The information you need is all printed on the bill you already have. Nobody should have to estimate their own electricity usage to find out whether they’re being overcharged.
Australian electricity retail is competitive on paper and opaque in practice. Retailers publish thousands of plans, the good rate you signed up for usually lasts twelve months, and when it ends nothing arrives in the post to tell you. Plenty of households and small businesses are paying several hundred dollars a year more than they need to, for no reason other than that checking is tedious.
The tools meant to help mostly start by asking how much power you use. Almost nobody knows. So you guess, and every number after the guess inherits it.
Switchbuddy starts somewhere better: the bill in your hand already contains your rates, your usage and your billing period. Read those properly and the comparison becomes arithmetic rather than estimation.
Today, we don’t. Switchbuddy is free, and we hold no commission arrangement with any energy retailer. When you pick a plan you go to that retailer’s own website and sign up with them; no money changes hands between us.
We may introduce referral arrangements in future. If we do, it will be stated here and in the Terms of Service before it happens, and it will never change the order plans are ranked in. Ranking follows the estimated cost to you, and that is the only thing it will ever follow.
Every dollar figure is an estimate built from your bill and published rates, and it is described that way. We don’t claim to compare “every plan in Australia”, because filters, coverage and the limits of the data mean nobody can.
The rates read off your bill are visible in the app. If a plan carries a demand charge, a membership requirement or wholesale-linked pricing, it’s labelled rather than buried.
If a bill can’t be read, or you’re somewhere we don’t cover, you get told. A wrong number presented confidently is worse than no number.
Delete a bill or your entire account from inside the app, and the copies on your device go with it. Every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe that needs no login.
Switchbuddy Pty Ltd is an Australian company based in Wodonga, Victoria. The product is built here, the data stays in Australian data centres, and the database and its backups sit in Australian regions.
Photograph your last bill and find out in about a minute.