Texas · commercial · independent

Your facility's electric bill, surveyed.

Somebody calls you every week promising to save you twenty percent on electricity. They are paid by the company they put you with, and the amount is built into the rate you sign, where you will never see it. We are not that. We take apart the bill you already have and show you where every dollar goes, what is fixable, and what a switch would not touch at all.

We take no commission, no referral fee and no rate adder from any electricity company. You pay us or nobody does.

The first thing we look at

You are billed for your single worst fifteen minutes.

A demand-metered business pays two different bills stapled together. One is for the electricity you used. The other is for the highest fifteen-minute peak you hit that month, charged per kilowatt, every month, whether you hit it once or a hundred times.

On a lot of small facilities that peak is a third of the bill and it is set by accident: the compressor, the ovens and the rooftop unit all coming up together at seven in the morning because that is when somebody unlocked the door. Moving one of them by twenty minutes is free.

No retailer will ever tell you this, because the peak charge is the utility's and switching does not change it by a cent. It is invisible to the person selling you a rate, and it is the first thing we measure.

92 kW · ONE MORNING billed all month at $5.20 per kW 6am noon 10pm
An illustration of a demand profile. Your own is drawn from your meter's fifteen-minute readings.

What makes this different

Everyone else in this market gets paid when you sign something.

The broker who calls you

  • Earns a commission built into the rate, usually a fraction of a cent on every kilowatt-hour you use for the length of the contract.
  • Never quotes you the number they are making, and it does not appear on the bill.
  • Has no reason to mention your demand charge, your rate class or your tax status, because none of those pay them anything.
  • Cannot tell you to stay where you are, because staying pays nothing.
  • Sends you the retailers who pay the best commission, which is not the same list as the retailers who quote the best price.

Scout

  • Charges you a flat fee and takes nothing from any electricity company, ever.
  • Prints an estimate of what your current supplier's margin looks like, so you can see what the last person made.
  • Measures the demand charge, the rate class and the sales-tax position first, because that is usually where the money actually is.
  • Will tell you plainly when the answer is that you are already fine. That happens, and you should hear it from someone who is not losing a sale by saying it.
  • Runs the bid to every retailer who will quote your meter and hands you the raw answers, including the ones we were not offered a cut on.

Where the money usually is

On most small facilities, the rate is not the biggest number on the page.

These are the six things we check before we look at a single competing quote. Four of them a switch cannot fix.

Almost always

15 min

The demand charge

Your peak sets a charge you pay every month. We find when it happens and what is running at the time. Often it is one piece of equipment and one schedule change.

Surprisingly often

Rate class

The wrong utility tariff

The utility has several commercial rate schedules. Most businesses were put on one at hookup and never moved. Changing costs nothing and is worth real money.

If you make or process anything

8.25%

Sales tax you may not owe

Texas exempts electricity used predominantly in manufacturing or processing. It takes a predominant-use study. It comes off every future bill and can be claimed back years.

Invisible by design

0.2–0.5¢

Somebody else's commission

If a broker put you on this contract, their fee is inside your rate per kilowatt-hour. We estimate it against what the market would have quoted, and we print the number.

The expensive one

Rollover

A contract that ended quietly

A commercial term that lapses does not stop. It rolls to a holdover rate that can move every cycle. We find the end date and tell you how long you have.

On some meters

Power factor

A penalty for equipment

Motors and older equipment can drag your power factor below the utility's threshold and earn a surcharge. It is fixable with hardware, and worth knowing before you buy any.

What you get back

Every charge on your bill, traced to whoever set it.

Not a savings claim. A teardown. We add up every line on your bill and show you which part your retailer controls, which part the utility controls, and which part is your own equipment. The parts add up to what you actually paid, so there is nothing hidden in a line called other.

Then a findings list, each one with a dollar figure and an honest label: whether it is something you can act on this month, something that needs a study, or something that is simply the cost of running the building.

Then, and only then, what the market would quote you, with the spread between the best and worst offer stated up front so you know how much the decision is even worth.

A bill, in cross-section

Energy you used Demand charge Delivery, per kWh Fixed and tax

Your retailer sets the top layer. The utility sets the middle two and charges the same whoever sells you electricity. The state sets the tax. Switching moves the top layer and nothing else.

