MeterStats is an iPhone and iPad app for people who want to know about utilities their home is actually using. Sure, you could wait for the (potentially painful surprise!) of the utility bill a month later. But it’s 2026. We want to know now. That’s what MeterStats is for.
The idea is simple. Every so often, you walk over to your electric, gas, or water meter, read the number, and tap it into the app. MeterStats takes those readings and does the math for you: tracking and displaying consumption over time, daily averages, cumulative monthly charts, and a heat map showing how often you actually remembered to take a reading. You decide how often to check. Weekly, monthly, or just whenever you’re meter adjacent. The app works out the rest from whatever readings you give it.
There’s obviously tradeoffs to this form of manual tracking, but on the plus side, you don’t need a smart meter or other third-party hardware. If you can read your meter, MeterStats can track it.
MeterStats developer Alexander Käßner cleverly included a feature called special events. Say you turn the thermostat down a degree, or buy a new fridge, or start working from home. You log that as an event, and MeterStats shows you what happened to your consumption afterward, meter by meter. It’s a way to find out whether the step you took to save energy… actually saved energy.
There’s more here than I expected from a meter-reading app. You can set up multiple locations, each with its own meters, events, and insights, so the garage or a rental property doesn’t muddy the numbers for the house. Reminders gently nag you to enter readings on a schedule. Everything syncs over iCloud. There are Control Center buttons for adding a reading, and a full set of Shortcuts actions for getting data out and putting data in.
This week’s update, version 2.2, adds iOS 27 support along with swipe actions throughout the app, Spotlight search for your meters and events, and deeper Siri integration, including onscreen awareness with the new Siri AI.
Käßner is a digital designer and self-taught developer based in Germany who builds apps under the name pxlwaves lab in his spare time. MeterStats first shipped in May 2023, and it’s frankly lovely.
MeterStats is a free download, and the free tier is genuinely useful: one location, one meter, unlimited readings, the consumption charts and trends, special events, and iCloud sync. MeterStats+ is $1.19 a month or $11.99 a year, with a two-week free trial, and it unlocks unlimited locations and meters, the daily average chart, the readings heatmap, reminders, the Shortcuts actions that add data, and Family Sharing. If you have one meter you care about, the free version may be all you need. If you have a house full of them, twelve dollars a year is not much to find out whether the new dishwasher’s energy saver mode does what it claims.