There’s a $50 check in your mailbox. TXU Energy’s logo is on it. The amount — $50.00 — sits right where a real check prints it.
Look closer. The “pay to the order of” line says Current Resident. And across the middle, in letters designed to be skimmed past: SPECIMEN — NON-NEGOTIABLE.
It’s not a check. It’s an ad for a plan called TXU Energy Free Pass 12, and it’s landing in mailboxes across Texas right now. We read every word of it, front and back, including the footnotes in six-point type. This page is what we found.
TXU Free Pass 12 at a glance
Plan availability and rates checked August 6, 2026.
| Contract | 12 months |
| Cancellation fee | $150 (mailer fine print) |
| The hook | Your 7 highest-usage days free each month — 9 in summer, per the mailer |
| The rate | Not published. Not on the mailer, not on txu.com, not on the rate boards. Phone only. |
| Base charge | Not published. TXU’s free-energy sibling plans carry $9.95/month. |
| Deposit | Maybe — TXU runs a soft credit check; waivers exist (age 55+, split payments, more) |
| Gimmick level | High |
Half that table says “not published.” Hold that thought — it matters more than anything the mailer does say.
What the mailer promises
Four things, in big friendly print:
- Your 7 highest-usage days free every month — plus 2 extra during summer
- A $50 bonus just for signing up
- Cancellation fees covered up to $360 if you’re leaving another company
- A True Fit Guarantee — change your plan anytime, for free
Every one of those claims is technically true. Every one carries an asterisk. The asterisks are the story — the table above lays them out side by side.
Who pays for the free days
Here’s how Free Pass works. At the end of each billing period, TXU looks at your usage, finds your 7 biggest days, and wipes out the per-unit charges for those days. You don’t pick the days. You don’t have to. Their computers do it automatically.
Sounds unbeatable — you always get your best days free, no schedule-juggling required. But think about what that means from TXU’s side of the table: they know, almost to the dollar, what those days will cost them. For a typical Texas home, the 7 heaviest days carry roughly a quarter to a third of the month’s power. An earlier Oncor pricing fact sheet for Free Pass — the EFL, the document that holds a plan’s only legally binding numbers — assumed 33.1%.
So they price the other 21+ days to cover the giveaway, plus margin. The free days aren’t a gift. They’re a prepayment, spread across every other day of your bill.
What Free Pass 12 actually costs — as best anyone can tell
Here’s the strange part: nobody outside TXU can quote you this plan’s rate. It’s not on the mailer — not on the fake check, not in the fine print, nowhere on either side of the page. It’s not on txu.com, where Free Pass doesn’t appear on the plans page at all (we checked August 6, 2026). It’s not on the rate boards. The only way to learn the price is to call the 833 number — where a salesperson answers.
The closest published pricing is Free Pass’s sibling, Live Your Free 12 — TXU’s other free-energy plan, launched with an Oncor-area pricing fact sheet in April 2024: a $9.95 monthly base charge, about 20.9¢ per kilowatt-hour in the hours that aren’t free, and an average of 18.6¢ at 1,000 kilowatt-hours once the free hours are counted (per EnergyChoiceMatters’ review of the EFL).
Run Free Pass through those numbers — a back-of-envelope illustration, ours, since TXU won’t publish the real ones. Say you use 1,000 kilowatt-hours in a Dallas-area month:
| Plan | Average price | Monthly bill |
|---|---|---|
| Free-days pricing at TXU’s assumed 33% free share (our estimate from the April 2024 sibling EFL) | ~20¢ | ~$200 |
| TXU’s own Simple Rate 12 (TexasElectricityRatings, Aug 6, 2026) | 17.2¢ | $172 |
| Cheapest listed Dallas 12-month fixed plan (ElectricChoice listings, early Aug 2026) | ~7¢ | ~$70 |
That bottom row deserves its own asterisk: sub-7¢ headline rates usually belong to bill-credit plans with fine print of their own. But the middle row has no asterisk. It’s TXU’s plain plan, at TXU’s own prices — and it beats Free Pass by roughly $340 a year in this illustration. (Houston area: the CenterPoint version of Simple Rate 12 listed at 16.2¢ the same day, so the gap runs wider there.)
