About us

CompareBolt started with a simple question that turned out to be surprisingly hard to answer: what's the cheapest electricity plan for me? A headline rate doesn't tell you. What you pay can depend heavily on when you use power, the daily supply charge and, if you have solar, how much you send back to the grid.

That difference is widest for solar and battery households, where the real question is how well the feed-in credit covers the supply charge. But it catches everyone. A household on time-of-use with an EV, or one with controlled-load hot water, can end up hundreds of dollars a year worse off on the plan with the cheapest headline electricity rates.

So we built something that does the maths for you. It costs every plan available at your postcode against your usage profile, and tells you what you would pay across a year - how the comparison works sets out where the data comes from and what goes into our estimate.

Every standard residential electricity plan published to the national plan register, refreshed nightly - NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT.

We exclude plans whose price is linked to the wholesale market, and virtual power plant (VPP) tariffs. This is not because they're bad plans - for a household with a large solar and battery setup they can be very good value - but because we can't cost them reliably. It's impossible to accurately predict the wholesale price of electricity over the next twelve months, and most of a VPP's benefit comes from surges in grid demand that are equally difficult to forecast far in advance. We'd rather leave out a plan than put a confident-looking cost against it that we can't back with facts.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory are not covered at present. Their retailers don't publish plan data to the national register, so their plans can't be compared in the same way as the other states.

At the moment, we don't. The site is free, carries no advertising, and isn't selling anything. CompareBolt isn't owned by an energy retailer, has no investors, and has no commercial arrangement with any of the retailers whose plans it ranks.

If it proves popular that may change - most likely ads, referral fees from retailers, or both. Either way, our results will always remain impartial - ranked on what each plan would cost you, never on what a retailer pays us. We will never put “sponsored listings” at the top of our results.

Corrections, questions, or a plan that looks mispriced: [email protected]. A wrong price is the most useful thing you can send us.