How this site works

Texas has hundreds of electricity plans, advertised in ways that make them hard to compare. Powerbilly prices every plan at the power you actually use, all-in, and flags the catches.

The cost math

Power to Choose prices every plan at three sample levels, 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh a month, and you shop by picking one of them. Providers design plans around exactly that. The classic trick is a bill credit of $100 or so that only applies once a month’s usage reaches 1,000 kWh, so the plan looks cheap at the level everyone sorts by and costs far more at 900. The published prices are all-in, TDU delivery and any credit included, which means the trick leaves a fingerprint in the shape of the three numbers. When we see it we rebuild the plan’s real structure, the actual per-kWh rate, the base charge, and the credit with its threshold, so the cliff shows up in our math the way it would show up on your bill. The same shape test catches minimum-usage fees, the same trick run in reverse.

Picking the sample closest to your average doesn’t protect you, because no home uses its average every month. A Texas home that averages 1,000 kWh runs closer to 700 in March and over 1,500 in August, so on a credit plan it misses the threshold and pays full freight for more than half the year. Nothing at the 1,000 kWh sample point warns you about that. We price all twelve months instead of one number. Enter a recent bill and we project the year from your area’s seasonal pattern, which you can open and adjust month by month, then rank every plan by what the whole year really costs.

What we flag

Plans are often priced to win the Power to Choose sort rather than to be a good deal, so we mark the common tricks: bullseye pricing that’s cheap only at 1,000 kWh, bill credits that need a usage threshold, minimum-usage fees, base and setup charges, and autopay or smart-thermostat requirements. Power to Choose, explained goes deeper.

Where the data comes from

Plans come from the Public Utility Commission of Texas’s Power to Choose dataset, refreshed regularly, each linked to its official Electricity Facts Label. We aren’t affiliated with Power to Choose or the PUCT.