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What is Subscription based energy & water buying?
Subscription based buying is a new concept for small businesses where you pay a fixed annual subscription allowing your business access to buy rate prices for gas, electricity and water tariffs. This can mean savings of up to 50% against typical supplier pricing models.
Why should I choose subscription based buying?
Subscription based buying for business water, gas and electricity not only gives you access to low pricing, but also offers full transparency in how your business energy bills are calculated. This is important as traditional style essential service buying include retail margin uplift, commission uplifts and other charges that are built in to your unit rates. For example, brokers, third party introducers (known as TPIs) & other energy providers will add an uplift on your energy unit rates to earn a commission payment. This means that there is no consistency in pricing and two identical businesses could pay vastly different amounts for their energy bills. You can see how energy & water bills are typically calculated in the examples below.

As mentioned above, traditional style energy contracts include charges, commissions and uplifts that increase the cost of your business energy (and water). Although these charges are detailed in your contract paperwork and letter of authority (if you have used a TPI service) they are very much in the fine print which with modern digital signing practices can easily go un-noticed. A typical example would look as follows:
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Annual gas usage = 60,000kwh
The Buy price = 4.5p/kwh
Provider adds a 1.6p uplift to the buy rate
Sell price to the business is 6.1p/kwh
Total annual cost (excluding VAT, CCL & Standing charges) = £3,660
The commission uplift included in annual cost = £960
So for a typical 36 month contract, business pays £2,880 in uplift charges!
The same contract on our subscription based contract would be £250/annum saving your business £710/annum or £2,130 on a 36 month agreement.
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This is a typical example but it must be noted businesses are often charged uplifts of 2.5p and more per kwh! In cases such as this, the uplifted charges based on the above example would be more than £1,500 per annum.
Water and waste pricing is calculated in a similar way to energy. A buy price is offered and an uplift is added to the retail margin. See the example below:
Buy price from Licensed Water Provider (LP) = £1,500 per annum
Provider adds uplift of £280
Business total annual cost = £1,780
Additional charges on a 36 month contract = £840
On Solus Water from the Cooperative you would pay a subscription equivalent to £50 per year saving the business £690 on the water agreement.
Solus Water savings can be up to 50% and more but average 32% per annum

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