What this app can't price yet

This calculator doesn't currently factor a battery into any of your numbers, even if you tell it on an earlier step that you have or want one. A battery's entire financial value comes from shifting kWh from being exported at your provider's rate to being self-consumed instead, and Texas's deregulated market gives every retail electric provider its own export credit terms rather than one standard buyback rate. Pricing a battery's effect accurately means pricing that shift correctly against each provider's specific, real terms, plan by plan, not applying one flat assumption across every provider and every battery size the way an earlier version of this app did. See why solar buyback rates matter so much for the full background on why those terms vary so widely.

That earlier, simpler approach had a real failure mode worth naming directly: a flat self-consumption boost, priced against a plan's real export terms, could produce an estimated annual bill below zero, implying a provider would pay you back for unused solar credit. In practice, that doesn't happen. Real Texas providers don't pay cash for unused export credit; it's typically capped or rolled over instead.

Doing this properly also means knowing things most homeowners don't have on hand and most Electricity Facts Labels don't state: whether your provider nets your export against your usage in real time or once a month, how long unused credit lasts before it's forfeited, and whether adding a battery requires new interconnection paperwork with your utility. This app isn't yet in a position to answer those questions for your specific provider with confidence, so it doesn't guess.

The battery toggle on earlier steps still exists, and still saves your answer. It's there so this app can be honest about what it does and doesn't know, not to suggest a battery wouldn't help. It very well may.

Even for plans this app prices with real, EFL-sourced numbers, the buyback math here is an annual estimate, not a simulation of your actual home's production and usage minute by minute. This app estimates what share of your solar production you'll likely self-consume using published research on typical self-consumption patterns by system size, not by replaying your specific roof's real production against your specific household's real usage in short intervals the way a smart meter actually bills you.

That distinction matters most for whether a battery, or a plan with a real-time buyback rate, would actually help you. Whether your provider settles your bill by netting each interval separately, once a day, or once a month is rarely stated on a standard EFL at all, and it's one of the biggest factors in how much a battery or a real-time plan is worth. Two households with identical solar systems and identical monthly bills can have very different real answers here, depending on details this app can't currently see.

If precision here matters for a real decision, your utility's own smart meter data, which most Texas utilities let you access through their own online account, is the real source of truth this app can't substitute for.

Some Texas retail plans price electricity differently by time of day: free or discounted overnight hours, higher peak-hour rates, or both. This app's plan data model represents every plan with one flat average rate, so it has no way to represent a plan whose price actually changes hour to hour.

Whether a time-of-use plan is a good deal for you depends entirely on when you actually use electricity during the day, information this app doesn't currently ask for. Usage here is tracked as a monthly total only, the same number that would appear on a bill, not split by hour or by day versus night. Without that split, this app can't tell you whether a free-nights plan would genuinely lower your bill or just shift when you're charged for the same usage.

This app's plan data does have a field for marking a plan as offering free nights, and the electricity plan screens are already built to show that badge, but no plan in this app's current dataset is marked that way yet. In practice, this means real free-nights and time-of-use plans that exist in the Texas market today aren't represented here at all, not because they're rare, but because this app can't yet price them accurately enough to include them honestly.

A small number of real Texas plans price electricity against the wholesale market price in close to real time, sometimes marketed as index or "surge" plans, where your rate can spike sharply during high-demand hours (a hot August afternoon, a winter freeze) and drop just as sharply overnight. This app's plan data includes an Indexed rate type for plans like this, but it stores a single current snapshot rate for each one, the same as a fixed plan, not a live or historical distribution of what that rate actually does over a billing cycle.

That snapshot can be badly unrepresentative of a real bill on an indexed plan, in either direction. A month with no price spikes could cost much less than shown here; a month during an extreme weather event could cost dramatically more. This app doesn't currently model that volatility, so treat any indexed plan's estimated cost here as a loose starting point, not a real forecast, and read that plan's own Electricity Facts Label and pricing history closely before choosing one.

Demand charges, a separate fee based on your single highest usage spike in a billing period, common on some commercial and a few residential plans, aren't modeled here at all. This app assumes every plan bills purely on a per-kWh and flat-monthly-fee basis.

Prepaid electricity plans work differently from the standard postpaid billing this app assumes: you fund an account in advance and typically get billed daily rather than monthly, often with no security deposit required, which can matter a lot for a homeowner who wouldn't otherwise qualify for a standard plan. This app's plan data model doesn't currently have a way to represent that billing structure, so no prepaid plans are included.

If a low or no deposit is your main concern rather than solar specifically, a prepaid plan is worth researching directly with a provider. This app can't yet tell you how one would compare against solar production, since its entire cost model assumes standard monthly billing throughout.

This entire app is built around one specific path to solar: a system installed on your own roof that you own, finance, or lease outright. It doesn't address community solar or shared-panel subscription programs, where you buy or subscribe to a share of an offsite solar array instead of installing anything on your own property, common for renters or homeowners whose roof isn't a good candidate for panels.

The math for a community solar subscription is genuinely different: no system size or roof condition to estimate, no federal tax credit question the way a purchased system has, and a subscription price and credit rate set entirely by that specific program rather than anything this app already models. If that's the path you're considering, this app's numbers don't apply to it, and you'll want to compare offers directly.