cooking a turkey in the oven. I know from recent experience that a 65º apartment will take some time to get down to 45º. If I find that my electricity rate has jumped to 9.33/kw, rest assured that I'm going full on Chuck McGill and terminating my service with an axe.