Kilowise

Kilowise takes the same public plan data Texas already publishes and does one thing with it: works out what each plan would cost you, using a full year of your own month-by-month usage instead of the single advertised price on a comparison chart. This page explains how that number is built, and where it stops being certain.

How to read a result

Every plan on the comparison page shows up as one row. Here is what each part of it means, using the top-ranked plan as the example.

1. Rank. The cheapest plan for the year of usage you entered. When two plans tie on cost, the higher rank goes to the one with more renewable content, then the better complaint record, then the lower early cancellation fee.
2. Provider. The retailer that bills you each month. The name links to their own site.
3. Plan name. Opens a page with the month-by-month cost breakdown, the contract details, and the provider's complaint record.
4. Warning badge. A ⚠ means the plan has a bill credit that only applies above a usage threshold, so a month just under that threshold can cost you more. A ? means Kilowise hasn't been able to read this plan's billing formula yet. No badge means the formula was read and no such threshold was found.
5. Estimated yearly cost. Your twelve monthly usage figures, each run through the billing formula from this plan's Fact Sheet, added up. The ranking is based on this number.
6. Average rate. Your estimated cost divided by your total usage. It lines up with the "average price per kWh" printed on a Fact Sheet, but it's based on your usage rather than a standard tier. Green marks a rate among the lowest for your area; red marks one among the highest.
7. Energy and delivery split. How the cost divides between the retailer's charge and the delivery charge set by your local utility. Shown for context only. It never changes the total or the rank.
8. Plan details. Contract length, renewable percentage, and any cancellation fee.

Where the data comes from

Every plan starts from Texas's official comparison site, PowerToChoose.org. That's the source for the provider, plan name, contract term, rate type, cancellation fee, renewable percentage, and the price at three standard usage levels: 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh a month. Your zip code is matched to your local utility, the company that delivers electricity over the wires and charges a separate regulated fee for it, using that same site's own lookup.

Where it can, Kilowise also reads a plan's Electricity Facts Label (EFL), the pricing disclosure every Texas plan is required to publish, and works from the billing formula it states rather than from the three tier prices alone. Not every EFL can be read this way yet. The section below covers what happens then.

You can also type in a renewal or loyalty offer your current provider sent you, using the same figures its own EFL lists, to see how it compares. That entry is used only to build that one page of results. It is never saved and never shown to anyone else.

The sources page lists every public record Kilowise draws on, from the plan catalog to the tax rules, with a link to each one.

How your estimated cost is calculated

Kilowise asks for your usage as twelve separate monthly figures, not one yearly average. A Texas summer pushes air-conditioning use far above a mild spring month, and that swing is often exactly what makes one plan cheaper than another for your home. A flat average hides it.

Each month's usage is run through the formula on the plan's Fact Sheet: the energy charge, the delivery charge, any fixed monthly charges, minus any usage-threshold bill credit that applies that month. The twelve results are added into an estimated yearly cost, and that's what the ranking uses.

Before you enter your own usage, plans are ranked at Texas's average home usage instead: about 1,096 kWh a month over a year, spread across the months the way Texas homes actually use power, with more in summer and less in spring and fall. That figure comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's published data on Texas electricity use. A realistic year matters because some plans give a bill credit only in months you reach 1,000 kWh. A flat 1,096 kWh every month would earn that credit all year, which a typical home doesn't.

What taxes add to your bill

Every Fact Sheet discloses its price with taxes left out, because state rules require it, and Kilowise's estimates do the same. So your real bill lands a little higher.

The state sales tax doesn't apply to home electricity in Texas. But some cities charge their own local sales tax on it, usually 1 percent. Houston, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth do. San Antonio, El Paso, Arlington, and Plano don't.

Where the local tax applies, expect your bill to run roughly 1 to 2 percent above the figure shown here. It's the same percentage on every plan, so it doesn't change which plan is cheapest for you.

