I built an AI that negotiates your bills (amongst other features)

A few months ago I tried to negotiate my AT&T internet bill. I was paying $90 a month for the same service my neighbour was getting for $60. I called the retention line, said the exact thing every blog post tells you to say — "I'm considering switching to Spectrum, can you match their price?" — and was told no.

So I switched. It took an afternoon. Cheaper internet, no contract, mild satisfaction.

What stuck with me was how badly that whole experience could have been compressed. The research (what do my competitors actually charge?) is a 15-minute web search. The script (what do I say on the call?) is a paragraph. The cancellation email is a five-sentence template. Combined: an hour of my Saturday, plus the emotional load of psyching myself up to negotiate with a stranger I'll never meet.

If you have an AI assistant with web access, all of that is a single task.

So I built it.

What the negotiator actually does

Cashowa's bill negotiator is a chat surface with one job. You give it a bill — internet, phone, insurance, streaming, energy, anything recurring — and it does three things in sequence:

1. Researches your provider and 2–3 live competitors. Real prices, current promotions, contract terms. Not what the model remembers from training data; what each competitor's pricing page says right now, fetched live during the conversation.
2. Writes you a retention call script. Specific to your bill, naming the competitor offers it found, framed for the person on the phone. A retention agent has a quota; the script gives them a graceful way to give you the discount and hit their number.
3. Drafts the cancellation email. Polite, dated, asking for written confirmation. So if the retention call doesn't work, you have the cancellation pre-built. The hardest part of cancelling is starting; we removed that part.

You either paste-and-send, or you read the script before the call. Cashowa doesn't dial the phone or send the email — you stay in control of the relationship. That felt important.

What surprised me

I built this expecting it to mostly fail. AT&T isn't going to lower their prices because some user found a competitor on a Tuesday. Right?

The surprise was that it works more often than I expected, but not for the reason I thought.

The discount isn't because the agent magically knows the right secret incantation. It's because most people never actually call. A retention agent's day is full of confused billing complaints, missed-payment apologies, people who don't know what they want. A clear, calm, specific request — "I've been a customer for 4 years, I'm paying $90 a month, Spectrum is offering me the same speed for $60. Can you match that, or should I cancel?" — is statistically rare. So it gets escalated. And the escalated person has authority to offer the discount.

The script doesn't do magic. It does the boring part — the research, the drafting, the framing — so you only have to do the 90-second call.

Under the hood

The interesting engineering bit is that this surface uses noticeably more compute than a regular chat reply. A typical Cashowa chat with one tool call costs about 3 credits. A negotiation costs 10. That's because a real negotiation chains:

• 5–10 web searches (your provider, 2–3 competitors, current promos, cancellation policies)
• 5–10 web fetches (actual pricing pages, terms of service)
• A synthesis step (which competitor is genuinely cheaper, on what terms)
• Two final drafts (the call script, the cancellation email)

I had to bump the agent's step limit from 12 to 24 and its output token budget from 4,096 to 8,000 to give the whole chain room to fit. There are real costs to making this useful — but the math works out: one successful negotiation saves a user $30–80 a month, and the credit cost of running it is less than a dollar.

Verifiable math, again. The price comparison in the script isn't a guess — it's the actual prices it pulled. If you click through to the retention script and the agent claims Spectrum offers your area $60 internet, the source URL is one click away. If the price is wrong, you can see it's wrong before you make the call.

Try it

If you have a recurring bill you suspect is too high, open cashowa.app/negotiate. Pick a category — internet, phone, insurance, streaming, energy, or "other" — describe your situation in one or two sentences, and let it do the research.

If you do call the retention line, let me know what they offer. I'm collecting examples — anonymised — to keep tuning the script. Email hello@cashowa.app. The more data I have on what actually gets accepted, the better the script gets for the next user.