The expensive part is forgetting

What happens when a contract ends

Your retailer must write to you before the term is up, and they do — usually in a letter that also contains three other things and arrives in the same week as a utility bill. If you do not act, you are moved onto a month-to-month variable rate, sometimes called a hold-over or default rate.

That rate is not capped by your old contract and it is not required to resemble the market. Households routinely find themselves paying half again what they were paying the month before, for the same electricity, having agreed to nothing. Then they get a hot August, and the bill arrives.

What we send

One email, roughly thirty days before your contract ends. It contains the five cheapest plans available at your zip code and your usage — recomputed the morning it is sent, not saved from the day you signed up, because an eleven-month-old price is worse than no price.

It is the same arithmetic as the rest of the site: each plan’s fact label plus your utility’s delivery charges, applied month by month, totalled over a year. The method is here if you want to check it.

Then we stop. There is no newsletter, no drip sequence and no second email. If you want another reminder for your next contract, you set another one.

What we keep, and for how long

• Your email address, used for this reminder and nothing else. Never sold, never shared with a retailer, never used to build a profile.
• Your contract end date, so we know when to write.
• Your zip code and twelve usage figures, so the email can contain real numbers instead of a link.

That is the whole record. No name, no address, no account, no password. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe that works without logging in, and unsubscribing stops the reminder immediately. The privacy page has the rest.

Why BillTruth does this

Honestly? Because it is the best thing this site can do for you and the best thing you can do for it. A household that gets a useful email a month before its contract ends comes back and switches; that is how the site earns. We would rather say that plainly than pretend the reminder is a public service.

The incentive happens to point the right way: the email is only worth opening if the numbers in it are right, so there is no version of this that works by sending you to whoever pays the most.