Bill-credit cliffs, and why a simple estimate misses them

Some plans include a bill credit, often $50 to $125, that only applies once your usage crosses a set point in a given month, usually 1,000 or 2,000 kWh. Below that point you don't get the credit, so a month where you use a little less electricity than the threshold can cost you more than a month where you use a little more. This is a real, disclosed feature of those plans, and it's easy to miss reading an EFL for the first time.

The chart below shows one plan's cost as monthly usage changes. A straight-line estimate drawn from the published tier prices rises smoothly. The plan's real bill has a step in it at the credit threshold, and around that step the straight line is wrong in both directions.

For any plan whose Fact Sheet formula it can read, Kilowise computes the cost one kWh below the threshold and at the threshold, and shows the difference in dollars with a ⚠ badge. Each plan on the comparison page shows one of three things: the ⚠ warning with the amount and threshold if a cliff was found, a ✓ if the formula was read and there is no such threshold, or a plain "Fact Sheet not yet read" note if the formula couldn't be read at all. A missing warning is not a promise the plan has no cliff. It only means one wasn't found the way Kilowise currently reads that plan, and a straight-line estimate can't show a cliff even in principle.

Flat-fee plans, where using less doesn't help

A few plans charge one flat amount every month for all usage up to a threshold, usually 1,000 kWh, and a per-kWh rate only above it. Providers call these "Instant" plans. A real example: $120 a month for anything up to 1,000 kWh, then about 14 cents per kWh after that.

The chart below compares a plan like this against a typical fixed-rate plan. The typical plan's bill rises steadily with usage. The Instant plan's bill is flat: the same $120 whether the month's usage is 500 kWh or 1,000 kWh. Its line sits above the typical plan's at nearly every usage level, and the two only meet just past 1,000 kWh, the one point its advertised average price is built around.

When Kilowise reads this structure from a plan's Fact Sheet, it shows a ⚠ badge on the results and the plan page: "Flat $120/mo up to 1,000 kWh." The estimated cost is computed from that formula, so a plan like this ranks where it belongs for your usage rather than where its 1,000 kWh showcase number would put it.

Longer contracts, and whether the lock is worth it

A 24-month or 36-month plan locks your energy rate for longer, but it costs more per kWh today than a 12-month plan. In Texas right now, a 2-year plan runs about 0.8 cents per kWh more than a typical 1-year plan, and a 3-year plan about 1.2 cents more. At an average household's usage that is roughly $9 to $13 a month. These averages leave out plans with bill credits, whose listed prices can make a 1-year plan look cheaper than it really is. On a plan's own page, Kilowise shows the exact figure for that plan's utility.

Whether that premium pays off depends on where electricity prices go. A longer lock is worth it if you would otherwise re-sign into a more expensive market. It is not worth it if prices stay flat or fall, which they have done for long stretches.

The table shows the two paths over two years for one Oncor example: lock in a 2-year plan now, or take a 1-year plan and re-shop after 12 months. The lock comes out ahead in the last row, where rates a year from now are 10 percent higher. The two paths break even at a rise of about 8.5 percent.

So the question is how often rates rise that much. The chart below groups every 12-month stretch in the last 25 years of Texas residential prices by how much the average rate changed over it.

So the rise of about 8.5 percent this Oncor lock needs happened over about 18 percent of 12-month stretches in the last 25 years, a bit less than 1 in 5. In the other big utility areas the 2-year premium is larger right now, so the lock needs a rise of about 12 to 13 percent. That happened about 1 time in 10. The rest of the time, re-signing a 1-year plan each year came out a little cheaper.

The comparison above also treats the whole rate as locked, which overstates the protection. A fixed plan only holds the energy charge. The delivery charge, a bit under half a typical bill, is set by your utility and passes through to every plan, fixed or not, and it changes on its own schedule. So on a plan where energy is the smaller share of the bill, a longer lock protects less than the gap in the table suggests. On a pricier plan, where energy is the larger share, the lock holds more, but it is holding a rate that was already high.

