About CheaperBills Ireland
How CheaperBills Ireland collects supplier prices, what our annual cost estimates include and exclude, how fresh the data is, and why this is not a CRU-accredited comparison service.
Who runs this and how it is funded
CheaperBills Ireland is an independent, automated price comparison site for Irish households. It covers four things households pay for and can change: electricity, natural gas, broadband, and home heating oil. It is run privately and is not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any energy supplier, broadband provider or oil distributor. Nothing on the site is a paid placement: no supplier can buy a position in a ranking, and no ranking is adjusted by hand.
This site covers the Republic of Ireland only. It is not connected to cheaperbills.com, a separate United Kingdom business with a similar name. If you arrived here looking for UK energy tariffs, this is the wrong site — the prices here are Irish tariffs in euro, calculated on Irish taxes, levies and network arrangements, and none of them apply in the UK.
Where the prices come from
Prices are collected automatically. A scraper reads each supplier's own published tariff or pricing page on a schedule, extracts the rates and terms, and writes them to a dataset that this site is rebuilt from. Every plan record keeps the URL it came from and the timestamp it was read, and both are shown on the page. Nothing is typed in by hand, which means the site cannot quietly carry a figure nobody can trace back to a source.
When a supplier's page changes shape or their site is down, that scraper fails. Rather than dropping the supplier out of the comparison — which would silently make a ranking look better than it is — we fall back to the last good record we hold for them and flag it as stale on the page. A stale row is a row you should check with the supplier before acting on. Separately, the whole dataset carries the date it was last generated, and if that is more than 14 days old the page shows a freshness warning at the top rather than presenting old prices as current.
How the annual costs are calculated
Annual costs are estimates, calculated the same way for every supplier so that the comparison between them is fair. For electricity we apply the plan's unit rates to your entered annual consumption, add the supplier's standing charge, and add the PSO levy, currently €19.10 a year including VAT and identical on every plan from every supplier. VAT on domestic electricity and gas is the reduced 9% rate; broadband carries the standard 23% rate. If you do not enter a usage figure we use the CRU's typical household consumption: 4,200 kWh a year for electricity and 11,000 kWh for gas.
For gas we additionally add carbon tax at 1.25 cent per kWh including VAT to any plan whose quoted unit rate excludes it, because suppliers differ in whether they quote it inside the rate or alongside it, and a comparison that took both at face value would be wrong. For smart meter and day/night tariffs we have to assume when electricity is used: our default profile is 63% day, 28% night and 9% peak. That is a reasonable national average and it is certainly not your household, so the comparison pages let you enter your own split.
Almost every Irish energy plan discounts the first twelve months and then reverts to a standard rate, so a single number cannot describe what a plan costs. We publish two: first-year cost, with every advertised discount applied to whichever base the supplier's terms specify and any welcome cashback subtracted, and ongoing cost, which is what you pay from month thirteen once the discount lapses. Those two rankings frequently disagree, and which one you should read depends on whether you intend to switch again next year.
Broadband is calculated on the same principle. First-year cost is the introductory monthly price for however many months it runs, plus the standard price for the remainder of the year, plus any setup or activation fee, minus any bill credit. The ongoing monthly figure is the standard price. Availability is the one thing we cannot check: no comparison site can reliably establish what is available at an individual eircode across every network, so treat our broadband table as a shortlist and confirm on the provider's own availability checker before ordering.
The individual charges are explained in more detail in our guides to the PSO levy and standing charges.
How heating oil is priced
Home heating oil has no meter, no tariff and no contract, so it is compared differently. Prices are collected as quotes from distributors at fixed order volumes, so that two quotes are compared at the same volume rather than at whatever size each distributor prefers to advertise. Where a distributor quotes by county we record the county. Where a distributor's quote form requires a specific address, we use one consistent, publicly known Eircode per county — a county council office or similar public building — so that the quote is reproducible by anyone who wants to check it, and so that the figure is not quietly taken from a cheaper or dearer part of the county each time. We also record the SEAI Domestic Fuel Cost Comparison figure as a national benchmark, which is independent of any distributor and is the right thing to sanity-check our numbers against. Oil prices move daily; ours are indicative and are not a quote.
What is not covered
What the comparisons exclude, deliberately. Pay-as-you-go and prepayment meters, which recover costs differently and are not comparable with credit accounts. Business and commercial tariffs. Bundle extras with no cash value we can verify, such as loyalty points or free subscriptions. Any supplier we cannot read a published price from — a comparison built on prices we cannot show you the source of would not be worth having. Debt, arrears arrangements and hardship tariffs are outside scope entirely, and if that is your situation the Money Advice and Budgeting Service and your supplier's own hardship team are the right first calls, not a comparison site.
Not a CRU-accredited comparison service
CheaperBills Ireland is not accredited by the Commission for Regulation of Utilities. The CRU operates a voluntary accreditation scheme for price comparison sites in the Irish energy market, and the accredited services are bonkers.ie and switcher.ie. Those two have been independently audited against the CRU's code of practice; this site has not. We say so on every page that shows a price. If you want an accredited comparison, use one of those two. If you want to see how the numbers were arrived at and where each one came from, that is what this site is for, and using both is not a bad idea.
Corrections and freshness
Corrections. If a figure here is wrong, it is worth telling us, and it is worth being specific: the page, the supplier, the plan and the number you believe is correct. Scraped data goes wrong in predictable ways — a supplier changes their page layout, a rate is quoted excluding VAT where it used to include it, a plan is withdrawn but left published — and those are exactly the failures a reader spots before we do. We fix errors by fixing the scraper or the underlying figure and rebuilding, not by editing a number on a page, so a correction sticks rather than reappearing at the next refresh.
Every price page states the date its data was generated and links to the supplier page each figure came from. Nothing here is a quote, an offer, or financial advice. Confirm the price and terms with the supplier before you sign anything.
Contact
Email contact@cheaperbills.ie, or use the contact page. What the site does and does not record about your visit is set out in the privacy policy.