Your bills
Stored against your account so your history and comparisons keep working. You can delete any single bill, or your whole account, from inside the app — and doing so clears the copies held on your device too.
How it works
No magic, just arithmetic done carefully.
Switchbuddy does one thing: it works out what you are paying now, works out what each available plan would cost you at the same usage, and subtracts. Everything below is how each of those steps is done.
Capture
Photograph the bill, lay it flat and shoot straight down. Multi-page bills are fine — capture each page and they’re treated as one bill. A PDF works too; text is extracted from it directly. If a photo is too blurry to read a rate off, Switchbuddy refuses it and asks for another rather than filling the gap with a zero.
Read
An AI vision model pulls the structured numbers out: retailer, plan name, daily supply charge, every usage rate and tier boundary, solar feed-in, controlled load, average daily usage, and the billing period. A second pass looks specifically for a price change part-way through the period, because one bill can carry two sets of rates.
Nothing is stored unless the essentials read cleanly. A rate of zero is never something a retailer actually charges, so a zero is treated as “not read”, not as data.
Compare
Your postcode decides which plans are even available to you — distribution networks don’t follow state borders, and a plan sold in one suburb often isn’t sold in the next. Each available plan is then costed at your usage: supply charge for the year, usage priced tier by tier where the tariff steps, less your solar credit.
Your current plan is costed exactly the same way from the rates on your bill, so the two sides of the subtraction are built by the same code. The difference is the estimate you see.
Watch
Plan data is re-read from every retailer overnight, so a price that moved yesterday is priced correctly today. Your contract end date, your rates and your retailer are tracked between bills, and you’re told when something changes rather than being left to notice.
Where the plan data comes from
The retailers publish it. We read it.
Under the Consumer Data Right, Australian energy retailers are required to publish their electricity plans in a machine-readable form. It’s the same underlying data behind the government’s Energy Made Easy service.
Switchbuddy discovers every retailer brand in that register — 86 at last count, not a shortlist of the big names — and re-reads their full plan detail every night. Plans a retailer has withdrawn are removed; plans whose prices changed are re-priced.
Because it comes from the retailer rather than from us, the rates you’re compared against are the rates they publish. If a retailer publishes something wrong, that’s what everyone reading the feed will show, which is one reason to always check the retailer’s own plan documents before you sign up.
What that does and doesn’t cover
| Covered | QLD, NSW, ACT, VIC, SA, TAS |
| Not covered | WA and the NT — they’re outside the National Electricity Market |
| Included | Published residential market and standing offers |
| Not included | Anything negotiated privately, and large commercial contracts, which are never published |
Your information
What we hold, and what we don’t.
What retailers see
If a retailer receives a report about interest in their plans it contains the plan, the state and the date. Not your name, not your email, not your address.
What we don’t do
We don’t sell your details, and we’re not paid by a retailer to steer you toward them. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.
Detail questions
Getting into the weeds.
How accurate is the reading of my bill?
Good, but not infallible — it’s a model reading a photograph. Switchbuddy refuses a bill it can’t read a usage rate or supply charge from rather than guessing, and every extracted number is visible in the app so you can check it against the paper in front of you.
Why does it need my whole bill and not just the total?
Because the total tells you nothing transferable. Two households with the same $400 bill can be on completely different tariffs. Comparing needs the rates and the usage separately, which is exactly what the itemised part of the bill carries.
Do you use my smart meter data?
Not today. Usage comes from the average daily figure printed on your bill. Interval data from a smart meter would make time-of-use comparison sharper and it’s something we’d like to support, but it isn’t connected yet.
Why do two plans with the same name show different prices?
Retailers frequently publish several versions of a plan under one name for different distribution zones or sign-up dates. They are genuinely different offers with different rates, so they’re priced and shown separately rather than merged into an average that matches none of them.
Is the app the same on the web and on a phone?
Yes — the phone apps wrap the same product. The web app works in any browser at app.switchbuddy.com.au; the iOS and Android apps are in testing.