This Truebill review will help you understand how this app helps you save money by shaving down your bills. More so, how it actually works (mind you, the process is not as simple as it seems but it is workable).
Did you know you can actually save money from your monthly bills? For some, perhaps they know and have been doing it for a while now, while to others, the idea is totally new.
Well, in this day and age when the economy is so unpredictable (recession sometimes comes in the most unexpected time), it’s normal for some if not a lot of people to look for ways to be able to save money. Saving money is like a mandatory thing now given the fact that the future is so uncertain.
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Good thing is, there are apps or platforms like Truebill, which is aimed at making financial management easy by lowering bills, monitoring subscriptions and for outages, as well as electric saving. We just have to say that among these four amazing offerings, we like lowering bills and monitoring subscriptions the most.
We just want to give a little emphasis on subscription billing. If you are someone who has a lot of subscriptions, Truebill will surely be of super great help to you. It works really well on negotiating bills and managing your subscriptions. It helps you keep track of your subscriptions, and eventually help you change your behavior towards it.
Just a fact from a study conducted by Waterstone Group. They found that 84% of Americans undervalue how much they spend each month on subscription services. Participants of the said study estimated their monthly subscription expenses at $79.94 only to find out that they are actually spending $237.33 per month! That’s a huge difference, right?
If you see yourself as one of those participants of the study who underrated their monthly subscription expenses on a monthly basis, then, Truebill will be of great help for you.
Don’t worry because today, as part of this Truebill review, we are going to ensure you fully understand how the app works and how you can take advantage from it and save a lot of money.
In particular, we are going to talk about the following:
- What is Truebill?
- How does Truebill work?
- What other services does Truebill offer?
- What fees does Truebill charge for?
- Does Truebill sell customer information?
- How safe is the Truebill app?
WHAT IS TRUEBILL?
Truebill is a personal finance application that aims to help people save money from their monthly bills. It aims to help people gain total control over their spending.
Basically, the app connects to your accounts to be able to give you a quick but comprehensive look at all your finances. This way, you can easily see your cash, as well as your credit and investment balances — all in one place. More so, Truebill lets you access reports that categorize your expenses, which helps in understanding better where your money goes.
Apart from that, Truebill app also aims to help you cut your spending right there and then. How? Simple. It helps you manage at the same time, cancel any unwanted subscriptions. Furthermore, Truebill can also help negotiate lower rates for your cable, mobile phone, and other monthly essential bills. You can also choose to automatically set aside funds to help you reach any specific financial goals.
Since its inception, Truebill takes pride in having “helped countless people save over $14 million dollars by helping them identify and cancel unwanted subscriptions, lower their bills, and get them refunds on fees and outages,” as stated on their website.
If you are interested to know more about the Truebill app, here’s a review made by Ryan Scribner. We thought it is very insightful and informative. Check the video down below:
HOW DOES TRUEBILL WORK?
The highlight of our Truebill review is how the app actually works. More than anything, we thought it is very important to understand how it does what it does so we, the users, can better appreciate the app.
Unlike most personal finance apps, Truebill offers a few different paths to be able to save money. This includes:
- Lowering Bills
- Monitoring Subscriptions
- Monitoring Outages
- Electric Saver
Let’s take a deeper look into each and how Truebill is able to do so.
LOWERING BILLS
The first path that Truebill offers is called, “Lower My Bills”. In this particular aspect, Truebill negotiates directly with roughly two dozens of service providers to help lower your bill. These service providers include telecom services such as internet and cable, as well as cell phone service providers.
For the app to be able to help you lower your monthly bill, all you have to do is upload a copy of your most recent bill with one of the service providers, or you may opt to connect automatically to your online account. You will then be asked to provide essential information regarding the service.
Once done, Truebill will negotiate a lower rate for you. Usually, Truebill helps you get a promotional plan, cut back on fake fess, or simply lower the rate for you. On average, the personal finance app helps its customers save around 20% of their current telecom plans by negotiating.
Perhaps you are wondering how Truenbil earns from this? Well, this is how it goes. Truebill will charge 40% of your total annual savings. So, if you, for instance, was able to save $100 for the whole year, Truebill will collect $40 as payment for the negotiations they’ve done for you. Take note that the payment has to be made right away.
