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Your bill went up. There are only four things that can do that.

A longer billing period, more electricity through the meter, a higher price per kilowatt hour, or a contract that quietly ended and dropped you onto a month-to-month rate. Every increase in Texas is some mix of those four. Give us the bill that made you look and the one before it, and we will tell you how much of your increase came from each.

Free. Nothing to sign up for, and we take nothing from any electricity company.

We should tell you now that it is probably not your plan

The whole distance between the cheapest electricity plan we can price in your area and the most expensive one is about $80 a month for a normal house. People come to us describing jumps of two and three hundred dollars. The arithmetic does not reach, and no comparison site is going to say so, because a comparison site earns when you switch.

We do not. So here is the honest version. Sometimes the answer is the plan, and when it is, the fix is worth real money and takes about ten minutes. More often the answer is the weather, or a billing period that ran four days long, or a contract that ended in March without anybody telling you. Those have different fixes and one of them has no fix at all. You should know which one you are looking at before you do anything.

Two bills, ten numbers, no account

The one that made you look, and the one you are comparing it to. Everything we need is on the front of both.

The bill that made you look
The one you are comparing it to

Same month last year is the better comparison, because it takes the season out of it. Last month works too and we will say what it can and cannot show. Put the day count in on both. A billing period that ran 34 days against one that ran 27 will move a bill by thirty dollars on its own, and that is the first thing we check.

What the answer usually turns out to be

Your contract ended and nobody mentioned it

A fixed plan that runs out does not stop. It rolls onto a month-to-month rate, and the rule governing it says the price may vary between billing cycles with nothing capping it. This is the most expensive thing in Texas residential electricity and it is also the easiest to fix.

You used more, and so did everyone around you

August is not July. A hot month moves every house in the zone together, and when that is what happened there is nothing wrong with your plan or your house.

You used more, and your neighbors did not

Then something in the house changed. A monthly total cannot tell you what, but your meter recorded every fifteen minutes of it, and that data belongs to you and is free to download.

The bill just covered more days

It happens constantly and almost nobody checks. A meter read that slips a week makes a bill look like a crisis.

A bill credit stopped arriving

Plans that pay you a credit at 1,000 kilowatt hours punish you at 999. Drop under the line for one month and the bill jumps by the size of the credit, with nothing on the bill explaining why.