Reliant’s pricing team has made a bet about your life: that 42% of your electricity happens while most of Texas is asleep.
That guess decides everything. Beat it by a wide margin and Reliant Truly Free Nights genuinely pays. Miss it — and most homes miss it by a mile — and you’ll pay more than you would on the plainest fixed-rate plan in town.
To be fair, the free hours are realer than most: inside the window, no energy charge, no delivery fee, nothing. The bet is about the paid hours — and about the sibling plan, Truly Free Weekends, which runs the same play on a weekend clock.
The plans at a glance (numbers checked August 6, 2026)
| Contract | 12 months |
| Early termination fee | $150 |
| Free window, Nights | 9 p.m.–6 a.m. — energy and delivery both $0 (reliant.com, August 2026) |
| Free window, Weekends | 8 p.m. Friday–12 a.m. Monday — 52 hours |
| Base charge | $3.42/month in the Oncor (Dallas) area, per ComparePower |
| Deposit | Credit-based; waivers for 65+, military, letter of credit |
| Renewable content | 100% solar renewable energy certificates on the solar-branded versions |
| Gimmick level | High |
What “truly free” actually covers
Give Reliant credit for the word truly. Most free-time plans in Texas waive only the energy charge and quietly keep billing you the delivery fee — the charge from the wires company that shows up on every plan.
Reliant waives both. Inside the free window, a kilowatt-hour costs you $0.00, full stop.
But notice what happened to the window. Earlier versions of Truly Free Nights ran 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. The version on Reliant’s site as of August 2026 starts at 9 p.m. — nine free hours instead of ten, fifteen paid ones instead of fourteen. Same name, one less free hour, and no press release. Your contract keeps whatever window its pricing fact sheet (the EFL) prints, so read that document, not the billboard.
The weekends version runs 8 p.m. Friday to 12 a.m. Monday — 52 hours a week. Both plans run 12 months, both carry a $150 fee to leave early, and both have been sold with a “100% solar” stamp (more on that stamp below).
So the free window isn’t the trick. The trick is what the paid window costs, and what Reliant assumes about your life when it prints the average price.
The 42% assumption is the whole game
Every Texas electricity plan advertises an average price per kilowatt-hour. For Truly Free Nights, that average is computed assuming 42% of your usage happens overnight — the assumption is printed in the EFL’s fine print, and ComparePower’s breakdown of the plan confirms it. For Truly Free Weekends, the assumption is 32% inside the weekend window.
The advertised number isn’t a rate. It’s a blend — a high paid-hours rate diluted by a big helping of free hours that Reliant assumes you’ll use.
Here’s what the blend hides. ComparePower’s breakdown of Truly Free Nights shows an advertised average of 26.1 cents per kilowatt-hour at 1,000 kWh in the Oncor (Dallas) area, checked August 2026 — with the 42% assumption already baked in.
Now do the arithmetic (this part is our back-of-envelope, clearly labeled): strip the $3.42 base charge, and a 26.1-cent blend where 42% of the power is free only works if the paid hours run about 44 cents each. As of early August 2026, the cheapest plain 12-month fixed plans in the Dallas area land near 15 cents all-in, per Texas Electricity Ratings’ Oncor tracker. The hours you actually pay for cost roughly triple.
And that’s the picture when you hit the assumption. ComparePower’s same breakdown priced a Texas-average home (1,132 kilowatt-hours a month) at roughly $309 a month on this plan — more than double what the average Texas home pays.
Run the numbers on a real month
Everything in this table is our arithmetic, built from the attributed numbers above — treat the shape as gospel and the pennies as approximate, because Reliant reprices constantly.
Say your home uses 1,000 kilowatt-hours in July, in the Oncor area, and compare Truly Free Nights (paid hours ≈ 44 cents, plus the $3.42 base charge) against a plain fixed plan at 15 cents all-in:
| Your overnight share | Truly Free Nights | Plain fixed at 15¢ |
|---|---|---|
| 30% — family home most evenings | ≈ $314 | $150 |
| 42% — Reliant’s own assumption | ≈ $261 | $150 |
| 60% — EV charging every single night | ≈ $181 | $150 |
| ~67% — the break-even line | ≈ $150 | $150 |
Read the second row again. Hit Reliant’s assumption exactly — do everything the plan asks of you — and you still pay $111 more that month than the boring plan charges.
At August 2026 prices, Truly Free Nights doesn’t beat a 15-cent fixed plan until roughly two-thirds of your usage lands in the free window — and Reliant’s own pricing only assumes 42%.
Check Reliant’s bet yourself in 30 seconds
You don’t have to take our arithmetic on faith. Every free-time plan’s pricing fact sheet — the EFL, the one-page disclosure Texas requires — hands you the inputs:
- Find the advertised average price at 1,000 kWh.
- Find the fine-print line stating what share of usage is assumed free.
- Divide the average by (1 minus that share). Ignore the base charge; it’s pennies.
