Why I Built Utility Check

In the summer of 2024, my electric bill jumped from around $180 a month to over $310. Same house. Same thermostat setting. Same number of people. I was annoyed, but I assumed it was the heat — Atlanta summers do that.

Then I actually opened the bill. Not the summary at the top. The pages of fine print underneath. Tier 1 energy charge. Tier 2 energy charge. Fuel cost recovery. Environmental compliance. Nuclear construction recovery. Storm damage recovery. Each line had its own kWh count and its own rate, and almost none of them matched what I expected from the rate plan summary on the utility's website.

I spent a Saturday with a calculator and a PDF of the approved tariff sheet. By the end of the day I had two conclusions:

1. The bill itself was mathematically correct, line by line.
2. I was on the wrong rate schedule for my actual usage pattern. A different plan from the same utility — same company, same meter — would have saved me roughly $42 that month. Repeated over a summer, that's a vacation.

Nobody had ever told me that. Not the utility, not my closing agent when I bought the house, not the energy efficiency newsletter I was subscribed to. The rate plan I was put on by default was the most expensive option for a household that runs the AC hard from June through September.

I started doing it for friends. Then for friends of friends. Then I built tooling to do it faster — first a spreadsheet, then a parser for the major utility PDF formats, then a full rate-plan database for FPL, Duke Energy, Georgia Power, Alabama Power, ComEd, and a few dozen others.

By the time I'd read 1,800+ residential bills, three patterns were obvious:

• 1.Most bills are mathematically correct. The line items add up, the meter reads are usually right, and the totals are what they say they are. That part of the system mostly works.
• 2.Rate plan placement is where the money is hiding. Utilities offer 4–12 residential rate options each. Customers are placed on a default plan and almost never switch. For roughly 1 in 4 households I checked, a different plan from the same utility would save $200 to $600 a year with zero behavior change.
• 3.Real billing errors are rare but expensive. When I did find a true error — a misapplied tier threshold, a stuck demand reading, an incorrect rider — the dollar amount was almost never small. It was usually worth filing a formal billing dispute over.

Utility Check is a one-time, $19.99 independent verification of your residential electricity bill. You upload a recent bill PDF. We parse the line items, look up your utility's current approved tariff, run the math against your meter reads, compare your actual usage against every other residential rate plan that utility offers, and produce a written report.

The report tells you three things, in plain English:

• Is the bill calculated correctly?
• Are you on the best rate plan available to you?
• Is your usage normal for a home like yours, or does something about it suggest a meter, equipment, or thermostat issue?

That's it. We don't sell solar. We don't switch your supplier. We don't bill you again next month. If we can't analyze your bill, you get a full refund — that's written into the product, not a goodwill gesture.

I read every report that goes out. The verification methodology is published. The editorial standards are public. If you ever want to know how a number on your report was calculated, the source is cited.