Truebill Review: Could This App Save You Money?

• Finds and cancels unused or forgotten subscriptions
• Helps negotiate bills to save you money
• Monitors cable, internet, and utility outages in your area so you don’t have to pay for outages

Once your bank accounts and credit cards are linked, Truebill scans for recurring charges and asks your permission to cancel any unused or forgotten subscriptions it encounters. You can then decide which services or subscriptions to nix.

If you upgrade to the premium version (price details below), Truebill will provide automated cancellations for you, as well as a host of other services. This saves you the hassle of canceling your unused subscriptions one by one yourself.

Another way Truebill helps save money is by potentially lowering bills. Once you connect your bills to your account, negotiators begin looking for hidden discounts and promo rates for you. Truebill can negotiate better rates or find one-time credits that can be applied to your bill. Companies Truebill negotiates with include: Comcast, Cox Communications, Verizon Wireless, Time Warner, Sirius XM, Sprint, AT&T, Charter, Cox, Verizon Fios, and others.

You then receive an email from Truebill to let you know how much money you’ll save. Whether you use the free or the premium version, Truebill charges you 40 percent of what you save. Be mindful that they charge you 40 percent of the entire year of the savings.

So for example, if you have a subscription that costs $100 per month and Truebill gets the rate reduced to $80 per month, you’ll owe Truebill 40 percent of $240 ($20 per month for 12 months), which is an upfront payment of $96. If the company is unable to negotiate any savings, you don’t pay anything for their negotiation attempt. You also have a say in which bills they negotiate for you.

Truebill also monitors for outages. If your electricity goes out or your cable or internet is down, the company will request a credit to your account. This means you only pay for what you actually use; no more paying for downtime — which let’s face it, is cool. The fee for this is 40 percent of the amount credited to you for the outage.

We’ve all experienced times when our internet stops working. Why should we pay for those four hours of wasted service?

Last, Truebill helps save money through the electric saver feature. The feature is available only in areas where electricity is deregulated. In these areas, Truebill will help find the provider with the lowest rates to help you save money on your electric bill.

The subscription starts at $3 a month, but Truebill encourages you to pay more if you think the company has done right by you. It lets you know most people choose to pay $7 month for premium (hint, hint!), and the sliding scale ends at $12. It’s a cool idea, but it took us a while to get to the bottom of the premium pricing model.

With this upgrade to premium, you receive automated subscription cancellations, unlimited budgets and categories, smart savings, overdraft and late- fee refunds, and premium chat support, plus you can sync all of your accounts. Overdraft fees at your bank can cost you more than $30 each time you are charged, so the price for a year’s subscription is not much more than just one overdraft fee.

With the premium version, you still pay 40 percent of what Truebill saves you on your bills. If you consider the refunded overdraft fees and late fees included in the premium version, you could potentially save much more than you would spend on a one-year subscription. Not to mention, you save money by not paying for subscriptions you’re no longer using. It’s easy to see how someone might save more than $100 when first using the service.

If you choose to upgrade to the premium version, your subscription automatically renews unless you turn off the auto-renew feature at least 24 hours before the current period ends. If you are trying out the premium version and later decide you no longer need it, make sure to cancel before the end of the current period.

We spoke with a representative to get a general picture of the different options.

“The app is offered on a sliding scale from $3 to $12, but if you purchase through the Apple Store or Google Play Store it is $4.99 per month. An annual subscription is $35.99 per year (which is actually much cheaper than even doing the $3 per month option),” he explains.

“We take a 40 percent success fee of what you save over the next 12 months. For example, if we save you $100, we’ll charge you $40. This can be paid upfront or you can request a payment plan. In the event that your savings are good for multiple years, we will only charge that 40 percent of the first year’s portion.”

Truebill is not accredited with the Better Business Bureau (BBB), a private nonprofit intended to help consumers find trustworthy businesses. It’s worth noting, though, that businesses must pay for accreditation, as Truebill co-founder and CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada points out. In fact, the majority of the 5.4 million businesses on the BBB site don’t pay for accreditation, according to Hank Parry, a spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau of Northern Nevada and Utah.

That said, accreditation has little to no effect on a company’s BBB rating, and unfortunately, Truebill received an F from the site. The BBB lists three reasons for the rating: an unresolved negative review, the existence of 20 complaints against the company, and the “length of time the company has been operating.”

The number of complaints is weighed in a company’s score in relation to “the size of the business,” Parry says. The majority of the BBB complaints are about bill negotiations not meeting customer expectations. Truebill did respond to most reviews. Of those, a majority have been updated by the customer to show the issue has been satisfactorily resolved.

Mokhtarzada admits that the company “hasn’t spent a lot of time trying to get the score up” on BBB, though he points to the high ratings it receives in the app stores. Those scores and reviews, he believes, are what most of Truebill’s customers pay attention to.

Mokhtarzada also notes that Truebill provides a “100-percent satisfaction guarantee on negotiation.”

If a customer is unpleasantly surprised by his or her bill, which Mokhtarzada says happens in a fraction of cases, the company will work out a prorated payment plan. “We’re looking to meaningfully improve people’s financial health, not nickel and dime them,” he says.

A quick look-over of Truebill’s Facebook page shows a few positive reviews, but also some negative ones. The main customer complaints include being overcharged for services, bills only being lowered because they were downgraded to a basic plan with their service provider, and not being able to get a response from customer service.

Truebill is helpful for tracking your monthly spending and subscriptions, especially if you’re using the free version of the app, in which you pay nothing initially while Truebill looks for ways to save you money.

The service allows you to monitor all of your spending within one app instead of switching between your banking apps if you have multiple bank accounts or credit cards. You’ll have one place to monitor all your spending.

There is no requirement to upgrade to the premium version unless you want access to the premium features. Customer service is available only through email, so you’ll have to wait for an email response, which can take up to 24 hours.

You can also choose which bills you want Truebill to negotiate for you. That way, the service doesn’t just start negotiating on your behalf without your permission or knowledge. Truebill is aimed toward people who are looking for ways to save money, and all considered, the app does what it is designed for. Some people even say they saved hundreds of dollars in a year. That seems smart to us.

Ready to Take Control of Your Finances? Start by Downloading Truebill to See How Much You Can Save >>

Additional reporting by Evan Sachs.