How PowerLens works

Ten minutes, start to answer. No account. No call centre. No one phones you afterwards.

Step 1: Send us a bill

Snap a photo or upload the PDF. Any recent electricity bill works, and photos are fine. We read it once to pull out your rates and usage, then delete the file. We never store the bill itself, only the numbers.

One bill is enough to start. More bills sharpen the answer, because they show us more of your year. You can add them at the start or later, from the review page.

We ask for your email at upload. That's where your verdict goes, and it's all we use it for unless you tick the marketing box, which is off by default and stays off unless you tick it yourself.

Step 2: Approve every number

Thirty seconds. Before we price anything, you see every number we read from your bill and you approve or fix each one. If something on the bill looks wrong to us, we ask you about it in plain terms instead of guessing.

This step is why the answer holds up. The verdict runs on numbers you have confirmed, not on what a machine hoped it read.

Step 3: Get your answer

We price your current plan from your own bill, to the cent where the bill lets us check ourselves. Then we test the market's plans against how your home actually uses power and give you the answer straight away: switch and save, or stay put, you're already on a good deal.

The answer is free. You'll see the verdict and how your current bill breaks down, with the working behind each figure one tap away. What you won't see yet is which plans we found: the free view never names them.

What the $15 report unlocks

"Stay put" is a real answer

Plenty of people hear "stay where you are". If you're already on a good deal, the report says so plainly, with the same prominence and the same proof as a switch verdict. That's the product working, not the product failing to find you something.

We can afford to say it because of how we're paid. We take nothing from retailers. No commissions, no referral fees, no sponsored rankings. We earn nothing whether you switch or stay. That is the point of PowerLens.

What a bill can and can't tell us

We'd rather show you our limits than hide them.

From your bill alone we can: price your current plan exactly, and price every plan with a single usage rate against your real usage. For most homes that covers the bulk of the market.

From your bill alone we can't: price time-of-use, demand or VPP plans. Those depend on exactly when your home draws and exports power, and a bill doesn't show that. Comparison sites rank those plans anyway, using averages. For a battery home, averages are fiction. We set those plans aside, count them, and tell you why.

And some plans we won't rank at all: wholesale plans, where the price changes with the market. We show them, labelled, but we won't rank them on a guess.

The sharper path: your meter data

Your smart meter keeps a half-hourly record of your home's power. Your electricity distributor (the company that owns the poles and wires) can export it as a meter data file (NEM12). Upload that file to your report and it unlocks the plans a bill can't price: time-of-use and VPP deals, tested against your real half-hours instead of an estimate.

We check the file is really yours before we use it, by matching its meter number against your bill's. We keep the half-hourly numbers with your report and delete the file itself the moment we've read it.

If your file isn't right, we say so specifically: wrong meter, wrong export format, a summary of meter reads instead of the detailed half-hour file. You'll know what to re-download, not just that something failed.

What happens afterwards

Nothing, unless you ask for it. Nobody phones you. We don't pass your details to anyone. Your report stays at its private link until you delete it, which you can do yourself, any time, permanently.

Money back if we get the numbers wrong. See our Refunds page for how that works.