Hidden Fees & Overcharge Calculator

The advertised price is the hook — the fees are the business model

Telecom, energy and cable companies advertise a headline price, then rebuild your real bill from a stack of small add-ons: "administration" fees, paper-billing charges, regulatory-recovery line items, activation fees and quiet mid-contract price rises. Each one is small enough to ignore — which is exactly the point.

A £3 or $4 fee looks trivial on a single bill, so almost nobody disputes it. This calculator puts the advertised price next to what you were actually charged, flags every line where you're paying more, totals the damage, and drafts the claim letter for you.

Step by step

1. In the Bill Input tab, enter each line from your bill: its description, the advertised price, and what you were actually charged.
2. The Difference and a "FLAG" appear automatically wherever the charged amount is higher than what you were quoted.
3. Open the Breakdown Summary to see your total overcharge, how many fees were flagged, and your overcharge percentage.
4. Go to the Claim Letter Generator and fill the highlighted cells — company, your name, account number.
5. The letter writes itself with your disputed amount and flagged charges pulled straight from your figures. Copy it and send.

• A Bill Input tab with automatic difference and fee flagging
• A Breakdown Summary with total overcharge and overcharge %
• SUMIF / COUNTIF formulas that do the maths for you
• A Claim Letter Generator that auto-fills from your figures
• Placeholders for company, amount in dispute and flagged charges
• Works in Excel and Google Sheets