That’s the real rate on your paid hours. If it’s double what a plain fixed plan charges, you know exactly who’s funding the free window. Reliant’s marketing page doesn’t lead with that number. The EFL can’t hide it.
Your dishwasher can’t outrun your air conditioner
The pitch practically writes your to-do list: run the laundry at night, delay the dishwasher, charge the phone after 9. Fine. Those are small appliances playing a small game.
The biggest number on a Texas summer bill is air conditioning, and the AC doesn’t care about your plan’s schedule. It runs hardest at 4 p.m. in August, when it’s 103° outside — the dead center of the paid window. You can shift a wash cycle. You can’t shift a heat wave.
That’s why the 42% assumption is so hard to hit. Reliant’s own materials aim this plan at people who are away all day and live at night. If that’s not specifically you, the math was never going to work — and Reliant knew that when they set the rate. It’s the same trade TXU offers with its Free Pass plan, and Reliant’s parent NRG runs the play twice: Direct Energy’s free nights plan is the same architecture under the same corporate roof.
Reliant free weekends: 52 free hours, 116 paying ones
The weekends variant deserves its own paragraph because it fits a different — and rarer — person.
Free runs 8 p.m. Friday through 12 a.m. Monday. The other 116 hours of the week bill at the elevated rate. Reliant assumes 32% of your usage lands in the free window; EnergyBot’s review of both plans figures you’d need to push about 39% of your usage into weekends just to match Reliant’s own fixed-rate plans — and Reliant’s fixed plans aren’t the cheapest in town, so the bar against the open market sits higher still.
A normal family that’s home every evening won’t get there. Who might: the traveling nurse gone Monday through Friday, the dual-city commuter, the lake house that only breathes on weekends. If your weekday usage is genuinely near zero, the weekend plan stops being a gimmick and starts being a fit.
About that “100% solar” label
Both plans have been marketed as 100% solar. The mechanism is renewable energy certificates — Reliant buys solar credits on paper to match your usage. It’s a legitimate, standard practice, and it changes nothing physical: the sun is down during every hour of your free nights, and the electrons at your outlet come off the same ERCOT grid as your neighbor’s. Treat the label as an accounting choice, not a power source. (TXU takes the honest version of this idea further with Free Nights & Solar Days — different mechanics, same lesson about reading past the label.)
The fine print worth two minutes
Leaving costs $150. Both plans run 12 months with a $150 early cancellation fee — standard for Reliant’s 12-month contracts.
There’s still a base charge. The free window zeroes out energy and delivery per kilowatt-hour, not the monthly base charge — about $3.42 a month in the Oncor (Dallas) area, per ComparePower’s breakdown. Small, but “100% free” never means the whole bill.
Renewal is where they get you back. When the 12 months end, Reliant starts renewal outreach early, and the “exclusive renewal offers” often run higher than what new customers pay on the open market. Counter-shop before you sign anything a second time.
Expect the upsell. Reliant is NRG’s flagship Texas brand, and every customer touchpoint doubles as a pitch for protection plans, HVAC services, and smart thermostats. Not sinister — just budget for the sales pressure.
Is it ever a good deal?
Honestly: only at the extremes.
- Night-shift worker with an EV. You sleep through the paid hours, the car charges through the free ones, and the house sits empty all day. That’s the profile that can approach the two-thirds line.
- An overnight-dominant home, verified. Not “we run the dishwasher late” — verified smart-meter data showing most of your power draws after 9 p.m.
- Nobody’s home on weekdays — for the weekends version. Weekday usage near zero flips the math.
Reliant helps you check your own case, which is to its credit: the company’s app has a “Truly Free Tracker” showing what share of your usage lands in the free window, and the 90 Day Satisfaction Guarantee lets new customers switch Reliant plans within the first 90 days with no termination fee. Use both. If the tracker says 25% after two months, take the exit while it’s free.
Reliant itself is a big, stable, NRG-owned company with real 24/7 support — that’s never been the question. The question is whether you want a plan engineered around an assumption about your schedule.
What to do instead
Before you sign anything with “free” in the name, spend ten minutes:
- Find out when you actually use power. Your smart meter data — via Smart Meter Texas or any recent bill’s usage detail — shows your overnight share. If it’s under half, stop here.
- Pull the EFL and run the 30-second test. Reliant’s plan page produces the document once you enter a ZIP code, and Power to Choose — the state’s official shopping site — lists the same paperwork for every plan.
- Compare total yearly cost, not free hours. See what every company charges at your usage on ComparePower — including Reliant’s own plain fixed plans, which usually undercut the flashy ones.
- If you’re weighing Reliant against a cheaper company, start with Reliant vs Frontier or TXU vs Reliant.
We’ve written a full guide to free nights and weekends plans if you want the pattern behind the pitch. Short version: nothing on your bill is free. It’s just moved.
Why this page exists
This page answers: “Are Reliant’s Truly Free Nights and Truly Free Weekends plans a good deal?”
It doesn’t answer: “What’s the cheapest plan in your ZIP code today?” Prices change weekly. For that, compare actual prices on ComparePower.