About Cheap Hours

Last updated: 10 August 2026

Cheap Hours answers one small, stubborn question: what should the delay timer say tonight? It takes the Octopus Agile tariff's 48 half-hourly prices and translates them into your appliance's own language — "press the delay button until the display shows 7:00" — so getting the cheap electricity doesn't require a spreadsheet.

Why we built it

Cheap Hours started the way most tools should: with an itch. One of our team switched to Agile and found himself checking a price chart every single evening, doing the same mental arithmetic — cycle takes two and a half hours, cheapest window starts at two, the display counts down to the finish, so the button needs to say… — and occasionally getting it wrong, which meant a full-price wash and a mild sense of betrayal. The prices were public. The appliance's timer settings were known. The arithmetic was mechanical. That's a job for software.

The part we cared most about is the translation. Plenty of sites show Agile price charts; the gap is between seeing a chart and knowing what to press on a washing machine whose display means "finishes in", a dishwasher that steps in whole hours, or a tumble dryer with exactly three buttons. Cheap Hours scores the settings your appliance actually offers and answers with the one to use — the thinking is laid out in our guides.

The principles

• No accounts, nothing stored about you. Your appliances and region live in your own browser. If you type a postcode, your browser trims it to the outward code before anything is sent — the full thing never leaves your device. The details are in the privacy policy, which we wrote to be read.
• Free to use. Ads (and the occasional coffee) keep it that way — and ad cookies stay off unless you say yes.
• Honest numbers. Savings are shown against that day's real prices, not a marketing best case, and when the timer can't reach the cheapest window we say so rather than pretend.
• Independent. Cheap Hours is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Octopus Energy. Prices come from the public Octopus API and may be inaccurate — always check your tariff.

Who's behind it

Cheap Hours is built and run by Grizzlyware, a small UK software company. We build and look after software for clients, and Cheap Hours is one of the things we've built for ourselves — which means it's maintained by people who use it every evening on their own washing machines. Company details are on the Grizzlyware company details page.

Spotted a wrong recommendation, or an appliance whose timer we don't model properly? We genuinely want to hear about it — get in touch.