Why energy management is misaligned today

For CFOs, energy is one of the least predictable lines on the P&L. It moves with fuel prices, peak-demand charges, billing errors, and tariff complexity. Businesses bring in intermediaries to help, but the incentives rarely line up.

Brokers and consultants get paid whether or not savings materialize. Bill-pay agents collect a fee for every invoice they process, but they do not reduce what you owe. A provider like Engie Impact charges roughly $5 to $25 per invoice, regardless of whether an error is caught or a dollar is saved. Hardware vendors such as solar, battery, and lighting-retrofit companies require large capital outlays with payback measured in years, not quarters.

The result is that you still face volatility, still overpay, and still shoulder the full risk.

How TrueMeter charges

Our pricing has two parts and no surprises. First, a low monthly per-location fee to automate all utility AP and utility service requests. Second, a share of the savings we actually deliver. That is it. There are no per-invoice charges, no upfront cost, and no implementation fee.

If we save you nothing, you owe no savings share at all.

What we actually do to create those savings

After onboarding, our optimization engine goes to work across every site you operate. It audits every line item before a bill is paid, switches you to lower-cost electricity suppliers, negotiates bulk natural gas procurement, optimizes rate plans (the average business has two optimal plans that change monthly), claims available government rebates and clean-energy incentives, detects and corrects utility errors, and participates in wholesale market trading where possible.

This is where the difference between paying a bill and auditing it shows up. Across our book, more than one in six locations carries a recoverable billing error in any given quarter, and a typical recovery lands between $4,000 and $18,000 per location each year. One client, a property management firm, had been paying the utility bills on a hotel they no longer owned for nine months. The total reached $400,000, and their previous bill-pay vendor never raised a flag. A provider paid per invoice has no reason to catch that. We do, because our pay depends on it.

Zero barriers

No installations and no site visits. Zero upfront cost and no implementation fee. A single consolidated invoice per entity instead of dozens of utility bills, with every utility paid on your behalf and the whole portfolio reconciled at month-end. Monthly reporting and on-demand dashboards. A typical one-year initial term, then month-to-month, so you stay because we are delivering value, not because you are locked in.

The math: a 20-location restaurant chain

Say a 100-location restaurant chain spends around $3,000,000 a year on energy, roughly $30,000 per site.

With a traditional bill-pay agent, you pay a per-invoice processing fee on every bill whether or not it is accurate. Across 100 locations that adds up to something like $20,000 to $30,000 a year, and it buys you zero in savings, because their job is to pay the invoice, not to lower it. You finish the year having spent your full $3,000,000 on energy plus those fees, and you have saved nothing.

With TrueMeter, there is no per-invoice fee. You pay a low monthly per-location fee plus a share of the savings we deliver. If we find and deliver 10 percent, that is $300,000 back in the budget. And if we recover nothing, you owe no savings share. Same 20 restaurants. One model charges you to stand still. The other only earns when your bill goes down.

The long game

We do not see ourselves as another vendor or another subscription. We are built to be a true partner, a utility agent standing shoulder to shoulder with you against a system designed to extract more every year. That is why we tie our own pay to your savings. We only win when you do.

Want the math run on your actual footprint? We will show you what your current vendor is missing, and what you would pay us versus what you are paying today. Book a free audit at truemeter.com/check-savings.

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