Terms of Service

1. Agreeing to these terms

These Terms are an agreement between you and OptiBill AI Technologies LLP. You accept them when you create an account, upload a bill or pay for a plan. If you do not accept them, please do not use OptiBill.

We may change these Terms from time to time. If a change affects your rights in any real way, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. Carrying on using the service after that means you accept it. If you would rather not, you can cancel under our Refund and Cancellation Policy.

2. Who can use OptiBill

You need to be 18 or older and able to enter a contract under the Indian Contract Act, 1872. You also need to be one of the following:

• the registered consumer of the MSEDCL connection, or
• an occupier of the premises who actually pays the electricity bills, or
• someone acting with the registered consumer's consent, which we verify separately.

Section 2(15) of the Electricity Act, 2003 treats anyone whose premises are connected for supply as a consumer. So a tenant who lives there and pays the bill is a consumer in their own right, even when the bill carries the owner's name. If you tell us you are an occupier, we ask for proof that you pay, and a person checks it before anything is filed.

3. What the service is, and is not

What it is

OptiBill reads the bill you upload, compares each charge against the tariff MERC had in force for that month, and shows you where the bill does not match. If you are on a paid plan and ask us to, we prepare and file a grievance with MSEDCL as your authorised representative.

What it is not

• We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice. No advocate and client relationship arises between us. If you need legal advice, please speak to an advocate.
• We cannot promise you any outcome. Whether MSEDCL accepts a grievance, and how much it credits back, is entirely their decision and the forum's. Nothing on our site or in the app is a promise of recovery.
• An audit is an opinion. It is worked out from the figures we could read on the photos you sent and the tariff data we hold. It is not an official recalculation and it does not bind MSEDCL.
• An audit is only as good as the bill you send. If a photo is blurred or cropped, or you send only one side of a two-sided bill, some charges cannot be checked at all. When that happens we say so, and we mark the audit as not fully checked. Not fully checked never means the bill is fine.
• Tariff orders can change. We audit against the order we hold as being in force for that period. Orders are sometimes stayed, revised or set aside on appeal, and occasionally that applies backwards.

4. Acting as your representative

Before we go to MSEDCL about any meter, you have to authorise us for that meter. You accept a declaration we generate, and confirm it with a one-time password sent to the relevant mobile number. We store the exact wording you accepted, when you accepted it, and the verification record.

What you are authorising is specific. We may examine your bills, write to MSEDCL, file a grievance with the Internal Grievance Redressal Cell, the Consumer Grievance Redressal Forum and the Electricity Ombudsman, and appear there for you. That covers the meters you have authorised and nothing else.

You can withdraw that authorisation at any time by writing to us. It takes effect for anything not yet filed. A complaint already filed can only be withdrawn through the forum's own process, and we will help you do it.

The complaint stays yours. It is filed in your name. We act for you, we do not replace you.

5. What you are responsible for

• Getting the details right, above all the consumer number. MSEDCL matches complaints against that number, and a single wrong digit gets the whole thing rejected at the counter.
• Confirming the tariff category printed on your bill when we ask. We make a good guess, but a guess is not confirmation, and we will not file until you have confirmed it.
• Actually being entitled to act for the connection, and telling us honestly whether you are the registered consumer, an occupier, or acting with the consumer's consent.
• Keeping your account secure. Anything done through your account counts as done by you.
• Paying your electricity bill. Raising a grievance does not pause what you owe MSEDCL. We are not responsible for disconnection, late payment charges or interest if you stop paying.

6. Plans, limits and fair use

Every bill you upload is read by a paid outside service and audited on our servers. That costs us money the moment it happens, and we cannot get it back. That is the reason plans carry limits, and we would rather explain it than hide it in small print.

One bill audited means one billing month, for one meter, processed once. Re-running an audit on a bill we have already read does not count again. A two-sided bill counts as one bill even though we read both sides.

Fair use. These plans are for auditing your own connections, or ones you are authorised to act for. If an account is being used in a way that is plainly out of line with that, say bulk uploads for connections you have no relationship with, or automated submissions, we may ask you to move to a plan that fits, charge reasonably for processing we have already done, or limit further uploads. We will tell you first, and we will not apply any of it retrospectively without notice.

