What we found in 100 Canadian phone bills · Rightward<br>We've been live for a week. In that week we've audited more than 100 Canadian phone bills across Rogers, Bell, Telus, Fido, Koodo, Virgin Plus, and Public Mobile. From these audits, five overpayment patterns keep showing up. About 55% of the bills we have audited have at least one of them.

I'm a software engineer in Ottawa. Later part of last year I paid off the phone I'd been financing for 2 years through Rogers. My bill dropped twenty dollars and then stopped changing. I stayed on the same plan for four more months. One day, my wife drew my attention to the fact that our bills are still quite high even after paying off the phone. I opened the MyRogers app and saw a cheaper plan sitting in the catalog. Same network, more data and $15 dollars less.

Momentarily, I was pissed. We did a similar check for my wife who is a Fido customer and the exact same pattern. Her phone was actually paid off 11 good months ago and we had been paying way more than necessary. And then I was embarrassed. I asked friends and family and I ended up becoming that external force that prompted them to check. I started Rightward from there.

After about a 100+ audits, this is what we have learnt.

The cheaper plan inside your own carrier's app

Carriers list cheaper plans in their own self-serve catalogs without telling existing customers about them. You can switch in 60 seconds from the app. No retentions call.

One example from the corpus: a customer paying $65/month for 30GB. The same carrier's app showed 75GB for $45. Same network. Lower price. The plan had been sitting there the whole time.<br>We caught this on a Fido bill on Tuesday and have since seen a repeated pattern on the Big 3 networks (Bell, Rogers and Telus) as well.

The check: carrier app → Plans → Change Plan. If a comparable or cheaper plan appears, switch in the app.

The post-financing plan that never changes

Paying off a phone is the most predictable trigger for overpayment we see. My wife and I are firsthand examples of this category.

Two things happen at once when your financing ends. The device payment line drops off, usually $30-50. A financing-tied credit on your plan also drops off, usually $15-25. Net effect: the bill drops by $15-25 and then plateaus. You see it go down and then you stop looking.

But the plan itself is the problem. It was built around the financing arrangement. Once financing ends the same plan is overpriced, and now you're paying full price for a plan that exists to soften a device subsidy.

We've seen Canadians stay on the post-financing plan for four, seven, and eleven months. None of them noticed by reading the bill. Mostly the user requires an external trigger to flag this. In my case, it was my wife. I interviewed a friend of mine and for him, the trigger was running out of data while on a trip. He goes into his app to get a better plan that can cover his data requirements and he finds a plan cheaper than what he has with much more data.

If you've paid off a phone in the last year and your plan hasn't changed, this is the single most likely source of overpayment on your bill.

Rate increases announced in advance, ignored

Carriers print rate increases on the bill 60-90 days before they take effect. Usually something like:

"Starting on your March 23 bill, the monthly fee for your internet package will increase by $7/month plus taxes."

A specific date. A specific amount. Plenty of time to act.

We see these warnings sit on bill after bill, untouched, until the higher bill arrives and the customer doesn't know why. The most expensive example so far in our corpus: a Rogers internet customer about to absorb a price cliff of roughly $120/month at term-end. Sixty days of advance notice. Customer on autopay and paperless. Had never opened the PDF.

Last week we surfaced a $104 increase notice on a bill 6 weeks before it would have hit. The warnings are disclosed but practically buried on page 3 or 4 or further on a PDF bill walled behind an app. Mostly the user is hit with the increase on their first bill, gets alarmed, calls the carrier to fix it. Mostly they get it figured out by threatening to leave, but they have already paid the high bill at least once.

Long-tenure customers who don't know the market has moved

Canadian wireless prices dropped 30-40% over the past three years. MVNO entry, competitive pressure, post-pandemic plan restructuring. A 2021-vintage plan that was competitive then is overpriced now.

Customers on the same plan for 5+ years tend to assume the plan is fine. The carrier hasn't moved them, because the carrier has no reason to. The customer hasn't checked, because the bill hasn't changed.

A Fido customer had been on the same plan since 2019 and was paying almost double the current equivalent.

The fix is the same as the first pattern: open the app, compare. The trigger is the hard part. Nothing alerts you to check.

The other forward-looking warnings...