To help you understand better how the whole thing goes, here’s a step-by-step process to serve as your guide:
Step 1: Sign Up for an Account
Like in any other personal finance app, Truebill will require you to sign up in order to be able to take advantage of the app. Once you are done signing up, you will receive a prompt asking you to enter some of your monthly bills into Truebill’s database.
Step 2: Search for the Bill/Service Provider
Truebill’s list is very comprehensive. We actually were quite impressed with the list of companies that Truebill gets to negotiate with.
Step 3: Allow Truebill to Access Your Monthly Billing Statements
Some customers may feel uneasy about this part given the fact that it requires you to share very important information. But for your safety, you are given two options in sharing information. You can either log into your online billing account or then connect it to the app, or you can manually upload a PDF or a photo/screen capture of the bill. For convenience, the former is ideal, but if you are security-freak, you may opt for the latter.
Step 4: Indicate a Contact Information and Enable “TrueProtect”
As part of the whole process, you will be asked to provide your contact information. However, the important thing that you should pay attention to on this part is choosing this bill to be part of the TrueProtect program. Once you opt for this option, it means you are allowing Truebill to negotiate on your behalf.
Step 5: Authorize Truebill to Charge Your Credit Card
This is the final step in order to lower your bill. Take note, however, that before anything happens, before Truebill starts negotiating, the app ensures it gets 40% from you right away — should the negotiation succeed. It is important to note as a user that the app claims its one-time savings fee from your credit card way before you see the gradual benefits of a lowered monthly bill.
For some customers, this may be a little troublesome. However, if you are someone who doesn’t mind paying ahead, before you even enjoy the benefits of Truebill, then this should not be a problem.
MONITORING SUBSCRIPTIONS
The more upfront path for connecting to Truebill is by connecting both your checking as well as your credit accounts to the app. With the use of the financial encryption called Plaid, all you need to do is enter your account information into the app. Once added, Truebill will immediately review all your transactions and flags recurring bills, as well as changes to bills. It will also determine whether or not it can lower the bill.
Furthermore, the app will map your bills to a calendar. This helps you figure out when your automatic bills hit your account. You can also opt to check your bills to see if it changed over time. Take note also that you can use the information provided to cancel subscriptions, as well as change your behavior, and many more.
Meanwhile, if you think you really need help, you may opt to upgrade to Truebill Premium, which costs $4.99 per month or $35.99 for a whole year of service.
MONITORING OUTAGES
We find this Truebill feature really cool. It’s probably safe to say that this one’s unique to Truebill. Basically, this service sends a letter to banks specifically to request refunds on overdraft or late fees on accounts linked to Truebill app. The process is initiated on the dashboard once you are done setting up your Truebill account.
It is important to take note though that not all banks allow Truebill to do this request on your behalf. So, to be sure, ask your bank first.
Apart from the above-mentioned, Truebill also helps in monitoring outages on your cable, phone, as well as internet providers. They do seek out potential refund on your behalf as well. Should they be successful, the 40% savings fee will also apply to this.
ELECTRIC SAVER
This feature is not available in all areas. What Truebill does is that they, along with their partner Arcadia Power will shop and look for the lowest price per kilowatt of electricity to help you save on your power bill.
For some customers or app users, this adds up to 30% savings on their electricity bill. If you come to think about it, 30% is a huge amount of savings! So, if you are using Truebill app and you belong in locations where the electric saver feature is available, we highly recommend you take advantage of this.
WHAT OTHER SERVICES DOES TRUEBILL OFFER?
Apart from the aforementioned features and services we mentioned, Truebill also offers premium services. Of course, we have to include this in our review. After all, some users or customers would prefer to use premium services than ordinary ones, right?
So, apart from lowering bills as well as managing subscriptions, Truebill also provides other tools that may be helpful in making good financial decisions with your monthly budget. Many of these tools, though, are part of the app’s premium subscription options.
Just so you know, Truebills premium services range from a little as $3 per month up to as much as $12 per month.
