Methodology and disclosures

Every comparison site says it is neutral. This one is set up so you do not have to take that on faith: the data is a public filing, the parser is a public repository, the ranking is one formula printed below, and the one conflict of interest is named. If any of that stops being true, the site is broken.

Where the numbers come from

All rates come from the Georgia Public Service Commission's Marketers Pricing Index, where every certificated marketer files its rates each month. The PSC publishes four charts as PDFs. Nothing on this site is collected from marketers, submitted by marketers, or estimated by us. The current data is the August 2026 filing.

Month page: https://psc.ga.gov/utilities/natural-gas/marketers-pricing-index/august-2026/. This month's charts:

• Fixed rate plans: https://psc.ga.gov/site/assets/files/9686/august_2026_fixed_pricing-1.pdf
• Variable rate plans: https://psc.ga.gov/site/assets/files/9686/august_2026_variable_pricing-1.pdf
• Senior citizen rate plans: https://psc.ga.gov/site/assets/files/9686/august_2026_senior_pricing-1.pdf
• Pre-pay plans: https://psc.ga.gov/site/assets/files/9686/august_2026_prepay_pricing-1.pdf

How to check these numbers

Every number on this site is copied from a PSC chart, and every page links to the PSC month it came from. To check a row, open that month on the PSC site, open the matching chart PDF (fixed, variable, senior or prepay), and compare the rate, service charge, effective date and early termination fee to the row here. The parsed values for the current month are published as rates.json and rates.md, so the comparison can be done by hand or by script. An automated sanity gate refuses to publish a month whose parse does not match the chart's own structure; those months are listed below rather than shown.

How plans are ranked

Plans are ranked by estimated total annual cost, cheapest first, and by nothing else. The formula, in full:

Total annual cost = rate × the PSC's therm assumption + the customer service charge × 12 + the Atlanta Gas Light annual base charge. Ties break by service charge, then by name. No other factor.

Where a marketer files a range of customer service charges rather than one figure, the high end is used. That is the PSC's own method for its published bill, and it is the conservative one: a marketer filing a range is ranked on the worst charge a customer could be given, so a wide range can never buy a better position. Both ends of the range are shown in the table.

The same formula is applied to every plan on every chart. The PSC publishes a Total Annual Bill of its own on some charts; it is kept in the data as psc_annual_bill and is never ranked on, because the PSC computes it on a different basis on the pre-pay chart and mixing two bases inside one ranked table would order plans by which basis happened to be available. Pre-pay plans billed as a flat monthly amount file no per-therm rate, so they show no estimated annual cost and sort last.

For August 2026 the PSC's assumption is 641 therms a year and the Atlanta Gas Light annual base charge is $580.53. There is no editorial score, no partner weighting, and no way to buy a position. Your own usage is not the PSC's assumption, so treat the ranking as a like-for-like comparison rather than a quote.

When a month is refused

A parser that quietly mangles a rate is worse than no site at all, so the ingest refuses to publish a month that fails any of these checks. On failure nothing is published, the errors are written to data/withheld/, and the monthly workflow opens a public issue. The rules the code actually applies:

1. All four charts, each identifying itself. Fixed, variable, senior and pre-pay must all be present and non-empty, and each PDF must carry the title line naming which chart it is. A chart the PSC never published is only allowed if it is recorded, with a reason, in data/skipped_months.json.
2. Row counts within 30% of the previous month, per chart. A chart that suddenly halves or doubles is a parse failure until proven otherwise. The comparison needs something to compare against, so it is skipped where the previous calendar month was never published, and skipped for any chart that was itself absent that month.
3. Filed rate present and between $0.20 and $3.00 a therm. Two rows are exempt from the floor: Regulated Provider Group 1 and Group 2 are the Atlanta Gas Light regulated provider's rate adders rather than commodity prices, so they are allowed from -1.00 to 3.00. A rate outside the range blocks the month wherever it appears. A missing rate blocks the month on a standard plan and is recorded as a warning elsewhere; pre-pay flat-bill plans file no per-therm rate at all, which is legitimate and noted.
4. Customer service charge present and between $0 and $30. A charge outside the range blocks the month wherever it appears. A missing charge blocks the month on a standard plan and is a warning elsewhere; flat-bill plans fold the charge into the bill, so their blank is always a warning.
5. Effective date within 60 days of the month. A missing date is a warning, not an error: the PSC itself sometimes omits it, and the date is not load-bearing for comparing rates. What is an error is a date the PSC printed that we failed to read, which is a genuine parse anomaly.
6. Every marketer name must be a known marketer. An unrecognised name refuses the whole month rather than dropping the row, because a silently dropped marketer is exactly the failure this site exists to avoid. A marketer that was there last month and is gone now is a warning unless its exit is already recorded in data/known_exits.json.

Months not published

When the gate refuses a month, that month is listed here instead of published. Nothing is patched by hand and nothing is quietly omitted: the errors below are the parser's own output, and the full record for each refused month is in the public repository under data/withheld/.

Who builds and pays for this

Open Natural Gas is built and paid for by adPharos, a marketing agency in Marietta, Georgia. One of the marketers listed on this site, True Natural Gas, is an adPharos client. That is a real conflict of interest, so it is stated here rather than buried, and it is why the ranking formula is printed in full and every number links back to its PSC source: the claim of neutrality is meant to be checkable, not believed.

True Natural Gas is treated exactly like every other marketer. For August 2026 it ranks 3 of 12 among standard 12-month fixed plans by estimated annual cost, at $1082.04 a year. If a competitor files a cheaper plan, the competitor is listed first, and nothing in the code can change that.

How the ads work

The site runs no ads today; they stay off until it reaches roughly 1,000 visits a month. If turned on, they will be Google AdSense units in fixed positions above, below and between the content, never inside a rate table. Ads would be served by Google and do not affect rankings, and no marketer, agency or comparison site can buy placement in the tables. AdSense auto ads are off, so nothing can inject itself into the data.

Advertisers on this block list are blocked from buying ads here.

PSC endorsement

The Georgia Public Service Commission does not rank or endorse marketers. It publishes the filings this site reads, and nothing more. This site is not affiliated with, operated by, or approved by the Commission, and no ordering shown here should be read as a Commission judgement.

Frequently asked questions

Is this site paid by gas marketers?

No. No marketer pays to appear here, to rank higher, or to be linked, and none can. The site runs no ads today. If ads are ever turned on they will be Google AdSense units, and advertisers that are adPharos clients or competing comparison sites are already blocked. adPharos pays the hosting bill and publishes both the parser and this disclosure.

Where do the numbers come from?

From the Georgia Public Service Commission's monthly Marketers Pricing Index, which publishes fixed, variable, senior and pre-pay charts as PDFs. An open-source parser reads those PDFs and writes one JSON file per month. Every rate table on this site links to the exact PSC chart the rows came from, so any figure can be checked.

Why is the annual cost higher than rate × usage?

Because a gas bill is more than the gas. The estimate adds the marketer's monthly customer service charge twelve times, using the high end where a marketer files a range, as the PSC does, plus the Atlanta Gas Light annual base charge of $580.53 that every Georgia customer pays whoever they buy from. The same formula is used for every plan on every chart.

How often is it updated?

Monthly. The PSC posts each month's charts on its own page, and an automated job fetches, parses and republishes them. Every page states the month it is showing, and a banner appears across the site once the newest published month is more than 45 days old, so stale data announces itself.

Why isn't marketer X listed?

Three reasons. If a name is unrecognised the parser refuses the whole month rather than quietly dropping the row, so no marketer disappears silently. Marketers that stopped filing with the PSC are recorded in data/known_exits.json. Plans open only to a marketer's existing customers appear on that marketer's own page, not in the comparison tables.