Electric Kiwi review

Electric Kiwi is a New Zealand-owned, online-only power company built around a single idea: that the time you use electricity should change what you pay for it. It is the smallest of the 8 companies we compare by customer numbers, and the one that has grown fastest.

What Electric Kiwi actually offers

The plans on offer today are Everyday, MoveMaster and Sunday Saver. All of them are built on time-of-use pricing, which means electricity costs different amounts at different times of day rather than one flat rate around the clock.

The feature everyone knows is the Hour of Power: one hour of free electricity every day. You choose the hour, and you can move it. It is not a gimmick so much as a very direct incentive: a household that runs the dishwasher, a load of washing and the hot water cylinder inside the same hour genuinely gets those for nothing.

Electric Kiwi states plainly that it has no fixed-term contracts and no exit fees. That is unusual enough in this market to be worth naming. It means the decision to try them is reversible, which is the opposite of how most fixed-price offers work.

They also sell broadband and mobile, so a household can consolidate onto one account and one bill.

Who it suits

Electric Kiwi is a good fit if you can move when you use power. Households that are home during the day, that charge an EV overnight, or that are happy to run appliances on a timer will do well out of off-peak rates plus a free hour. So will anyone who wants to avoid being locked in. There is no term to serve out and nothing to pay to leave.

It also suits people who are comfortable managing an account online. Electric Kiwi has no branches and no retail footprint; everything happens through the app and the website.

What to watch

Time-of-use pricing cuts both ways. If your household's demand is concentrated in the evening peak — everyone home at 6pm, heating on, dinner cooking, showers running — and you genuinely cannot shift it, then off-peak rates are of limited help and the Hour of Power is worth less than it looks. Be honest about your own routine before assuming the structure favours you.

There is no mains gas. We have not been able to confirm that Electric Kiwi sells piped natural gas. If your home has gas hot water or gas heating, you would be running two suppliers, which is usually more expensive and always more admin than a dual-fuel account.

Online-only means online-only. For most people that is fine or better. If you would rather sort a problem out by walking into a branch or talking to someone locally, it is a real trade-off.

How Electric Kiwi compares

Against the big generator-retailers — Contact, Genesis, Mercury, Meridian — Electric Kiwi competes on structure rather than scale. It does not own power stations. What it sells is a pricing model designed to reward flexible households, plus terms that are easy to walk away from.

Against the other independents, its distinguishing features are the free hour and the explicit no-exit-fee position.

The honest caveat: we do not yet show what any of this costs. Electricity is priced by network region, user type and meter configuration, so we are collecting rate files from the companies directly rather than estimating. Until then, compare Electric Kiwi on what is verifiable: the free hour, the absence of a lock-in, the off-peak structure and the broadband and mobile bundling, and confirm the numbers with them before you sign up.