SmartCut

Comparing Household Services, From the Bill to the Offer

SmartCut connects households that want to pay less for recurring services with providers looking for new customers: mobile, internet, TV, fiber, electricity, gas, health funds and more. The business runs on leads, so every screen answers one question: did the user leave their details, and did the request reach the right provider?

The challenge

Every category is measured differently. Mobile plans compare on data and minutes, health fund plans on waiting periods and coverage, gas on price per cubic meter. One engine had to hold a separate data model for each category without turning into a collection of separate sites. And price comparison is a trust business. A user who doesn’t understand why a plan is ranked first goes straight to the provider’s site.

How we worked

Before a single line of code: a brand strategy and a user research plan that decided what comes first on the homepage, how a price appears on a plan card and where the form sits. Then a detailed specification and a prototype, and only then staged development in a separate Staging environment, where the client approved every page before it went live.

What went live

Four components running on the same plan database: the comparison engine, the address checks, bill analysis and the personal area. A user can start by checking availability at their address, move on to comparing plans, and come back a month later through an alert on their next bill, without leaving the system.

A multi-category comparison engine

Category-specific filters, side-by-side comparison of up to five plans, and automatic highlighting of the best value on each parameter. Filtering does not generate new URLs, so category pages keep their search strength.

Address-based checks

Fiber availability, smart electricity meters and mobile reception quality. A user who checks one service is prompted to check the next at the same address.

Bill analysis

Users send a bill in one of three ways: a dedicated email address the provider sends to directly, a manual upload, or an approved connection to their Gmail inbox. An OCR engine extracts the provider, the amount and the line items, and the system compares them with last month and with the plan database. The user is alerted to a price increase, a new charge they never ordered, a cheaper plan for the same service, or a plan about to end.

A personal area

A watchlist with price-change alerts by WhatsApp, SMS or email, and a reminder one week before a plan ends. Users inactive for 60 days stop receiving messages, so the messaging budget is not spent on cold accounts.