That is exactly what the system counts on. OptiBill exists because being right about your electricity bill should not cost you more than being wrong about it.
There is a particular kind of Maharashtra afternoon this company was built out of. You are in a queue at the MSEDCL office. You got there at eleven. The person ahead of you has a bundle of bills going back four years and a lot to say about each one. Your shop has been shut since morning, or you have burned a day of leave you were saving for something better. And in your hand is a light bill you are fairly certain is wrong by about three hundred rupees.
Three hundred rupees. Less than the day you just spent trying to get it back.
So most people do the sensible thing. They pay it. They complain about it at home, they pay it, and they get on with the week. And the next month it happens again, and they pay that one too.
The amounts are small enough to ignore and frequent enough to matter. That is not an accident. It is the whole shape of the problem.
It is not a fair fight, and it was never meant to be one.
MSEDCL has the tariff order. It has the billing software, the slab tables, the fuel adjustment rates that change every month, and a counter that is open exactly when you are at work. You have a piece of paper with thirty numbers on it, none of which are explained, and a lunch break.
The tariff orders are public. MERC publishes every one of them. But they run to hundreds of pages, they are amended, stayed and revised, and working out whether your fixed charge should have been ₹130 or ₹445 means knowing which order was in force in which month, and whether your supply is single phase or three. Almost nobody knows that. There is no reason anybody should have to.
You take a photo of your bill. We read every line on it and check each one against the actual MERC order that applied to that month. Then we show you the arithmetic. Not a verdict, the arithmetic, so you can see where a number came from and disagree with us if you think we are wrong.
If something is genuinely overcharged and you want it back, we file the grievance with MSEDCL as your authorised representative. You do not stand in the queue. You do not shut the shop. And if we do not recover anything, you do not pay us anything for trying.
This is the part we care about most, so we would rather say it plainly than let you find out later.
The first bill we ever audited properly, end to end, was one of our own family's. It had climbed from around two thousand rupees to five and a half thousand in a few months. Everyone was certain something was wrong. It would have been very easy, and very good for us, to find something.
The engine checked every line and said the bill was correct. The rise was summer, and slab rates, and a consumption jump that was entirely real. We shipped that answer, and it is still what the app says today.
It is a sales pitch with a calculator attached. Ours is built to say "this bill is fine" as readily as it says "you have been overcharged", and to admit when it could not read enough of a bill to be sure. A wrong claim filed at MSEDCL does not just fail. It costs you your credibility the next time you are actually right.
So the engine refuses to guess. If it cannot read the charge breakdown, it says the bill was not fully checked rather than calling it clean. If the tariff card for a month has not been verified against the published order by a person, it withholds that check instead of pricing off a number nobody confirmed. Less impressive on a screenshot. Considerably more useful when it matters.
You work office hours. So does the MSEDCL counter. You have never once been free at the same time as the person who could fix your bill. Being a tenant makes it worse, because the bill carries your landlord's name and you assume that ends the conversation. It does not. Under the Electricity Act, if you live there and you pay the bill, you are the consumer.
Thirty or forty thousand a month, and closing for half a day to argue about it costs more than the error. Commercial bills also carry the charges most likely to go wrong: demand charges, power factor penalties, load-based additions. Nobody is checking them, and everybody is paying them.
Twenty medical stores, or eleven outlets. Somebody in accounts pays twenty bills a month and has no way to tell a normal bill from a wrong one. Small errors, twenty times over, twelve months a year, are no longer small.
The near goal is simple and unglamorous. Every MSEDCL tariff category, every month, checked against a rate card a human has verified against the published order. No gaps, no guesses, no "probably".
The longer goal is the one worth getting out of bed for. Right now the only person checking your electricity bill is the person who sent it. We would like that to stop being true, for anyone in Maharashtra with a meter and a phone, whether or not they can afford to lose a day's work over three hundred rupees.
We are a small operation in Pune. Not a large one pretending otherwise. If you write to us, the person who replies is the person who built the thing you are writing about.
OptiBill AI Technologies LLP · Pune, Maharashtra
support@optibill.in
