BollettaLimpida

The problem

Anyone looking at an Italian electricity or gas bill sees a total and dozens of items, but the real question is a simple one: am I paying too much? To answer it you have to isolate the part of the cost that actually changes from one supplier to another, the energy and the fixed fee, and compare it with the real offers on the market, not with an advert.

The best-known comparison sites make money from commissions and phone consultations, or ask you to upload your bill and reply by email. I wanted a tool anyone could recommend, with no phone number to leave and no file to send.

What it does

You drop in your bill, even a scan or a password-protected PDF, or a photo, or you type the figures in yourself. Your phone or computer reads it on its own, without sending it anywhere, and shows you item by item what it read, so you can check. Then comes the verdict: whether switching pays off, which is the cheapest offer open to everyone and what steps it takes. If you like, you can get a reminder for when your price expires.

The comparison uses the official offers that suppliers publish every day on the Portale Offerte run by ARERA, the Italian energy regulator: almost 2,900 across electricity and gas, refreshed every morning. Around the tool there is a six-article guide, from reading the bill to switching supplier, and a monthly price observatory.

The choices that matter

• Your bill stays yours. It is read on the device and never leaves it. More than the number of offers, this is what makes the difference.
• Only what you can change is compared. System charges, transport and taxes are the same for everyone. Comparing totals confuses; comparing the negotiable part tells you where you stand.
• The ranking cannot be bought. Offers are sorted by estimated cost and nothing else, and an automatic check makes sure no commercial deal can change that order.
• No empty advice. A switch is suggested only if it saves at least €30 a year and the saving holds even at the highest and lowest prices of the past twelve months. “Stay where you are” is a useful answer too.
• Exact numbers, not plausible ones. I don’t use AI to read or to calculate. A bill contains figures that must be exact, and a calculation you can redo by hand is worth more than a believable answer.

Problems solved along the way

• Errors nobody would have noticed. In the first versions the data read from a bill went straight to the result, and in a test on 30 bills, 18 contained invisible errors. That is where the check screen came from: it warns you when something does not add up, for example a total that differs from the sum of the items. Today, on a test bench of 30 made-up bills, the tool reads every field from PDFs and 95.8% from scans, with no silent errors on the fields that matter.
• The official portal blocks cloud servers. So the update starts every morning from a Mac, which checks the data before publishing it and never replaces good data with broken data.
• PDFs would not open on iPhone. The automated tests that use the site the way a person would, on real browsers, caught it, and the problem was fixed.

Where it stands

BollettaLimpida has been live at www.bollettalimpida.it since September 2026, six days after the first day of work. I don’t have usage figures yet: the anonymous, cookie-free counters have been running since 25 September. Next come twenty comparison cases against the official portal’s calculations, a collection of real bills shared with people’s consent and a usability test with five people.

What I learned

• One source of truth, with checks that fire when something drifts away from it. The most serious defects came from hand-written data sitting next to the official data.
• No warning is better than a wrong warning.
• Lab tests are not enough. A test on fake data can hide a real problem. You need real bills, real people and outside experts.

Try it

You can try the site without a bill: the «Non hai la bolletta? Prova un esempio» button (no bill? try a sample) loads four made-up bills, from an expensive old fixed price to a rate that is already good value. The interface is in Italian. The code is private, but I can show it on a call.