How it works

Three steps, and two of them are ours.

You send one bill

Both pages, however you have it. A photograph off your phone is fine. You do not need to gather anything else: we request your twelve months of meter readings from Smart Meter Texas ourselves, once you sign a one page authorization.

We take it apart

Every charge traced, the peak located in your own fifteen-minute data, the rate class checked against the utility's filed tariffs, and the tax position screened.

You get the report

Findings with dollar figures, what to do about each, and what a switch would and would not change. Yours to keep, and yours to take to anyone else for a second opinion.

Right now

We are testing this on real bills, and yours is free.

The engine is built and the arithmetic is proven. What it has not had enough of is real commercial bills, because every utility and every retailer formats theirs differently.

So for the moment we are doing these at no charge. Upload one bill and we will send back the full teardown. Nothing to sign, no account, and we do not want your business as a customer for anything else. If the report finds nothing, we will say so, and you will have lost an email.

Upload a bill

Or ask a question first. We would rather talk than have you wonder what the catch is.

What it costs

One price, quoted before we start, and no percentage of anything.

A broker on a facility your size earns somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500 a year, every year of the contract, and it is inside the rate where you cannot see it. Our most expensive service costs about what they take in a single year, once, and we show you the arithmetic.

The teardown

$500

one site, paid once

  • Which part of your bill is your retailer, which is the utility, and which is tax
  • The exact fifteen minutes that set your demand charge, and what was running then
  • Whether the utility has a cheaper rate schedule you should be on
  • Whether you qualify to stop paying sales tax on electricity
  • Every finding costed, and what it adds up to over three years
  • The report is yours, in writing, to take anywhere

See a sample teardown →

Teardown and bid · most take this

$1,000

one site, paid once

  • Everything in the teardown
  • We run the request to every retailer who will quote your meter
  • Quotes normalized so you are comparing the same thing, on the same terms and dates
  • Every reply passed to you unedited, including from the retailers that pay brokers nothing and so rarely get shown to anyone
  • You sign directly with whoever you pick. We are never on the contract

See a sample bid →

The watch

$200/year

add to either · free first year with the bid

  • We hold your contract end date and tell you 90 days out, not 9
  • Every bill checked against the tariff for errors and drift
  • An alert if your peak moves enough to matter
  • A short report every quarter, even when it says nothing happened
  • Most useful mid-contract, when the renewal date is the thing that will cost you
  • Free for a year with the bid, whenever you take it
  • Cancel any time. There is nothing to unwind

See a sample watch report →

When you pay

Nothing up front. Send the bill, we look at it, and we tell you whether this is worth doing on your facility. Plenty of the time the answer is no.

Once, when you commission it. $500 for the teardown, or $1,000 for the teardown and the bid together. Quoted before we start and never a percentage of anything.

Mid-contract is fine. Take the teardown alone now, come back at renewal, and the bid is still $500 with the first year of the watch included. Splitting it over two years costs what doing it at once would have.

Whether it is worth it, honestly

On the sample facility the teardown found $5,755 a year. At $500 that is eleven times what it cost, and we would take that trade every time. On a facility spending under about $12,000 a year on electricity it usually is not, because the findings scale with the bill and the fee does not.

So we will tell you before you pay. Send the bill, we will look at it, and if your facility is too small for this to pay for itself we will say so and you will owe nothing. We would rather lose a $500 sale than have somebody feel they were sold something.

What we will not do

We will not take a percentage of what we find. The moment our fee depends on the size of the number, we have the same problem as everyone else who calls you, and you would be right to discount everything we say.

We will not take a commission, a referral fee or a rate adder from any retailer, ever. That is the whole reason this works, and it is the one thing we cannot trade away.

Who we are to the retailer

We act as your representative. We never present ourselves as you, and we are not a party to whatever you sign. Texas calls anyone who advises on choosing a retailer a broker, and requires them to be registered and to say how they are paid.

You pay us. No retailer pays us anything. Every request we send says so in writing and asks for the price quoted with no broker fee inside it. Where a retailer offers us a margin anyway, we decline it and print what was offered.