When we successfully negotiate your savings, we split the savings with you. For residential negotiations, we cap those savings at the first 12 months of savings. When you go to pay, you can pay one of two ways: upfront or monthly. Upfront means you’ll pay for the full 50% of the savings right away and not pay anything else until we negotiate again. Monthly means we’ll charge 50% of the savings each month. Once you choose a preference, that will be your default preference going forward, but you can change it yourself at any time.

Picking a preference the first time

When you get savings for the first time (or the first time in our new system, if you’ve previously used Freshbooks), you’ll get this screen:

You can click either of those boxes in the middle of the screen to choose your payment preference and the breakdown along the side will change. In that example, Monthly Payment has been selected. One thing you might notice is that if you get “One Time Savings”, which are generally just a credit on your next bill, you’ll be charged for that in the first month. So, here you’ll pay $35 the first month, but then $35 monthly. Or, you can just pay $310 in one payment.

Changing your preference later

By default, you’ll be on monthly billing. However, if you don’t want to pay monthly, you can pay the rest of your balance at any time by just clicking “Pay in Full” on your payments page. This will only work if you are already on monthly billing.

If you’re on upfront billing and would like to switch, you can do that at any time. First, click “Edit Payment Preferences” on that payments page to navigate to Payment Preferences.

From there, at the bottom of the page, you’ll have “Payment Frequency” options. Whichever one is highlighted will be your preference. So, if you’d like to pay monthly in future, click the button on the right. If you’d like to pay in one payment in the future, click the button on the left.

You can go to this page to change your preference at any time, even if you don’t have active savings.

Why should I pay upfront vs. monthly?

This is totally a matter of personal preference. The advantage to paying monthly is that you space out your payments so that you’re always ahead. So, your first month, you’ll save $20, pay $10, and have $10 in your bank account. However, lots of people choose to pay upfront to get it out of the way, because they prefer not to have another recurring expense. The total amount you’ll end up paying is the same. However, because we pay a flat fee per payment, if it’s all the same to you, we actually get to take home a little more money if you pay upfront. So, if you want to do us a favor, we always appreciate upfront payments. However, at the end of the day, our goal is to help you save money, not us, so you should do whatever works best for you!

None of this looks familiar. This isn’t how I used to pay. What should I do?

If you’ve worked with us before, you probably were on our old billing platform, Freshbooks. We built this new platform ourselves for more flexibility and to make things easier (although we’re still improving it, so it’s not perfect yet.) You can tell if you’re on “Legacy Billing” meaning still set up to pay in our old system, by checking to see if you see a credit card icon the left menu of your dashboard. If you don’t have it, contact us and we’ll get you moved over. Otherwise, we’ll migrate you automatically soon.

I was charged upfront! I didn’t want that! What should I do?

By default, we set everybody to monthly. However if you chose upfront payments in the past, you’ll be charged upfront in the future. If this happens and you’re unhappy about it, we’re happy to help. What we can do is refund the payment and then set you up on monthly billing instead. Since this is a somewhat labor intensive process, we have to do it manually, but just reach out to us and we’re happy to help.

What if I pay upfront and then cancel service or don’t receive the savings?

Our whole thing is that we split the savings with you. So, if you cancel service after paying upfront, just let us know and we’ll refund the difference. No sweat. To calculate the amount you’ve been overcharged, we just need a copy of the last bill showing the closed account. If for whatever reason you think there’s some issue causing you to miss out on savings we’re charging for, you can send us your most recent bill and we’ll figure it out. If that ever happens, we’ll try to get the provider to fix it. However in the worst case scenario where there actually is a mistake and they won’t honor the discount, we’ll of course refund any overcharges.