Which is better at saving you money on your cellphone (or credit card), BillShrink or Validas? Part II

My Validas is a Houston-area startup located in the deceptively-named suburb of Missouri City.

Founded by ex-Verizon Wireless executives, Validas does only two things: analyze your cellphone bill and help you contact carriers to lower your bill or switch services. It appears to do them well.

First, the not-so-good. Validas' Web site is homelier and less powerful than BillShrink's (you can see my full review of BillShrink, as well as my interview with a Billshrink exec).

For instance, Validas requires users to download a PDF of their bill from their carrier's Web site and then re-upload it to Validas to be scanned. BillShrink will automatically download your bill if you enter your phone number and password.

Validas -- homelier than BillShrink, but more accurate

Scanning the physical bill may seem kludgy and oh-so-last-century, but Validas' co-founder and CEO Tom Pepe maintains it is more accurate.

This claim was borne out by my experience. Validas offered four money-saving recommendations, all of which took into account my Blackberry data usage, which BillShrink did not.

One option was to switch to T-Mobile and save $20 a month, which by my quick calculations, checked out. The other was to downgrade my unlimited data package to a 10 MB/month one with my existing carrier, which would save me $16 a month.

The latter is an all-too-common scenario, according to executive vice-president Ed Finegold. Carriers use the penalty of high overage charges as part of their "fear marketing tactics" to keep consumers unnecessarily subscribing to unlimited voice or data packages.

"It's like collecting protection money," Finegold said. "You see a lot of people who get upsold on (unlimited) text messaging or data plans they don't need."

Validas then helps you either e-mail the carrier you'd like to switch to, or create a polite e-mail with the attached report to your existing carrier that asks to switch plans as well as some of the money you've overpaid back.

This approach may be less cathartic than chewing out a carrier's customer service rep over the phone. But it's more effective, says Pepe. Instead of "you calling in all emotionally charged, you're creating a form tailored to the carrier's bureacracy, written in their language. And it's on their time now, not yours."

The result? "If you can show that you had all of these unused minutes last year, or that a huge percentage of the calls billed one minute were actually actually just one second long, they are absolutely willing to make those changes," Pepe said.

Validas has attracted 3,000 paying customers, who pay to have, as I did, a single month's bill analyzed for $5, or for packages of 12 or 24 monthly bills, which cost $20 and $24, respectively.

Analyzing multiple months' invoices is obviously more accurate than doing just one. Here is Validas' biggest shortcoming. Even if you buy a package of reports, you can't view how your usage changes over time. Nor can you aggregate those bills and get a recommendation based on your average usage. Then again, BillShrink does neither of these things.

Considering that cellphone bills usually run at least $1-2,000 a year, Validas' investment seems well worth it, though the multi-bill reporting can stand to be improved.

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What's the most money you've ever been overcharged by your carrier? And have you ever used Validas or BillShrink to save money?