Kilowise
KilowiseHow Kilowise turns your usage and a plan's disclosures into an estimated cost.
Every plan starts from Texas's official comparison site, PowerToChoose.org, which lists provider, plan name, contract term, rate type, cancellation fee, renewable percentage, and price at three standard usage tiers (500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh a month). Your zip code is matched to your utility (the company that delivers electricity over the wires, separate from who bills you for it) using that same site's own lookup.
Where possible, Kilowise also reads a plan's actual Electricity Facts Label (EFL), the disclosure every Texas plan is legally required to publish, to find its real billing formula rather than relying on the three tier prices alone. Not every plan's EFL can be read this way yet; see "When a plan's real formula can't be read" below for what happens then.
You can also type in a renewal or loyalty offer from your current provider, using the same numbers its own EFL discloses, to see how it compares. That's request-only: it's used to compute that one result and is never saved or shown to anyone else.
Kilowise asks for your usage as twelve separate monthly figures, not one yearly average. Texas summers push air-conditioning usage well above a typical spring month, so a flat average smooths over exactly the swing that makes one plan cheaper than another for your specific household. Each month's usage is run through a plan's real cost formula (energy charge, delivery charge, any fixed monthly charges, minus any usage-threshold bill credits that apply that month) and the twelve results are summed into an estimated annual cost.
Until you enter your own usage, plans are shown at Texas's statewide average residential usage instead, about 1,096 kWh a month. That figure comes from EIA's own published data on Texas electricity consumption, not from PowerToChoose's own 1,000 kWh tier. The two are close but deliberately not the same: a default ranking built on a number a provider publishes themselves is a number a provider can design a bill-credit cliff around, so Kilowise ranks by a figure no plan is built to game.
Reading a real cost formula out of an EFL means recognizing the specific wording a provider used for its energy charge, base charge, and delivery charge, and every provider writes its EFL a little differently. When Kilowise can't confidently find both figures on a plan's own EFL, that plan's cost is estimated instead by interpolating between PowerToChoose's own published 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh tier prices, the same three numbers every plan publicly discloses. That's a reasonable first approximation, but it can't represent a real bill-credit cliff the way reading the actual formula can, since a straight line between two tier prices has no way to show a sudden jump at a specific usage threshold.
Every cost pulled from a real EFL is also checked against PowerToChoose's own published price at 1,000 kWh before it's used. If the two disagree by more than a small margin, something was likely misread, and Kilowise falls back to tier interpolation for that plan instead of showing a number it can't stand behind.
A small number of plans state their own energy and base charge but never state a delivery charge as a number, only a link to look it up. For those, Kilowise combines what the plan's own EFL does state with your utility's separately maintained, regularly updated delivery-rate table instead of falling back to tier interpolation. A "Delivery charge estimated" badge marks any plan priced this way, so it's never shown as if it came entirely from the plan's own EFL.
Some plans include a bill credit, often $50 to $125, that only applies once your usage crosses a specific threshold in a given month, commonly 1,000 or 2,000 kWh. That can mean using slightly less electricity than the threshold costs you more than using slightly more would have, a real and disclosed feature of some plans that's easy to miss reading an EFL cold. For any plan whose real formula Kilowise can read, it computes the cost one kWh below and at the threshold itself and flags the difference directly, in dollars, with a ⚠ badge.
Not seeing that badge on a plan isn't a guarantee it has no cliff. Most plans in the catalog don't have a real formula read yet, and tier interpolation has no way to represent a cliff at all.
Once you enter your own usage, plans with a known cost formula show a split between the energy charge (what the retail provider charges) and the delivery charge (what your utility charges to move electricity over its wires, set by state regulation rather than by the retail provider you pick). That split is shown for context only. It never changes the total estimated cost or a plan's rank, and it's only shown once both a real usage figure and a delivery rate for your utility are known.
Filling in twelve exact monthly figures takes real effort, so entering a single average usage number will fill in a full year's worth of months for you, following an approximate Texas residential seasonal shape, lower in winter and spring, higher in summer. That shape is a reasonable starting point, not a precise forecast for your specific home, and any month you edit yourself afterward keeps exactly what you typed, unaffected by the estimate.
Kilowise's cost estimate is a genuine forecast for a fixed-rate plan, since its energy charge is locked for the whole contract term. A variable-rate plan has no such lock: the provider can reset its rate every month, with no formula and no cap, so projecting today's rate across a full year isn't a forecast in the same sense, and Kilowise doesn't rank one against a fixed-rate plan's real forecast. Variable-rate plans are listed separately, unranked, on their own page instead.
Time-of-Use plans charge a different rate depending on the time of day electricity is used, and Kilowise only collects a monthly usage total, not a day-and-night split, so it has no way to personalize one of these plans' real cost. They're hidden by default for that reason, with an option to show them anyway using a typical-usage estimate rather than a personalized one.
Kilowise reads the same public disclosures every plan is legally required to publish. It doesn't independently verify pricing with each provider, and every estimate here is exactly that, an estimate. Always check a plan's actual Electricity Facts Label before enrolling, especially for anything with real consequences like an early termination fee.