Yup, absolutely free. We believe your energy consumption should be as easy to track as how many calories you eat or how many steps you take. You will get a free account, not a free trial. We don’t ask for a credit card anywhere in the sign-up process.

Our intent is to keep the energy dashboard free forever. The energy market takes advantage of the fact that most people are under-educated when it comes to electricity consumption. We truly want to promote conservation and energy justice, and the only way to make a difference is to make tools that provide transparency readily available to all.

However, when we started looking at hosting costs, we realized we’ll eventually need to find a revenue model to cover rising overhead. We’ll eventually release some features that come at a premium, but the home energy monitoring dashboard will remain free for everyone.

We’re still early in the development process and there’s additional functionality planned.  For now, the current features in the home energy monitoring dashboard include:

• Energy consumption reports: by hour; by day; by week; and by month.
• Neighbor compare to benchmark your usage against neighborhood averages.
• Weekly compare to show your current trending against the week prior.
• Clean energy impact to highlight your environmental impact.
• General tips to help you save electricity.

First and foremost, we’re here to help you save on your electric bill. Our roadmap is constantly evolving as we learn more about what’s important to you. So please tell us what we can do to make your experience even better! You can contact us anytime to submit a bug or feature request.

As for our roadmap, some of the features we’re currently developing: 

• Standby power consumption.
• Rate plan expiration reminders.
• Weekly usage summary reports.
• Export your historic data for drill-down.
• Energy usage correlation with weather data.
• Goal-setting by spend and usage targets.

As we continue to improve, eventually we want to help you predict your next month’s bill, your next year’s usage, and the best rate plan to save you the most money.

Your smart meter data is actually hosted on a service called Smart Meter Texas. When you create an account with Smart Watts, you authorize Smart Meter Texas to share your historic electricity usage with us. In order to initiate the agreement, we collect your email, ESID number, meter number, retail electricity provider and consent. All of this information is available on your electric bill.

Our service is currently available to any homeowner in Texas with an electric smart meter installed. This means our solution is widely accessible by nearly 8.9 million residences. If your address isn’t being found, chances are: 1) your address is outside of Texas, or 2) your energy provider has not yet installed a smart meter at your residence.

Please feel free to contact us to troubleshoot. In some instances we might be able to help, though unfortunately our service requires a smart meter installed by your local energy provider.

As noted above, your smart meter data is actually hosted on a service called Smart Meter Texas. In order to share your historic electricity usage, Smart Meter Texas requires your consent and authorization. You will receive an email at sign-up to confirm your authorization, and on an annual basis to renew your data sharing agreement. You can cancel this agreement at any time.

We love to hear from you, and would be happy to answer any other questions. Contact us anytime!