Subscriptions run 12 months from payment. They do not renew on their own unless you have set up a recurring payment. Unused allowance does not carry over.

7. Fees, success fee and taxes

Subscriptions

Prices in the app are in rupees and include GST unless we say otherwise. You get a tax invoice when you pay.

Success fee

If we file a grievance for you and money comes back, we charge 20% of what is actually recovered, plus GST.

• Recovered means an amount MSEDCL credits, adjusts, waives or refunds against your connection because of the grievance we filed. It can be a cash refund, a credit note, or a reduction on a later bill.
• It does not include future savings, charges you avoid, or a lower bill caused by using less electricity or by a tariff change.
• Nothing recovered means nothing to pay. There is no minimum and no fee for a grievance that does not succeed.
• We invoice once the credit or refund actually shows up, and we show you the calculation. Payable within 15 days.
• If you settle directly with MSEDCL on a matter we filed and do not tell us, the success fee is still payable on what you recovered.

Payments

Razorpay processes payments. We never receive or store your card, UPI or bank details. Refunds work as set out in our Refund and Cancellation Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

8. What you must not do

• Upload a bill for a connection you have no right to act for, or lie about your relationship to it.
• Send forged, edited or made-up bills or payment proofs.
• Use the service to harass MSEDCL or its staff, or to file a complaint you know has no basis.
• Scrape, reverse-engineer, resell or white-label the service, or push bills through it automatically in bulk, without our written agreement.
• Try to reach another user's data, or probe, scan or test our systems.
• Use OptiBill for anything unlawful.

9. Who owns what

The OptiBill name, logo, software, audit engine, tariff database and the wording of our documents are ours. Please do not copy or reuse them beyond simply using the service.

Your bills stay yours. You give us a limited licence to store and process them so we can do the audit and, if you ask, file for you. We may use aggregated figures that cannot be traced back to you, to improve the engine and to describe general patterns in MSEDCL billing. We will not publish your bill, your name or your consumer number without asking you first.

10. Liability

Nothing here excludes liability for fraud, deliberate wrongdoing, or anything the law does not allow us to exclude. That includes your rights under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, which these Terms do not touch.

Beyond that:

• We are not liable for what MSEDCL, the Forum or the Ombudsman decides, or how long they take to decide it.
• We are not liable for loss caused by information you gave us that was wrong or incomplete, or by a photo that could not be read properly.
• We are not liable for indirect losses, lost profit, lost opportunity, or a recovery you expected and did not get.
• Our total liability for any claim is capped at what you have paid us in the 12 months before it arose.

The service is provided as it is. We work hard on accuracy, and we would far rather tell you a bill could not be fully checked than guess at it. But we cannot warrant that every audit is free of error.

11. Indemnity

If we face a claim because you broke these Terms, because something you told us was untrue, or because you filed against a connection you had no right to act for, you agree to cover our losses and reasonable costs. This does not apply where the problem was our own mistake.

12. Suspension and closing your account

You can close your account whenever you like, from Settings or by writing to us. Closing it does not cancel a grievance already filed, and does not wipe out a success fee already earned.

We may suspend or close an account if we have good reason to believe there has been fraud, forged documents, misuse, or a breach of these Terms. If we do, we will tell you why, and unless the reason is fraud we will give you a chance to put it right.

13. Governing law and disputes

Indian law applies. Subject to the next paragraph, the courts at Pune, Maharashtra have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer, nothing here takes away your right to go to a consumer forum where the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 allows it, including one near where you live or work.

Before you start anything formal, please raise it with our Grievance Officer. Most disputes turn out to be a misunderstanding about what an audit actually said, and those are far quicker to sort out directly.

14. Grievance Officer

As required by the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 and the Information Technology Act, 2000:

Name: GRIEVANCE OFFICER NAME
Email: grievance@optibill.in
Address: REGISTERED ADDRESS
Hours: Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm IST

We acknowledge every complaint within 48 hours and resolve it within one month.