Eskom prepaid meters hand you a number of units for a rand amount and almost no explanation of the rate behind it. This page explains how prepaid electricity is billed in South Africa, why two neighbours pay different amounts for the same units, and how to work out your own cost per kWh from the confirmation message you already receive.
ElecTracker does not sell electricity, meters or tokens, and is not affiliated with Eskom. It is a free browser tool that reads the purchase confirmation your bank or vendor sends you and turns it into a spend, units and cost-per-kWh history.
A prepaid meter holds a credit balance in kilowatt-hours rather than rands. You buy a 20-digit token, key it into the keypad, and the meter adds those units to its balance. When the balance runs down the supply cuts until you load another token. Eskom meters that are not prepaid do the opposite: they record consumption and you are invoiced afterwards.
Because the transaction happens at purchase time, the receipt is the only record of the rate you paid. There is no monthly statement reconciling it. That is the gap this tool fills.
Not every prepaid household in South Africa buys from Eskom. Many are supplied by their local municipality, which buys bulk from Eskom and resells on its own tariff. The token, the meter and the keypad work identically, but the rate, the service charge and the vendor differ. Eskom prepaid electricity and municipal prepaid electricity therefore produce different cost-per-unit figures for the same rand amount.
Whichever supplies you, the confirmation message names the vendor. ElecTracker recognises messages from FNB, Standard Bank, Absa, Nedbank, Capitec, Bank Zero and Investec, plus municipal prepaid vouchers, till receipts and online purchase confirmations, and tags each purchase with its source so you can compare them.
People searching for Eskom prepaid meters prices usually want one figure: rands per unit. There is no single figure, and any site quoting one without naming your tariff is guessing. What you pay depends on:
We deliberately do not publish a tariff table here. Tariffs change annually and a stale figure on a third-party page is worse than none. Confirm the current rate with Eskom or your municipality directly.
The number that is actually true for your household is the one on your own receipt: the electricity amount you paid, excluding service fees, divided by the units you received. That is the figure ElecTracker calculates for every purchase.
A typical bank confirmation for a prepaid purchase looks like this:
The rate is not the amount divided by the units. The service fee bought no electricity, so it has to come out first. ElecTracker strips the service fee, handles the VAT-inclusive and VAT-exclusive variants that different banks send, and reports the resulting rands per kWh. Paste a few months of messages and the trend line shows whether your rate is drifting upward.
It is free, runs in the browser, and stores your history against your account in Cloud Firestore so it is there on your phone and your laptop.
No. It reads the confirmation of a purchase you made elsewhere. Buy from wherever you normally do.
No. It only sees what your purchase message contains. It reports the effective rate you paid, which is often more useful than the tariff name.
No. Daily usage is estimated from how many units you bought and how long they lasted between purchases.