Most comparison sites ask how many people live in your house, drop you into an “average household” bucket, and estimate from there. We read your actual bill instead.
Why that matters: two identical houses on the same street can differ by hundreds of dollars a year — shift work, a pool pump, solar, electric hot water, a teenager who showers for twenty minutes. An average is a guess about someone else's home. Your bill is a measurement of yours.
The detail is the point. Each of these can move the answer by hundreds of dollars a year, and most of them are things a bedroom-count questionnaire never asks about.
| What | Why it changes the answer |
|---|---|
| Usage in kWh | The single biggest driver. Taken from your bill, not estimated. |
| Peak / shoulder / off-peak split | On a time-of-use bill, when you use power matters as much as how much. |
| Your current rates and daily supply charge | So the comparison starts from what you're genuinely paying today. |
| Solar export and feed-in rate | A high feed-in tariff can outweigh a cheaper usage rate entirely. |
| Controlled load (electric hot water) | Plans without a controlled-load rate charge that usage at the full general rate. |
| Meter type | Some plans require a smart meter; some are basic-meter only. You can't downgrade a smart meter. |
| Residential or business | Business plans are priced against business plans, never mixed. |
| Billing period and rate changes | If your bill spans a price rise, we use the current rates, not the blended average. |
| Estimated meter reads | If your meter was guessed rather than read, we flag it — your real usage may differ. |
Every plan we price comes from the Australian Energy Regulator's Consumer Data Right product data — the same public filings that sit behind the government's Energy Made Easy site. Retailers are required to keep it current. We refresh it continuously, and we price every South East Queensland plan we can retrieve, not a shortlist.
We don't accept payment for inclusion, and no retailer can pay to rank higher. Rates from that data are filed excluding GST, so we add it back before comparing anything to your bill.
A plan with a great rate and a compulsory monthly fee isn't a great plan. So fees you can't realistically avoid go into the number:
Everything in that second group is one tap away on each plan, so the comparison stays readable without hiding anything. We also show GreenPower options and any perks or sign-up incentives.
We separate plans we can price exactly from plans we can only estimate, and we say which is which. Pretending to a precision we don't have would defeat the purpose.
Plans whose structure matches your bill — the same tariff type, and for time-of-use, the same peak windows. We can compute what you'd pay to the cent.
Two checks run before any change goes live. The first re-prices real bills against their own retailer's published rates and confirms we reproduce the printed total. The second re-runs a set of real, verified bills end to end and fails if any headline saving moves unexpectedly.
That second one exists because the dangerous bug isn't the one that crashes — it's the one that quietly shifts a saving by a few hundred dollars and looks perfectly plausible.