What happened when I moved
When I moved to Texas, I ran head-first into a deregulated electricity market I wasn't prepared for — dozens of providers, each selling multiple plans, each advertising a headline rate that didn't obviously tell me what my real monthly bill would actually look like. Texas is one of the only places in the country where you get to choose your own electricity company, which is genuinely a good thing — real price competition — but it also meant the entire burden of comparing plan structures, contract terms, and fine print landed on me, at exactly the moment I had a hundred other moving-related things to deal with.
Trying to make sense of it, I ended up paying for outside help, expecting the process to get easier once someone else was looking at it with me. It didn't work out that way. The experience was disappointing — it didn't give me the confidence or the transparency I was actually looking for, and I came away without a clear, independent sense of why one plan was supposed to be better than another. I won't name who I used or get into specifics of what happened, but the gap it left is exactly what motivated me to build the tool I wished had existed when I first moved: something free, plain-English, and honest about how it reaches its conclusions.
What I built instead
I Moved to Texas takes your ZIP code and a real or estimated usage profile, checks it against every plan I track in the dataset, and shows the actual projected cost — not just the advertised rate — along with a plain-English explanation of any pricing gimmicks the plan contains. Every step of that process is documented on my How We Rank Plans page, in enough detail that you could verify the logic yourself if you wanted to. Nothing about the ranking is a black box on purpose — that was the whole point.
Who this is for
Primarily, people who are new to Texas or new to a specific address within Texas and need to pick an electricity provider for the first time — the exact situation I was in. It's also useful for anyone already living in a deregulated part of Texas whose contract is coming up for renewal and wants a straight comparison instead of relying on whichever provider emails them first. It is not useful for Austin or San Antonio addresses, which are served by municipal utilities with no retail choice — the tool tells you that plainly instead of pretending to help where it can't.
What "independent" actually means here
I don't accept payment from any electricity provider in exchange for placement, ranking, or a more favorable recommendation. Every plan in a given comparison is scored by the same deterministic logic, regardless of which company sells it — see How We Rank Plans for exactly how that scoring works, and my Editorial Policy for how I handle sourcing, corrections, and any future commercial relationships.
Compare plans using my home and usage
See how it works for your own ZIP code — no account required.
Have a correction, a question, or something that seems wrong? Reach me through the Contact page — every message is read.