One rule: what would this plan have cost you
Every plan is priced by running your actual consumption through that plan's full charge structure for a year. The ranking is that number, ascending. Nothing is weighted, boosted, sponsored or adjusted afterwards.
That sounds obvious until you look at how comparison is usually done. A site paid commission by retailers has a structural reason to prefer some results, and a site comparing on a headline rate is not really comparing plans at all.
What goes into the cost
- Usage charges
- Priced on the tariff structure the plan actually uses — flat, block (stepped by consumption), or time-of-use with separate peak, shoulder and off-peak rates.
- Daily supply charge
- Multiplied across the full period. This is the component a headline-rate comparison ignores, and it routinely decides the outcome.
- Controlled load
- Priced on its own rate against your separately metered consumption, where you have one.
- Solar feed-in
- Credited against your exports. Where a plan pays different rates by time of day, exports are credited per band rather than at a single blended rate.
- Demand charges
- Priced on your peak half-hourly draw, seasonally where the plan varies. Only applied when the plan genuinely has one.
- Discounts
- Guaranteed discounts are applied. Conditional ones are treated as conditional rather than assumed.
- Fees
- Ongoing fees are included in the annual figure.
Where the time-of-use split comes from
Pricing a time-of-use plan needs to know when you use power, not just how much. If you are already on a time-of-use tariff, your bill states that split and it is used directly.
If you are on a flat tariff, your bill cannot tell us when you used power, so a default profile is applied. This is the single largest source of imprecision when comparing a flat-rate customer against a time-of-use plan, and it is why interval data — where you have a smart meter and choose to share it — materially improves the answer.
The GST trap that changes rankings
The regulator's published plan data is GST-exclusive. A comparison that treats those figures as GST-inclusive understates every plan by about 9%, and understates them unevenly across the components — which does not just make the numbers wrong, it can reorder them.
Usage, supply and controlled-load rates are grossed up; the feed-in credit is not, because that is how it is actually treated. The same rule is applied to the rates read off your own bill, so both sides of the comparison sit on the same basis.
Frequently asked questions
Is the ranking ever influenced by commercial arrangements?
No. There are none. The subscription is the only revenue.
Why might a plan rank differently from another comparison site?
Usually because the other site is costing a reference household rather than your usage, or comparing headline rates without the supply charge, or has commercial relationships in the ordering.
How current is the plan data?
It is synced from the regulator daily, and the health endpoint reports if a sync has gone stale.