How is this a free service?

The model, in full.

We have direct arrangements with some energy retailers. Where such an arrangement is in place and you switch to that retailer through Fix Your Bill, that retailer pays us a fee. That fee is what keeps the service free for you.

Where we have no arrangement with a retailer, we earn nothing if you switch to them. We show you that retailer anyway, at whatever position your own numbers put it in, including first.

You are never charged, there is nothing to subscribe to, and there is no paid tier holding a better answer behind it. There is one answer and you get it.

What is the fee worth?

We don't publish a figure, and we would rather say so than leave the question hanging. The amount is agreed retailer by retailer, so there is no one number that would be true across this page, and a range we can't stand behind for every retailer is worth less to you than a straight answer about the shape of it.

The shape is the part that actually affects you. It is a one-off fee, paid by the retailer, once, when a customer switches. It is not a share of your bill, it does not recur, and it is not scaled to what your plan costs. There is nothing here we earn more from by you paying more.

Does that fee change what we show you?

No. Our engine ranks plans by projected annual cost on your actual usage, cheapest first. Whether we have an arrangement with a retailer is not an input to that calculation. It cannot move a plan up or down the list, because the ranking code never sees it.

This is the part we want to be held to: we show the cheapest plan first even when we earn nothing from it, and we show retailers we have no relationship with alongside the ones we do.

We don't sell placement. We don't accept payment to feature a provider. There is no “sponsored” slot.

One other thing a retailer can get from us, so it is not a surprise if you read the privacy policy. We may show a retailer how its pricing sits in the de-identified market data described there. They see the market, never a customer, and it cannot change the order your plans come back in.

Where our plan data comes from.

We build our comparison from retailers' published plan data: the Product Reference Data they lodge under the Australian Government's Consumer Data Right (CDR). We harvest it straight from the public register, not from a commercial panel of whoever pays us.

A word on what that does and does not make us. The plan data is the public half of the CDR and anyone may read it. The other half, a customer's own usage pulled from their retailer on their consent, requires accreditation. We are not an accredited data recipient. We never ask for your CDR consent and we never pull your data from your retailer. We read the bill you hand us and the plan data everyone can see.

It is the same data that powers Energy Made Easy, the government's own comparison service, in every jurisdiction Energy Made Easy covers. Victoria is not one of them: it runs its own service, Victorian Energy Compare. Victorian retailers publish their plan data to the CDR the same way, so Victoria is in our comparison either way.

Three edges to that, so you know where they are. The register covers the national electricity market: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT. Western Australia and the Northern Territory sit outside it and we do not cover them. The obligation to publish falls on retailers above the small-customer threshold, so a very small retailer can be selling in your area without appearing on the register at all.

And the register carries plans a retailer publishes for anyone to take up. It does not carry a retention offer made to you on the phone when you threatened to leave, a deal signed at your front door, or the pricing inside an embedded network such as an apartment building or a caravan park. Those exist and we cannot see them. If you have been offered one, it belongs in your decision alongside what we show you.

So the accurate sentence is every published plan from every retailer that publishes to the register, not every offer in Australia. They are close to the same thing for most households and they are not the same sentence, and we would rather write the one we can stand behind.

What if you go direct?

You can take everything we show you and sign up on the retailer's own website. You get the same plan at the same price. We won't know, and we won't chase you. We just don't get paid for that one.

That's a deliberate trade. A comparison you can act on without us is a comparison you can trust.

The honest summary.

Some retailers pay us when you switch to them. It never affects the order plans appear in. We read your actual bill instead of guessing from your postcode, and we rank on your numbers, not on who pays us.

That's the whole model. Nothing hidden.