How BillSense works
From bill upload to ranked results in under 30 seconds. Here is exactly what happens.
1.Upload your bill
Drag and drop a photo or PDF of your electricity or gas bill. We accept any format, a phone photo is fine. No account or email needed.
2.We read your rates
We extract only the numbers that matter: your energy retailer, tariff rates, daily supply charge, usage (kWh or MJ), billing period, and distribution zone. We deliberately skip your name, address, and account number.
3.Live market comparison
We fetch current plans directly from the Australian Energy Regulator's Consumer Data Right registry, the same government database retailers are legally required to publish to. Your usage and billing pattern is applied to every eligible plan in your network zone, so the savings figure reflects your actual bill, not a generic estimate.
4.You get a ranked result
Plans are sorted by estimated annual cost based on your real usage. The best deal goes first, not the plan that pays us the biggest referral fee. You can filter by solar, concession card, green energy, or business ABN. Switch directly from the result page, or take the plan details and go to the retailer yourself.
How we filter plan data
Plan rates come from the AER CDR registry, which retailers are legally required to keep current. We apply two freshness rules before showing any plan:
- ⚠Flagged if not updated in 90 days. The plan is shown but marked stale so you know to verify before switching.
- ✕Excluded if not updated in 180 days. We drop it from results entirely to avoid showing rates that may no longer exist.
Some plans in the registry carry special conditions, such as rates only available when you purchase a solar system from that retailer, or an introductory rate that resets after 12 months. We flag these with a warning on the result card so you can check eligibility before acting on the saving.
How eligibility filtering works
Not every plan is available to every household. By default we show only plans you are most likely to qualify for based on what we can read from your bill. Plans are hidden if they require:
- Solar export: plans that require feed-in tariff eligibility
- Concession card: pensioner or healthcare card required
- Business ABN: commercial-only plans
- Green energy: accredited GreenPower add-ons
You can toggle any of these on from the filter bar on your results page if they apply to you. Solar households in particular should enable the solar filter, as some of the cheapest plans in each state are only available with a solar system.
How the savings estimate is calculated
We take your actual usage in kWh (or MJ for gas) and billing period from your bill, then apply those figures to every eligible plan's rate structure: usage rate, daily supply charge, and any time-of-use peak, shoulder, and off-peak rates. The result is annualised so plans with different billing cycles are directly comparable.
Estimates assume your usage pattern stays the same. Actual savings may vary if your usage changes seasonally or if a plan includes conditional discounts (such as pay-on-time bonuses) that are not captured in the AER data. Always verify the final rate on the retailer's website before switching.