Square Deal exists because millions of Australians overpay for essential services — not because they don’t care, but because the system is designed to make it hard to fight back. We’re building the AI that changes that equation.
In Australia, long-term customers routinely pay $180–480 more per year than new signups for the exact same service — on mobile, NBN, energy, and insurance. The industry calls it “price inertia.” We call it what it is: a loyalty tax.
The ACCC has flagged it. Consumer advocates have written about it. But the gap persists because the economics work in the provider’s favour. Retention teams are trained to minimise concessions. They have scripts, escalation matrices, and discount authority tables. The average consumer has none of that.
Comparison sites solve half the problem — they help the 10–15% who are ready to switch. But the vast majority of people stay. They stay because switching has real friction: time, lock-in, 2FA tied to a number, billing integrations, bundled services. Staying is rational. Overpaying while you stay is not.
Until recently, real-time negotiation coaching was something only professionals could provide — and only for high-value corporate deals. The cost of having a human expert listen to your Telstra retention call and whisper advice was absurd relative to the $200 you might save.
That changed. Large language models can now listen to a live conversation, identify the specific tactic being used in real-time, cross-reference it against a database of known retention strategies, and generate a calibrated counter-response — all in under two seconds. The AI doesn’t get flustered. It doesn’t forget the price anchor. It doesn’t accept a temporary credit when a permanent rate reduction is available.
This is not a chatbot. This is a structured intelligence layer — carrier registries, plan databases, tactic detection models, regulatory knowledge, and decision logic — all orchestrated in real-time during the most adversarial 15 minutes of your month. The AI is commoditised. The structured knowledge that makes it useful is not.
Square Deal is a co-pilot, not an agent. The AI coaches — you decide. We will never speak on your behalf, make commitments to providers, or take autonomous action on your account.
Every coached call starts with mandatory disclosure. We believe the product works better when the provider knows you’re prepared. Transparency is not a handicap — it’s leverage.
Knowing your loyalty tax should cost nothing. We want every Australian to see the gap. Most people who see the number want help closing it — that’s our business model.
Price anchors come from real, publicly available data. We show our sources. If a price is stale, we say so. We’d rather give you no anchor than a wrong one.
Square Deal is pre-launch. We’re an Australian company based in Sydney, currently running a pilot with a small group of users on telco retention calls. Our telco content layer covers the top 10 Australian carriers representing over 92% of the market. Energy and gas coverage is built and being validated.
We’re looking for early users who want to test the product on real calls, provide honest feedback, and help us build something that actually works. If that sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you.