The math behind that top row is short. At sibling-plan pricing, a 1,000 kilowatt-hour month costs about $269 before any free days. Each percentage point of usage you shift onto free days saves about $2.09. Shift TXU’s assumed 33 points and you land near $200.
For Free Pass to merely match TXU’s own plain fixed plan, your 7 free days would have to carry about 46% of the month’s power. TXU’s own pricing sheet assumed they carry 33%. The plan isn’t priced to lose that bet. You are.
The $50 check that isn’t a check
The real $50 bonus exists. Collecting it is an obstacle course. From the fine print, here’s the full route:
- Sign up by phone — the bonus is “only redeemable by calling.”
- Wait about 90 days from the day your service starts.
- Watch your mail for a postcard with redemption instructions.
- Follow the instructions within 90 days of receiving it. TXU’s own words: if you don’t, “you will not receive it.”
- Stay in good standing, not pending cancellation, with your first month’s bill paid in full.
- Then, within five more weeks, receive — not cash — a prepaid Visa card.
The rebate industry has a word for the people who never finish that course: breakage. Every step is legal and every step is disclosed. The course is simply engineered so that a healthy share of the people promised $50 never collect it. If the bonus were the point, it would be a credit on your first bill. It isn’t, and that tells you something.
The rest of the fine print
Leaving costs $150. Free Pass 12 has a 12-month minimum term and a $150 early cancellation fee. Both are in the mailer’s footnotes, neither is on the front.
The “change anytime” guarantee keeps you at TXU. The True Fit Guarantee lets you swap plans without a fee — but only to another TXU plan, and the new one must run 12 months or longer. It’s not an exit. It’s a revolving door that opens back into the same building.
“Cancellation fees covered” has homework. TXU will cover up to $360 of your old company’s cancellation fee — as a credit on your TXU bill, after you send them your final bill, and “subject to approval.” Reasonable, but it’s a rebate with paperwork, not money in your hand.
They already looked at your credit. The mailer is a “prescreened offer” — TXU got your name by running criteria against credit-bureau data. That’s disclosed in the fine print too, along with the phone numbers to make it stop.
None of this is illegal. All of it is working exactly as designed: the front of the mailer sells certainty and free stuff; the back quietly takes most of it back.
Is TXU Free Pass ever a good deal?
An honest answer: sometimes, for a narrow band of homes.
The plan fits a house whose usage doesn’t just run high but spikes — a pool pump cycling through a 105° July, electric heat slamming on for a February freeze, a 2,500-square-foot house full of teenagers where the worst seven days dwarf the other twenty-one. If a $400 August has burned you before, free days on exactly those days blunt the ugliest bills, and that predictability is worth something.
But run the 30-second test before you believe you’re that house. Pull last month’s daily usage from your electric company’s app or Smart Meter Texas, add up your 7 biggest days, and divide by the month’s total. Under 40%? Free Pass can’t win for you — the everyday rate eats the gift. Most homes land near a third.
Then run the other 30-second test on the plan itself: ask the salesperson to email the pricing fact sheet (the EFL) before you agree to anything — they’re required to provide it. Find the average price at 1,000 kilowatt-hours. Put it next to a plain fixed-rate plan. TXU is a legitimate, stable company — that’s never been the question. The question is whether you want to pay extra for a plan built around a marketing hook.
We’ve seen this movie before with free nights and weekends plans and bill-credit plans. TXU alone runs several versions — we’ve taken apart Free Nights & Solar Days and the Ultimate Season Pass the same way. The prop changes. The script doesn’t: give the customer something vivid and free, and recover it in a rate nobody reads.
What to do instead
Toss the check — it was never money. Then do the ten-minute version of what we did:
- Get your real usage. It’s on any recent bill, or your online account.
- Compare total yearly cost, not gimmicks. See what every company actually charges at your usage on ComparePower — including TXU’s plain fixed plans, which are often better than their headline plans.
- If you’re weighing TXU against a cheaper company, start with TXU vs Gexa or TXU vs Frontier.
A plan with nothing free, no bonus, and no guarantees usually costs less than one with all three. Someone has to pay for the fireworks.
Why this page exists
This page answers: “Is the TXU Free Pass plan — and that $50 check in the mail — 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.
We don’t sell plans on this site — enrollment happens on ComparePower, and our methodology page spells out the relationship. What we sell is the fine print, read for you.