For your reference, here are some of what you can avail on Truebill’s premium subscription:
- Balance Syncing
- Cancellations Concierge
- Custom Categories
- Premium Chat
- Smart Savings Plans
- Unlimited Budgets
While any of these subscriptions renew automatically once you subscribe, you can also cancel your subscription anytime you feel like you do not need it/them anymore.
If we may say, while these features are amazing, some of them may be available in other apps free of charge. Thus, if you really want to save money, we suggest you check other applications first before subscribing.
Remember, it is good to compare features and services especially if you know your specific needs and preferences. Don’t get us wrong though because just the same, we find these tools really helpful, and this makes a good choice if you want a single app to do everything for you.
WHAT FEES DOES TRUEBILL CHARGE FOR?
Our Truebill review will not be complete if we will not look into the app’s fees and charges. After all, the very purpose of personal finance apps is to help you save money, right? Which makes it justifiable to check first whether the app will incur money or not.
Anyway, the Truebill app is free to download the app. However, the free thing does not last. What do we mean by that? Simple, if you want to take advantage of Truebill’s other tools that will help you manage your finances thoroughly, you may need to upgrade to their premium plan, which, of course, costs a few bucks.
Truebill Premium Plan costs $35.99 a year or $4.99 a month. You may opt to pay annually or on a monthly basis. If you are new to this though, we highly recommend subscribing on a month to month basis so you can cancel a few services immediately, and eventually downgrade to the free service if you find it better or necessary.
Meanwhile, as we have mentioned earlier, should you use lowering bills feature, Truebill charges 40% of your total annual savings on the first year of use. It is also important to note that the company charges the said fee as soon as the negotiation is complete. Thus the need to provide your credit card details when availing the said feature.
Apart from what we have mentioned, there are no other fees and charges.
DOES TRUEBILL SELL CUSTOMER INFORMATION?
Some users usually worry about the security of the personal information they provide online particularly on apps like Truebill. So, based on what we’ve found, your information is secured with Truebill. The company does not and will not sell your information to any third party company. However, Truebill advertises insurance and credit cards on their site. You will be given the option to connect to the insurance or credit card comparison sites if you want to. Your information will eventually be passed on to these companies.
Apart from that, your information is secured.
HOW SAFE IS TRUEBILL APP?
Since we already mentioned about security concerns, to complete our Truebill review, we also looked into the safety of the app – in totality.
We mentioned earlier that Truebill (just like any other financial management apps out there) asks for access to your personal online financial records. For this reason, some customers or users find it necessary to look into safety as well as the security features of the app.
Looking into the safety and security of the app is one of the major decision-breaker.
Having said that, it is worth sharing that Truebill fully understand that potential users or customers are going to be skeptical of the security risks. Thus, they specifically created a tab on their website titled, “Security”. This is to hopefully put potential users’ minds at ease about handing over keys to your accounts.
Here are some key points we found from the company’s security disclosure:
- It uses the Plaid service to connect with financial institutions
- Using Plaid does not require you to share your banking credentials to Truebill
- Truebill uses bank-level 256-bit encryption for your data
- It ensures that the company does not sell your personal information to any third party company
- Truebill hosts its data on Amazon Web Services (it also stores sensitive data for the Department of Defense among others)
Overall, we have to say that the company is on par with industry security standards, and that it does its best to ensure you feel at ease sharing your information to them. But at the end of the day, it is only you who can really tell whether or not Truebill fits perfectly to your standards based on its safety and security features.
PROS AND CONS OF TRUEBILL
Before we end this Truebill review, we just wanted to share with you the pros and cons that we found on this app.
PROS
- Downloadable for free
- Free from subscription charges for basic services
- Catches service outage
- Monitors subscription renewals
CONS
- It charges 40% of your total annual savings
- Requires access to some sensitive personal information
- A few negative reviews on the Better Business Bureau
FINAL THOUGHTS ON TRUEBILL REVIEW
Overall, we got to say that Truebill, like any other personal finance apps has its share of highs and lows. It’s quite promising. We particularly like the fact that it helps you save money from your bills – regardless if it charges you 40% of your total savings.
How about you? After all the information we shared, how do you find Truebill?