Tiered tariffs
Your rate steps once you pass a usage threshold. Pick one number to represent both steps and you’ve invented a rate that isn’t on your bill. Switchbuddy prices each step and blends them against how much you actually use.
Live now
Your bill, read properly.
Every comparison site asks how much power you use. Almost nobody knows. Switchbuddy doesn’t ask — it takes the numbers off the bill in your hand, including the awkward ones most tools quietly round away.
The awkward cases
Where the usual comparison falls over.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re on a large share of Australian household bills, and each one quietly breaks a naive comparison.
Mid-period rate rises
Retailers change prices part-way through a billing period, so one bill can carry two sets of rates. The comparison uses the rates you’re on now, not the ones you started the quarter on.
Solar, including the legacy schemes
Feed-in credit is subtracted from what your current plan really costs you. If you’re on a legacy Solar Bonus Scheme rate, that’s flagged rather than treated as an offer you could get again — because you can’t.
Controlled load
A separate circuit for hot water or slab heating has its own rate. It’s read off the bill and carried into the comparison instead of being folded into your main usage.
Concession cards
Tick the box in Settings and concession-only plans stay in your results. Leave it unticked and you won’t be shown a plan you can’t actually get.
Plans that don’t suit you
Membership plans, wholesale-linked pricing and home-battery plans are labelled, and battery plans are hidden unless your bill shows you have one. A cheap plan you can’t sign up to isn’t a result.
After you switch
The bit everyone forgets.
Switching once is easy. Staying on a good rate is the hard part, because nothing tells you when you stop being on one. Benefit periods lapse. Rates creep up between bills. The plan you chose two years ago is rarely still the plan you’d choose.
Switchbuddy keeps looking after you’ve moved — and asks before it assumes anything, rather than silently deciding on your behalf.
Contract expiry reminders
Told well before your benefit period ends, on a schedule you set, so you’re not finding out from the first expensive bill.
Rate-rise alerts
Upload a new bill and Switchbuddy compares it to the last one. If your rates went up, you hear about it.
It notices when you change retailer
A new retailer or plan on your latest bill means a new benefit period. Switchbuddy spots it and asks whether to move your reminder — it never moves it on a guess.
It notices when you move house
Rates are location-specific, so a new postcode makes your old bills a poor baseline. You’re asked whether you’ve moved before anything is archived.
Worth knowing
What Switchbuddy doesn’t do.
It doesn’t switch you
You go to the retailer’s own site and sign up with them directly. Switchbuddy isn’t a retailer, broker or agent and doesn’t arrange transfers.
It doesn’t cover WA or the NT
The Consumer Data Right energy data set covers the National Electricity Market — QLD, NSW, ACT, VIC, SA and TAS. Outside that we say so rather than guess.
It doesn’t promise a saving
Figures are estimates from your usage and your rates against published rates — not quotes. Sometimes the answer is that you’re already on a good plan, and you’ll be told that.