The short version
We pulled every residential electricity plan across Texas’s four major utilities — 545 plans, live — and checked each one’s real price at 500 kWh versus its advertised price at 1,000 kWh.
Every single one of the 20 cheapest-advertised plans more than doubles its rate for a low-usage home. Meanwhile the typical plan barely moves. The “cheapest” list isn’t a list of the cheapest electricity. It’s a list of plans built around one number on a state disclosure form.
How this works — and how we get paid. We earn a fee, the same no matter which plan you pick. We’re not paid to push any particular company — so our only job is finding the plan that costs you the least at your real usage. That’s the whole point: your savings, not theirs. We win when you win.
How the “8.3-cent” plan is really a 14-cent plan
Texas makes every provider print a plan’s average price at three usage levels: 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh. Comparison tools — ours included — sort by the 1,000 kWh number. So providers attach a bill credit that lands right at 1,000 kWh to make that one number look unbeatable.
Here’s a real, current example (rates as of July 2026):
4Change Energy’s “Maxx Saver Value 24” advertises 8.3¢/kWh at 1,000 kWh — among the lowest in Texas. But the underlying energy rate is actually about 14.3¢/kWh. The 8.3¢ only appears because a $125 bill credit kicks in at 1,000 kWh. Use 500 kWh — a small apartment, or any mild-weather month — and the credit doesn’t apply. Your bill comes to about 21.2¢/kWh: two and a half times the advertised rate, same plan, same month.
Worth saying clearly: 4Change is an established, well-known provider — part of Vistra, one of the largest power companies in Texas. This isn’t about shady operators. It’s about how the pricing is structured — and nearly every plan marketed as “cheapest” is structured this way.
The pattern, in the data
Sorting all 545 plans by their advertised 1,000 kWh rate and checking the real 500 kWh price (as of July 2026):
- 100% of the 20 cheapest-advertised plans more than double their rate at 500 kWh on Oncor (DFW), CenterPoint (Houston), and AEP Central — 95% on TNMP.
- The median plan across the whole market rises only about 5% at 500 kWh. So this isn’t “low usage costs more everywhere.” A little extra per kWh from fixed charges is normal. Doubling is not.
- The cliff is specific to the cheapest-advertised plans, which are almost all bill-credit plans engineered around that 1,000 kWh sort.
The math is simple once you see it: a $50–$125 credit that only applies at about 1,000 kWh can drop an advertised rate by 5–12¢. Fall a hundred kWh short and the whole credit disappears. One low-usage month can erase what you “saved” over several.
To be fair, a bill-credit plan isn’t automatically a bad deal. If your home reliably lands near 1,000 kWh every month, the credit hits and the low rate is real. The catch is that most homes swing hundreds of kWh between summer and winter — and the advertised rate quietly assumes they don’t. So the headline rate can’t tell you which plan wins; only one number can: total annual cost at your real usage. Price a full year against how your home actually uses power and the bill credit flattens out — it counts only in the months you’d genuinely earn it. That’s the one number a credit can’t game.
The fix: you shouldn’t have to decode a fact sheet — so we don’t make you
Catching this yourself means opening every plan’s Electricity Facts Label, finding its price at 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh, and doing the math against how your home actually uses power, month by month. Those labels are legal disclosures, not shopping tools — they’re built to be skimmed past, and almost nobody runs the numbers.
That’s the whole reason Live Link exists. It pulls your last 12 months of real usage straight from Smart Meter Texas and ranks every plan by total annual cost against your actual month-by-month kWh — summer peaks, winter lows, and all. That’s the one thing that beats a bill-credit plan: pricing the whole year on your real usage flattens the credit, because it only counts in the months you’d genuinely hit the threshold. You don’t read a fact sheet, you don’t guess a usage number, and the sweet-spot gimmick simply stops working. You just see what each plan would truly cost you, and choose.
Every other comparison tool — the state’s site included — still sorts by that same 1,000 kWh number. Pricing on your real usage instead is the whole difference. It’s also why our fee is flat: whichever plan wins for you, we’re paid the same.
Rather do it by hand? Fair. Open each plan’s fact sheet, read the price at your usage instead of 1,000 kWh, skip anything whose rate swings wildly between usage levels, and check the company’s complaint history with the PUCT and its Better Business Bureau profile before you sign. It works — it’s just the long way around.
For our current pick of genuinely low-cost plans judged on real usage, see our guide to the cheapest electricity companies in Texas.
Methodology
- Rates: pulled live from the ComparePower plan catalog (the same live data behind Texas plan comparisons) on July 9, 2026, across the four major utilities — Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Central, and TNMP (545 plan records).
- Price basis: each plan’s all-in average ¢/kWh at 500 vs 1,000 kWh — including energy, TDU delivery, base charges, and bill credits (the same “average price per kWh” your Electricity Facts Label shows).
- “More than doubles”: a plan whose 500 kWh rate is at least 2× its 1,000 kWh rate. “Cheapest-advertised”: the 20 lowest by 1,000 kWh rate per utility.
- Rates change frequently; the figures above are a July 2026 snapshot. You can reproduce the finding from any provider’s current Electricity Facts Label.