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Usage-based pricing: The best way to compare & find the right electric plan for your home.
Usage-based pricing: The best way to compare & find the right electric plan for your home.

Use your actual usage to get the best price on electricity.

Brad avatar
Written by Brad
Updated over a week ago

Pro Tip! All energy and delivery charges, discounts, and fees are already built into the prices we show on ComparePower. This way you can truly compare every plan based on the total monthly cost. 

Why Usage-based comparison shopping is so important

Electricity companies advertise their best “price per kWh” rates based on an exact monthly usage (usually 1000 or 2000 kWh). But you don’t use exactly 1000 kWh or exactly 2000 kWh. No one does.

This advertised “price per kWh” doesn’t apply the same in different households that use different amounts of energy. It’s not the same as gasoline pricing where the “price per gallon” applies to every gallon.

Buy 1 gallon or 10, it’s all the same price per gallon. 

This is not the case with electricity. 

Every plan has a different equation used to calculate your monthly bill. The math is complicated.

At ComparePower, that math has already been done for you for every plan. We show you the total monthly energy costs for all the plans based on your expected monthly usage. 

When you're viewing plans on ComparePower, you can select your expected average usage, or you can input your monthly usage history for up to 12 months to see exactly what each plan would have cost you over the past year.

This way you can be confident you aren’t signing up for a low advertised rate but instead choose a rate based on costs for your usage. That’s real power.

Continue reading to take advantage of the incredible tools the ComparePower team has developed for our fellow Texans...

Average Monthly Usage Pricing

Here you can select a home type/size to estimate your usage.  You can also type in your own value to see pricing for any usage.  Pricing will instantly update to show the total-monthly-bill pricing for all plans.  

You can continue to change your usage level to sort the plan list live.

If you want to see how an individual plan changes when you have different usage in one month, you can do that in the Plan Details area, like this:

Usage-history and Usage-range Shopping

Usage-based comparison lets you see the total cost of all the plans over a period of time. This could be a full year worth of historical data from past bills, or just a couple of months as a range.

This awesome tool is a user favorite and lets you instantly compare all the plans by total cost for any number of months combined.

You can use this tool in several different ways...

Total Annual Cost of Ownership ( aka, Power T.A.C.O.)...

Instantly calculate the total annual cost for each plan based on your home's historical usage patterns to pick a plan based on its total cost across multiple months or seasons. Put in as many months of history as you have access to - not all 12 months are required to use the tool.

High / Low Range...

Know you use about 850 kWh in the winter, and about 1700 kWh in the summer? Simple. Just type 850 into January, and 1700 in February. Now you know which plans are best for you over two different times of the year.

Pricing if you use a little more, or a little less...

Want to know how plans price if you go just over or just below your average kWh? Easy. Just type in something like 950 in January 1000 in February, and 1050 in March. Now you see what plan is best in case you consume a different amount of energy than the average you are expecting.

Here's how you use this powerful shopping tool:

Check out this short video, and the screenshots below, so you too can take advantage of this incredible tool.

Usage-based pricing Video:

Usage-based pricing screenshots:

If you want to see even more details, click the "View Plan Details" button.  And if you really want to dig in to see how exactly your bill is calculated for any rate plan, click on the "View Calculations" button:

Power in YOUR hands...

You now understand how critical it is to shop using your expected usages when comparing electricity plans. Many providers don't want you to know about this method, because it cuts through the gimmicks and gets you to the bottom line.

Now that you're empowered with the awesome tools we've built for our beloved users, and realize the importance of them, go try it and find the best electric plan for your usage situation.

The power is in YOUR hands at ComparePower.com

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