So a longer lock is best understood as insurance against an energy price spike, and its premium is the price of that insurance. It caps part of your cost in a bad year and usually costs you a little in an ordinary one.

When a plan's Fact Sheet formula can't be read yet

Reading a cost formula out of an EFL means recognizing the exact 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 those figures, that plan's cost is estimated by drawing a line between PowerToChoose's published 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh prices, the same three numbers every plan discloses. That's a reasonable first approximation, but a straight line between two tier prices has no way to show a sudden jump at a specific usage point, so it can't represent a bill-credit cliff.

When a plan's listed prices show the signs of a bill credit but Kilowise couldn't read its Fact Sheet, it assumes you only get the credit in months you reach 1,000 kWh. That keeps the estimate from quietly counting a credit you would miss in a lighter month.

Every cost that is read from an EFL gets a second check against the plan's own published price. If the two disagree by more than a small margin, something was likely misread, and Kilowise falls back to the tier-price estimate for that plan rather than show a number it can't stand behind. How we check the numbers covers this in full.

A few plans state their own energy and base charge but give only a link for the delivery charge, never a number. For those, Kilowise combines what the EFL does state with your utility's separately maintained delivery-rate table instead of falling back to tier prices. A "Delivery charge estimated" badge marks any plan priced this way, so it's never shown as if the whole figure came from the plan's own EFL.

The usage and cost charts

A plan's detail page breaks its estimated year into twelve months, shown as two charts stacked and lined up: cost in dollars on top, usage in kWh below. They don't share a unit, so putting them on one axis would be a coincidence of scale rather than a real comparison. Instead you line up a cost bar with the usage bar directly below it.

When your utility's delivery rate is known, plans with a readable formula also split each cost bar into the energy charge (what the retailer charges) and the delivery charge (what your utility charges to move electricity over its wires, set by state regulation, not by the retailer). Delivery sits at the bottom of the bar, energy on top. On the comparison page this split appears only after you enter your own usage; a detail page shows it either way. The split is for context. It never changes the total or the rank.

The quick usage estimate

Filling in twelve exact monthly figures takes real effort, so there are two shortcuts. Enter a single average and Kilowise spreads it across all twelve months. Or enter one recent bill's usage for one month, and Kilowise works out the average that would produce that number and spreads that across the other eleven. Either way, any month you edit yourself afterward keeps exactly what you typed, and the month taken straight from a real bill is never treated as a guess.

Both shortcuts use the same seasonal shape: a set of monthly weights taken directly from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's published data on Texas home electricity sales, three years of actual statewide monthly totals (2022 through 2024), not a hand estimate. That real data corrected one wrong assumption from an earlier hand-drawn version: January usage sits close to the yearly average, not near the bottom, because a lot of Texas homes heat with electricity. The real low months are March and April.

This shape describes Texas as a whole, not your home, your utility area, or your heating and cooling equipment. Even with real data behind it, it's a starting point, not a personal forecast. For the most accurate ranking, enter a full year of your own usage in the twelve-month grid.

Variable-rate and Time-of-Use plans

Kilowise's estimate is a genuine forecast for a fixed-rate plan, because its energy charge is locked for the whole contract term. A variable-rate plan has no such lock. The provider can reset the rate every month, with no formula and no cap, so projecting today's rate across a year isn't a forecast in the same sense. Kilowise doesn't rank those against fixed-rate plans. They're listed separately, unranked, on their own page.

Time-of-Use plans charge different rates depending on the time of day. Kilowise only collects a monthly usage total, not an hour-by-hour split, so it can't personalize one of these. They're hidden by default, with an option to show them anyway using a typical-usage estimate rather than one built from your numbers.

