It's 4pm. Time to Check Tomorrow's Prices.

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0100

If you are on Agile Octopus, you will know the feeling. Every day at 4pm, Octopus publishes your half-hourly electricity prices for the following day. And checking them becomes a bit of a habit.

Why 4pm matters

Octopus sets the next day’s Agile rates based on the wholesale market, and they drop them into your app at 4pm every afternoon. From that moment you can plan your evening and the following day around the cheapest windows.

It sounds like a small thing. It becomes oddly compelling.

The daily ritual

You open the app. You scroll the graph. You are looking for two things.

First, the overnight dip. Rates between midnight and 7am are almost always cheap, often under 10p. That is your dishwasher, your washing machine, your EV charger if you have one.

Second, the magic green bars. Those are plunge pricing windows where the rate goes negative. If you see them, something that looks a bit like excitement happens and you start mentally listing every appliance in the house.

What a good day looks like

Negative rates from 10am to 1pm. Sub-10p overnight. A peak around 5pm to 7pm that you will avoid. You shift your usage, run everything during the cheap windows, and by the end of the day you have spent a fraction of what a standard tariff would have cost you.

What a bad day looks like

Flat rates around 20p all day with a spike at tea time. You shrug, run the dishwasher after 8pm, and remind yourself that even on a bad Agile day you are still doing better than most fixed tariffs.

The point

Agile Octopus turns electricity into something you actually think about, and thinking about it saves you money. The 4pm check takes thirty seconds and becomes second nature within a week.