What happens to your bill.
You're uploading a sensitive document to a website. Here is exactly what happens to it, in plain English first and formal terms second.
The plain-English version
- Your file is never stored. It's read in memory by our AI extraction system, the numbers are pulled out, and the file is discarded. It never touches a database, disk, or backup.
- We ignore who you are. Your name, street address and account number aren't needed to compare plans, so we don't extract or keep them.
- We keep the numbers only. Rates, usage, tariff type, billing period, solar export, state: the structured facts needed to build your report. When you unlock the full plan, we store those facts, your report, your household answers, your alert email and a history of the quarterly checks we run. That stored copy is what lets your counselor keep re-checking your deal. The bill file itself is still never stored.
- No human reads your bill. Extraction is fully automated. If you email a bill to support for help, only that support case sees it, and it's deleted after the case closes.
- Nothing is sold or shared. Not to retailers, not to advertisers, not to data brokers. Our revenue is your membership fee, see how we make money.
What we collect
From your bill (structured extraction only)
Retailer name, plan name, billing period, electricity usage, tariff rates, supply charge, controlled load, solar export and feed-in tariff, concessions already applied, bill total, state and postcode. Extraction confidence scores are stored alongside so we can flag uncertain reads instead of guessing.
From you directly
Optional household answers (solar, gas, EV, hot water, pool, concession card, routine flexibility) and, once you’re a member, your email address so quarterly check results and savings alerts can reach you. There’s no password account: your purchase is your access.
Payments
Card details are handled entirely by Stripe, our payment processor. We never see or store card numbers.
Anonymous usage events
We count product steps (a check started, a report viewed) to see where the product confuses people. These events carry no name, email, IP address or bill contents. They're tallies, not tracking.
How long we keep things
- Uploaded files: seconds, deleted after extraction, never persisted.
- Structured bill facts, reports, household answers and quarterly-check history: while your membership is active, so monitoring works. Deleted within 30 days of a deletion request.
- Alert email: while your membership is active, or until you ask us to remove it.
Your rights
Under the Australian Privacy Principles you can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data at any time. Email privacy@energycounselor.ai and we’ll action it within 30 days, usually much faster.
Which AI reads your bill
Our system is built to work with a mix of established AI providers rather than being locked into just one. Here is exactly which, and exactly what each receives.
- OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude) and Ollama (Qwen): reading your bill. Rendered images of your bill's pages, sent for the single request that reads your rates and usage. Our system supports directing that request to any of these providers; which one is active for your bill is chosen by our own server configuration, not by you. Each provider's own terms govern how long it holds a request. We never keep the images ourselves, and your bill goes nowhere else.
- OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude) and Ollama (Qwen) (optional, and currently switched off): writing your report's counselor note. Structured numbers from your finished report only, never your bill file, never the bill images. Nothing is sent while this feature is off. If we switch it on, the provider's own terms govern retention.
Being straight with you about one detail: we send your bill’s pages as images, so whatever is printed on them travels in that request: your name and address included. What we don’t do is pull those details out or keep them. Extraction is automated, nobody here reads your bill, and nothing about you is sold or shared onward.
Other third parties we use
- Stripe: payments.
- Supabase: account and structured data storage (Sydney region where available).
- Vercel: website hosting.
- Loops: sending the emails you’ve asked for (when email sending is enabled).
Questions? Support answers privacy questions like any other. No runaround.