Provider complaint scores

On a plan's detail page, where Kilowise can confidently match the provider, you'll see the Public Utility Commission of Texas's own complaint ranking for that provider, shown as five stars, next to a link to the provider's official complaint history and the date it was licensed. PUCT works this out each month from a rolling six-month average of complaints per 1,000 customers, then sorts providers active on PowerToChoose into five roughly equal groups, from the lowest complaint rate to the highest.

Five stars means a provider is in the lowest-complaint group this period, not that it has never had a complaint. One star doesn't mean a provider is uniquely bad, since a fifth of providers land in that group every month by design. PUCT notes that a smaller or newer provider's ranking can move a lot month to month on just a few complaints, which is why the license date is shown alongside it.

Not every provider can be matched to this ranking yet. Some sell electricity under a brand name that differs from the name on their license, and Kilowise only shows a match once it can verify from PUCT's own records that the two names belong to the same license. Where there's no verified match, the entry reads "N/A", which means the match couldn't be confirmed, not that the provider has a clean record.

Complaint history by category

Below the complaint score, a detail page can also show a month-by-month breakdown of that provider's complaints by category, such as billing or service disconnection, with a chart of the total over time. This comes from the same PUCT page the complaint-score link points to, which only ever shows a rolling six-month window.

Kilowise fetches that page every month and keeps every month it has seen, not just the most recent six, re-checking each figure against PUCT's current numbers on every fetch. So the record here can go back further than PUCT's own page does. The chart and table show the most recent two years, to keep the chart readable, though nothing older is discarded.

How we check the numbers

Every Fact Sheet has to state the plan's average price at 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh a month, with every charge included. Those published prices are the yardstick. When Kilowise reads a plan's billing formula, it works out what that formula would charge at 1,000 kWh and compares the result with the plan's own published price. If the two are more than 10 percent apart, the reading is thrown out and the plan is estimated from its published prices instead. A provider can't look cheaper here without changing the prices it's required to publish.

Most readings land far closer than that. Across the plans whose formula Kilowise reads, the gap from the published price averages a small fraction of a percent, with no meaningful lean in either direction. Every reading is logged, so if one kind of Fact Sheet starts to drift even slightly, it shows up and gets looked into.

A reading that was right once isn't trusted forever. Providers change their prices often, usually without changing the plan's listing, and a utility's delivery charge changes for every plan in its area at once. Each day, when the new plan list comes in, every reading is compared again with the plan's current published price, and any that no longer match within 10 percent are dropped that day. Each week, Kilowise reads the Fact Sheet again for every plan whose price has moved since its last reading.

Once in a while a Fact Sheet doesn't agree with itself: the charges it lists don't add up to the average prices it publishes. When we've checked a plan's Fact Sheet by hand and confirmed that, the plan carries a "Confirm the price with the provider" warning. Kilowise keeps showing the published prices, because those are what the provider is required to publish, but it can't tell which figure you would actually be billed. Each warning lapses after a few months unless it's checked again and still holds.

The delivery charge is the part that moves most. Your local utility sets it, it's passed through to you at cost, and it changes a few times a year, even on a fixed-rate plan. The table shows what that did to one Houston-area household on a 36-month fixed plan in 2026. The utility lowered its delivery charge on March 1. The plan's published prices still carried the old charge, so from March on an estimate built from them ran about 8 percent high. The Fact Sheet formula, worked with the delivery charge in effect during each billing period, stayed within a dollar of every bill.

This is also why Kilowise's estimate uses the current delivery charge. Nobody can know the next change in advance, but the current charge is what your first bills will carry. For what the delivery charge means for a longer contract, see longer contracts.

What Kilowise doesn't do

Kilowise reads the same public disclosures every plan is required to publish. It doesn't check pricing with each provider directly, and the underlying public data can lag a provider's current offer. Every figure here is an estimate. Before you enroll, read the plan's actual Electricity Facts Label and confirm the price, the contract length, and any cancellation fee, especially on a plan with an early termination fee.