As tariffs get more time-variable — cheap night/EV windows, and now day-ahead dynamic prices — the value increasingly comes from charging the battery, EV and immersion in the cheapest slots automatically, rather than remembering to do it by hand. There are three broad levels of sophistication. The simplest is to set fixed charge windows in your inverter app (e.g. "charge battery 02:00–05:00"), which works perfectly for a standard cheap-night or EV tariff where the cheap window is the same every night.
The next level is the built-in "smart" or "intelligent" modes some inverters and battery systems now ship with, which try to cycle import/export to maximise savings automatically — the premium integrated platforms lean on this, and some owners report the intelligent modes doing a decent job out of the box. The most flexible level is DIY automation: reading the published day-ahead dynamic prices and using something like Home Assistant (often with Shelly energy-monitoring hardware) to trigger battery/EV charging only in the cheapest half-hours. That's powerful and tariff-agnostic, but it's a hobbyist's project, not a click-and-go feature.
A common question is how the dynamic price feed even reaches your automation — for now, the day-ahead prices are published in advance and the more technical owners pull them into their own systems to schedule loads. If you don't want to tinker, a fixed-window setup on a good EV tariff captures most of the benefit with none of the fuss; if you enjoy automation or you're on a dynamic tariff, the Home-Assistant route squeezes out the extra. Match the effort to your appetite — you don't need AI to save money, you need your big loads landing in the cheap hours.