Building your product with a utility API means weighing far more than price and basic data access – other factors like coverage and speed are also of huge importance in many scenarios.
Bayou delivers instant auth and data in under a minute for 66% of US meters. UtilityAPI delivers data in 5-15 minutes or more for only 16% of meters.
This low coverage number is the result of a sharp reversal for UtilityAPI. They’ve shifted focus toward selling data exchange services directly to utilities but most utilities haven’t joined their platform, resulting in dramatically reduced coverage.
The table below offers a quick side-by-side comparison of UtilityAPI and Bayou, and then below we dig further into each area.
| UtilityAPI | Bayou | |
| Coverage | Data covering only 16% of US meters (11 utilities) Includes bill/meter data and interval data where available, but does not include | Electricity and gas data covering 66% of US meters (58 utilities) with a target of 78% by March 2026 and a path to 100%. Includes bill/meter data and raw bill PDFs for all utilities, and interval data where available. |
| Speed | 5-15 minutes+, detailed speeds not published | Auth + Data in under 1 minute, speeds published per utility |
| Pricing | Sometimes cheaper for historical data, expensive and confusing for recurring data pulls | Simple $2 / meter / month, with unlimited data refreshes etc Free tier – your first 10 meters |
| Team and Philosophy | Increasingly focused on selling to utilities directly on data coverage | 100% focused on customer permissioned utility data, with weekly API updates, clear roadmap and solid growth trajectory |
Requirements like utility and geographic coverage, customer experience, reliable utility data management, and developer-friendly data collection and security all shape the total cost of ownership.
In this article, we compare Bayou Energy’s utility API with UtilityAPI across some of those factors so you can evaluate your options wisely.
Coverage
In April 2025, UtilityAPI permanently removed 23 utilities including Baltimore Gas and Electric (BG&E), Austin Energy, Dominion Energy, PPL and PG&E CCAs, from its platform.
Developers got exactly ten days’ warning between the first deprecation announcement and final shutdown.
In August 2025, UtilityAPI removed an additional 19 utilities from their support list, including ComEd, Xcel, PSEG, PECO, and Duke Energy.
As of January 2026, they list only 11 supported utilities. The end result is that UtilityAPI only covers about 16% of US electrical meters.
Compare this to Bayou’s utility API, with 9 instant connection utilities added in the second half of 2025 and utility coverage now reaching 66% of U.S. residential meters with sub-minute retrieval.
Bayou’s broad coverage means that you can integrate once and then operate across your region or across the country.
Speed your users feel
The other vendors claim authorizations that “go through within 5–15 minutes,” and data shows up minutes after that. This creates delayed experiences, long enough for prospects to abandon an onboarding flow.
With Bayou, the first utility bill and twelve (12) months of utility data land in your backend in under 60 seconds after the user submits credentials.
For companies with use cases in the field, this speed and instant reliability enables you to close more customers at the kitchen table.
Pricing you can forecast
With UtilityAPI, you pay a cheaper fee for historical data pulls. However, pricing gets complicated to understand from the per-collection fees, monitoring subscriptions with wide ranges and more. There is no free tier to start using API credentials.
Bayou charges a flat $24 per meter/yr with the first ten meters free, and unlimited API calls.
Additionally, Bayou continuously fetches a customer’s full bill & interval history automatically without you needing to post an API call.
This way you choose exactly which statements (or even meters) to unlock with a single API call. It can be useful for keeping storage, egress, and licensing costs low.
Team & roadmap philosophy
UtilityAPI is increasingly focused on selling data exchange tooling to investor-owned utilities. Bayou runs a lean engineering team that ships weekly API improvements and new instant integrations, aligning its success directly with developers rather than utility procurement cycles.
This results in faster support, improved product experiences and a team that wants to see you and your product grow.
Sealed’s CTO, Sam Swift, who has integrated three major providers including Bayou, UtilityAPI and Arcadia, mentions “Bayou is the default choice for seven of our last eight integrations because it just works.”
Why more builders choose Bayou in 2026
- Instant, reliable, Plaid-like user experience that keeps customer funnels moving.
- Transparent pricing for all use cases, from startups to enterprises, particularly well suited for use cases that help build an ongoing relationship with customers through ongoing utility data access.
- Rapidly expanding instant-connection footprint and product roadmap
Building with Bayou
When you start building with a utility API, it’s important to understand the must-have requirements and how they fit into your roadmap. We hope this article has highlighted some of the reasons our customers have switched to Bayou for instant and reliable utility data.
Rather than us telling you, put it to the test and get started with Bayou by connecting up to 10 customers free today.
You can get data for your first customer in 1 minute and complete the quickstart guide in 5 minutes all within your terminal.
If you have any questions about implementing a utility API or would like more details on how these requirements fit your unique use case, schedule a call with James (Bayou’s CEO).
We’d love to learn more about what you’re building and how we might be able to help.
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