insane: Huh, quite interesting indeed!

Even through Frank Energy and Genesis Energy are one and the same, there's a $520 / year difference for me. I guess it's similar to Spark & Skinny, with the only difference being there is zero difference in service between the power coming out of the walls or gas through the lines.

I could have apparently saved another $30 by using two different providers.

Just changed.to Frank... But annoyed Genesis had me in such an inappropriate plan for the last 4 years. Could have saved $400 by just changing Genesis plans alone.

Congrats on your new found savings.

Sad reality is that the most profitable way to businesses to operate these days is to milk their "sticky" or loyal customer's. While offering more attractive deals to new / actively shopping customers.

Common way to do this is to introduce and market new plans for customers who are shopping around, while quietly increasing prices on legacy plans that people signed up to years ago. Introducing a whole new lower cost sub brand does take this to the next level somewhat.

As you say, at least with skinny / spark, there are some service differences, such as call forwarding not being permitted on skinny (spouse ended up moving to 2 degrees for this reason.

In a lot of way's it would be nice if we had just kept the NZ electricity board. Hence avoiding the need for each power company to have a high paid CEO and marketing team, a marketing team, expensive adverts etc. And I wouldn't have needed to have spent my Sunday afternoon shopping power company websites, in order to stay on a good deal.