AutoFix is a BillFixers feature where we automatically renegotiate your bill to keep you at the lowest rates. Whenever we see an additional opportunity for savings, we’ll get in touch with your provider to renegotiate. The idea behind automatic renegotiation is that you can set it and forget it. That way, you don’t have to worry about overpaying for that bill ever again. You can choose to either use BillFixers with AutoFix or without it. If you don’t have AutoFix turned on, you’ll have to manually initiate negotiations.
When will you negotiate my bill with AutoFix?
The most common situation is when discounts expire. Whenever we negotiate, we record the amounts and expiration dates of discounts on your bill. That includes both pre-existing discounts and discounts we negotiate ourselves. Then, when the discount expires, we’ll initiate a new negotiation. Depending on the provider, this will either be just before it expires, or just after.
Another common situation is when we discover that there are new discounts available to you. So, if you are halfway through a discount we negotiated, but we find out that your provider is offering additional discounts, we’ll negotiate again to get you maximum savings. So, for example, we negotiate a $20/mo discount for your Comcast cable bill in January. In June, Comcast starts offering free HBO discounts and we know you’re paying $15/mo for HBO. So, we’ll contact Comcast again even though your original discount is still good. Now, you’re saving $35/mo!
But the more general answer is that we’ll keep an eye out for savings opportunities. If we think you’ve gotten a late fee, we might initiate a negotiation then. However, not all price increases will trigger an AutoFix. For example, if taxes increase in your area, or your provider does a non-negotiable price hike, we won’t try again until we know we can likely get savings. If all else fails, our default is to check in every year at the minimum.
How do I turn AutoFix on or off?
You can turn on or off AutoFix on each of your bills when you sign up.
But you’re not stuck with that choice. After you make that choice the first time, you can turn it on or off any time. You’ll be able to see the status of AutoFix on each of your bills on your dashboard at any time. Just click “View Bill” in the top right corner to go to the details for that individual bill. From there, you’ll have a toggle for AutoFix on the card in the top right corner of that page at all times. 
Just click that toggle to turn AutoFix on or off. If it is grey, it will be off. If it is green, it will be on.
You can hover over that at any time on a computer and see a reminder of what AutoFix is.
A word of warning: if you turn off AutoFix, that won’t cancel your current negotiation request, just future negotiations. If you want us to stop negotiating right away, click the cancel button on the card or email us. Here’s some more information on cancelling service.
How does billing work with AutoFix?
When it comes time to renegotiate, we will try to negotiate before the scheduled price increase when a discount expires. So, you won’t get to see the clear bill-to-bill reduction like you did the first time. For example, if you pay $60 a month for internet when you sign up and we negotiate a yearlong discount for $20 a month, your bill with your provider will be $40 and your bill with us will be $10. Then, after a year, the discount is going to expire. We negotiate a new discount. Your bill otherwise would have been $60 a month and is now $40 and the charge from us is still $10. But your bill didn’t drop.
That’s a weird and annoying problem for both of us and we get a little more into it in this article, but the general idea is that we’re not going to try to play games: we’ll just try to get your bill as low as possible and then charge 50% of the amount less you’re paying than what you otherwise would have paid.
For residential negotiations, we cap our savings at 12 months when we’re figuring out how much to charge you. When we AutoFix a bill, you’re working with us on a new negotiation, so we’ll start the clock again. But we won’t charge for more than 12 months of savings on any given negotiation.