Privacy

What we do not ask for

There is no account, no sign-up and no login. We do not ask for your name, your email address, your street address, your phone number or any payment details. You cannot upload a bill, and we would not want you to.

What you type into the form

To do the comparison we need your postcode, how many people live in your home, the amount of the bill, how long it covered, and optionally the kWh figure. Those values are sent to our server, used to work out the answer, and included in the page we send back to you. They are not written to a database and they are not kept.

The form is submitted as a POST request, which means none of those values ever appear in the address bar, in your browser history, or in the referrer header sent to any other site. The result page is marked as not cacheable, so it will not sit in a shared cache after you leave.

Logs

Our host records standard web server information such as the time of a request, the page requested and a coarse location. We deliberately do not log request bodies, so what you typed into the form is not in those logs.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to count visits to each page, how many people start the tool, how many finish it, how many add a kWh figure, and whether results came out below, near or above the benchmark. That is the whole list. Your bill amount, your postcode and your usage figure are never sent to Google or any other analytics service, because knowing them would not help us and holding them would not be fair to you.

Google Analytics also records the kind of device and browser you use, the site that sent you here, and your approximate location to the nearest city. It works out that location from your IP address and does not store the address. We have switched off Google signals, which links visits to signed-in Google accounts, and ad personalisation.

Cookies

Google Analytics sets two cookies, named _ga and _ga_000K0KW22T, so it can tell a returning visitor from a new one. They hold a random identifier and the times of your visits, not anything you typed, and they expire two years after your last visit. Bill Checker sets no other cookies.

The checker works the same with those cookies blocked. Most browsers can block them in their privacy settings, and Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics on every site.

Who we are

Bill Checker is independent. We are not an electricity retailer, a broker or a comparison service, and no retailer pays us to show you a particular result. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed plainly on the page where it applies, not in a footnote here.

Getting in touch

If something on this site looks wrong, we would rather hear about it than not. The methodology page sets out exactly where every figure comes from, so a disagreement can usually be settled by checking the source.