Setting up a home should not take a week of phone calls.

Moving into a place means doing the same thing four times over. Power is one hunt. Internet is another. Television is a third, and a security system is a fourth, each with its own comparison site, its own form, its own hold music. By Thursday you have explained where you live to six different people and you still do not have a light switch that works.

Somewhere in there you hand over a phone number, because every one of those forms asks for it. That is when the week really starts. The calls come from companies you contacted and companies you never heard of, at dinner, for months, long after you signed with someone else. The number was never needed to show you a price. The number was the price.

So the idea here is deliberately unexciting: one place, one set of answers, everything compared at once. You give a ZIP code, we show what is genuinely available at that address, and you sign up on the provider’s own site. There is no account to make and no number to give, which is the entire reason nobody calls you afterwards.

An advertised rate is marketing. It is the smallest almost-true number a company can print, and everything that makes it bigger is further down, in a filed disclosure document that nobody reads. So we read the document.

For Texas electricity we pull every plan the Public Utility Commission lists (not a curated selection, the whole list) and open each plan’s own Electricity Facts Label. From that we rebuild the pricing from the ground up: the energy charge, the base charge, the regulated delivery cost, the credits, the fees. Then we check our arithmetic against the Commission’s own published figures for that plan.

If our numbers do not land on theirs, the plan does not ship. It does not get an asterisk or a hedge or a “from” price. It is simply not on the page, and the results tell you how many were left out and exactly why, so our list never quietly poses as the whole market.

Rebuilding the arithmetic is what catches everything the headline rate hides. Promotional pricing that steps up once the first year is over. Bill credits that hang on a usage threshold, so a household landing a single kilowatt-hour underneath it pays roughly a hundred dollars more that month than the one that landed just above. Required fees folded out of the advertised number and quietly back into the bill. None of it is hidden, exactly: it is all there in the disclosure. It is just that reading the disclosure takes an afternoon.

We do the afternoon. The same instinct governs the other three categories: internet and television coverage is stated at the level we can actually stand behind rather than dressed up as address-verified, and security systems are ranked on the full first-year cost (hardware, installation and monitoring together) because a low monthly fee is usually how the hardware gets paid for.