The Startup That Wants to Sell You a Subscription to New York City Tap Water Explains Itself.
That is the concept behind Reefill, a start-up that aims to bring the subscription model to the simple, free act of filling up a water bottle at a cafe.
On Monday, I met Connorton and co-founder Jason Pessel, who had the idea for Reefill during a thirsty moment in Manhattan, at a crowded downtown café.
Two dollars a month is a sizable mark-up from the penny-per-gallon water costs from the tap.
That’s why, despite its founders’ proclivity for tap water, Reefill stations run the water they pipe from the city’s system through several more filters.
It’s tap water in a suit.
Then again, it’s hard not to look at both a "smart" fountain network and the bottled water industry and ask why the promise of the public drinking fountain—the kind you could access without a phone, without walking into a café—has failed even as Americans drink more water than ever before.
Incredibly, installing a new water fountain can cost New York City into the six figures; installing a Reefill, which piggybacks on the sunk costs of a store, costs a few thousand dollars.
And yet: New York City has nearly 2,000 public water fountains.
As a New Yorker, that’s a network I’m already subscribed to, and I’d like to see better results.