Utilities are the expense people assume is fixed. It is not. Between PG&E discount programs, prepaid phone service, and low-cost internet tiers that providers do not advertise, a single person in San Francisco can realistically cut two hundred dollars a month off these three bills.

The reason most people do not is that every one of these requires filling out a form, and the companies involved have carefully arranged things so you never learn the form exists.

PG&E #

One thing to know before anything else. Since March 2026 there is a Base Services Charge of about $24 a month on your bill that no amount of conservation reduces. CARE and FERA cut it to $6 and $12, which makes the program below worth more than it used to be. I wrote up where that charge came from and who it actually hits separately, because the history is worth knowing and the break-even is around 400 kWh a month.

CARE is PG&E’s income-qualified discount program, providing a discount of roughly 20% or more on electricity and around 20% on gas. Qualification is based on household income against a published threshold that scales with household size, and it is more generous than people expect. A single person under roughly forty thousand dollars a year qualifies, and the thresholds go up substantially with household size.

FERA is the tier above CARE, for households of three or more that earn slightly too much for CARE. It provides about an 18% discount on electricity.

Medical Baseline gives you a larger quantity of energy at the lowest rate if anyone in the household uses qualifying medical equipment or has a qualifying condition. It stacks with CARE.

Applications are on PG&E’s website and take about ten minutes. You self-certify income, and they occasionally ask for verification. Enrollment lasts a couple of years before you re-certify.

Nobody applies because the program is real, well funded, and mentioned in a paragraph on a bill insert that goes straight into recycling. If you are a student, early-career, part-time, freelance, or between jobs, check the current threshold. Twenty percent off a hundred and thirty dollar bill is about three hundred dollars a year for ten minutes of paperwork.

The rate plan question #

PG&E has multiple residential rate plans, and the default one you were assigned is not necessarily the cheapest for your usage. Time-of-use plans charge more in the late afternoon and evening and less overnight and midday. If you are out of the house from nine to six, a time-of-use plan is often cheaper. If you work from home and run a space heater at 6pm, it is worse.

PG&E’s site has a rate comparison tool that uses your actual usage history. It takes five minutes and tells you which plan would have been cheapest over the past year. Switching is free.

The San Francisco specific piece #

San Francisco has CleanPowerSF, a community choice aggregation program run by the city. Most SF residents are enrolled by default. It supplies the electricity while PG&E still delivers it and bills you. The default Green tier is priced comparably to PG&E generation, and SuperGreen costs slightly more for 100% renewable.

Check which tier you are on. If you were opted into SuperGreen and did not choose it deliberately, you are paying a small premium every month for something you may not have picked.

Actually using less #

The boring stuff, ranked by how much it matters in a San Francisco apartment.

1. Heating, which is almost all of your gas bill. San Francisco is mild, which means most heating is discretionary. A sweater and a small electric heater in the one room you are in beats heating a whole apartment.
2. The refrigerator, which runs constantly. An old inefficient one costs meaningfully more, and if it is the landlord’s problem, ask them to replace it.
3. Anything with a heating element: dryers, space heaters, electric kettles. These dwarf everything else.
4. LED bulbs. Real but small. Lighting is a minor share of a modern bill.
5. Phantom draw from electronics. Very small. The advice to unplug your chargers is mostly folk wisdom at this point. Do not spend energy on this.

Most air conditioning advice does not apply here, which is one of the genuine financial perks of the climate. Do not buy an air conditioner for eight uncomfortable days a year.

Internet #

San Francisco internet is a duopoly in most buildings, and pricing is entirely a function of whether you ask.

The single most effective move is to call and threaten to cancel. Promotional pricing expires after twelve months and your bill quietly goes from fifty dollars to ninety. Call retention, say you are switching, and ask what they can do. This works with remarkable consistency and takes fifteen minutes. Do it every year, and set a calendar reminder for month eleven.

Low-cost tiers exist and are barely advertised. Comcast runs Internet Essentials at around ten to fifteen dollars a month for qualifying low-income households, and AT&T runs Access at a comparable price. Qualification is generally tied to participation in programs like SNAP, Medicaid, or public housing, or to an income threshold. Check the current requirements directly with the provider, because these programs get restructured.

Monkeybrains is a local San Francisco wireless ISP, roughly thirty five dollars a month for service in much of the city, with no contract, no data cap, and a one-time installation fee. For a lot of apartments it is both cheaper and better than the incumbents, and it is a local company rather than a national one, which some people care about.

Buy your own modem and router. Rental fees are ten to fifteen dollars a month, which is a hundred and twenty to a hundred and eighty a year, forever. A modem costs sixty to a hundred dollars once. That is a payback in under a year, and yet the modem rental line item persists on millions of bills because it is small enough to ignore.

Consider whether you need gigabit. For a household of one or two doing normal things, including video calls and 4K streaming, a hundred megabits is plenty. The gigabit tier is thirty dollars a month more for a difference you will never perceive.

Phone #

This is the easiest large saving on the list and the one people resist most.

The three major carriers charge seventy to ninety dollars a month for a single line. Mobile virtual network operators run on those exact same towers and charge fifteen to thirty.

Mint Mobile runs on T-Mobile’s network, and multi-month prepaid plans work out to roughly fifteen to thirty dollars a month depending on data. US Mobile lets you pick which of the major networks you want and starts low. Visible is Verizon-owned, runs on Verizon’s network, and is a flat monthly rate in the twenties to thirties with unlimited data. Google Fi is more expensive but excellent for international travel.

The network is identical. You are on the same towers with the same coverage. What you give up is priority during congestion, which in practice means that at a crowded stadium your data may be slower. That is the entire difference.

Going from eighty five dollars a month to twenty is seven hundred and eighty dollars a year. That is more than most people save from every small frugality habit combined.

On the phone itself: buy it outright, used or refurbished, and keep it for four years. Carrier device financing is a loan bundled into your bill so that you never see the interest rate, and the “free phone with a new line” offers are two-year commitments at inflated service pricing. A three-year-old flagship for three hundred dollars does everything a new eleven hundred dollar one does.

The total #

Roughly $1,740 a year, from three phone calls and one online form. None of it changes anything about how you live. You have the same electricity, the same internet, and the same phone service on the same network.

That is the pattern behind Frugal SF: the expensive version and the cheap version deliver the same thing, and the gap is a fee for not asking. Same as the airport bus, same as buying produce in Chinatown, same as not owning a car.

And once you have freed up a hundred and forty five dollars a month, the question of where it should go is worth answering. That one is in retirement savings in your twenties.