What we found in 100 Canadian phone bills

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. 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 nobody reads

Rate increases are one category. There are others.

Discount-removal warnings ("Your Savings: X will no longer apply"). Term-end notices ("Your promotion will be ending. Once your term ends, this service will continue at the regular rate of $Y"). Financing-end notices, which is the one that triggered my own post-financing trap. Bundle expirations.

Every one of these is a forward-looking, account-specific notice on your bill. Almost all of them live in a single paragraph at the bottom of a per-service block. No banner, no colour change, no section break. Just a paragraph that starts with a small info icon.

We audited a customer last Tuesday whose discount notice would have cost them $10 extra if they'd missed it by another month.

Every bill prints "You saved $X on this bill!" in green at the top. The sentence "$X of your current price is held by conditions that can change" never appears anywhere on any Canadian phone bill we've audited.

Why these keep happening

Autopay debits the account on the due date. Paperless replaces the envelope with an email. The email links to a portal that shows the total due. The PDF, where everything that matters lives, is two clicks deep, and almost nobody opens it. While gathering bills from friends to test our system, I had people that were not even sure where to find their bill. I am not sure what to believe, do the carriers know this and designed it this way? Or is it just a lazy bill design that happens to favor carriers? I will leave that to you to decide. I believe though the CRTC should mandate plain-language summaries on page 1 or in the bill emails.

What we built

Rightward reads your phone bill PDF and runs all five checks in about 30 seconds. Free. No account.

If reading the bill isn't the blocker — if the time on hold with retentions is — we run the carrier call ourselves. $49 plus applicable taxes upfront, full refund if we can't find savings on your bill.

The audit is at rightward.ca.

Check your own bill in five minutes

If your bill has looked the same for months and you haven't reviewed your plan in over a year, the corpus math says about a 55% chance one of these five is on your bill.

Carrier app → Plans → Change Plan. Compare what's listed against your current plan name.
Most recent bill PDF (the actual PDF from your account portal, not the notification email). Scroll to the bottom of each per-service block. Look for paragraphs starting with a small info icon.
The words that matter inside those paragraphs: effective, increase, ends, promotional pricing, will be ending.

If you find one of these, drop a comment with what carrier. We're tracking which ones are worst.

Isaac A. is a co-founder of Rightward Financial Inc., a Canadian telecom bill analyzer based in Ottawa. PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa with 6+ years in the networking space. Rightward — co-founded with Peter L. — launched in May 2026 and has audited 100+ Canadian phone and internet bills in its first week of going live.