When TRON energy is cheapest
The answer to when is TRON energy cheapest is a clock rather than a number. Our selling tariff is cut into time-of-day zones, and the price inside a zone is recomputed against the market every five minutes, so what any single hour costs is a moving thing. What moves less is the shape of the day: across the thirty days of hourly history ending 7 September 2026, the same stretch of hours was the cheap one almost every day — 01:00 to 12:00 UTC, with the hour beginning 06:00 the cheapest of all. Here is that map, and what a payout desk can do with it.
Where the boundaries fall, in UTC
GET /v1/tariff is public and takes no key, and its reference_schedule is the day cut into segments, ordered by time of day. As the cut stands today: off-peak runs 01:00 to 12:00, standard holds the two shoulders 00:00 to 01:00 and 12:00 to 14:00, and peak runs 14:00 to midnight. A zone name is a price band and not a time of day — standard occupies two separate segments, which is why a row is identified by its bounds rather than by its zone.
Two fields save you from doing clock arithmetic on your own side. Exactly one row carries active: true, and that is the segment running now; next_change_at is the moment it ends, and the answer's cache lifetime is never longer than the time left until it. Read those instead of comparing your own clock against the table.
The rest of the schedule is a record and not a forecast: every segment, the running one included, carries what it actually came to over its last completed occurrence, and avg_basis says whether anything was measured at all — none, right after a schedule change, means the number is null rather than invented. None of it is a quotation for later — the only price that binds is the one fixed into an order when the order is created.
What thirty days of history showed
GET /v1/tariff/history?range=30d answers with 720 points, one per hour, no gaps and no pagination. Averaging each of the twenty-four hours of the day across the thirty days ending 7 September 2026 gives a plain ranking. The first half of that window predates automatic repricing, when each zone stood at a fixed figure; the second half is repriced, and the shape survives both.
The eleven cheapest hours of the day were, without exception, the eleven hours of the off-peak window. The single cheapest was the hour beginning 06:00 UTC, with 05:00 just behind it and the whole 05:00 to 09:00 morning bunched close together. From there the price climbed through the midday shoulder, and from 14:00 to midnight it sat on a plateau where every hour was within a whisker of every other: the dearest single hour was 15:00, and the late evening was level with it. The odd one out is the hour after midnight — standard by name, but on average dearer than either midday hour and much closer to peak.
In ratios, which is the form worth carrying away: over those thirty days the off-peak window averaged about a quarter of what the network charges to burn the same energy, and the peak window about a third of it. Peak against off-peak is roughly four to three, so shifting a batch out of the evening and into the morning took about a quarter off what it would otherwise have been charged. Measured over a month; not promised for tomorrow.
Two cautions come out of the same data. It is a tendency and not a timetable: the day's cheapest price was reached somewhere inside off-peak on twenty-seven of the twenty-nine full days, which leaves two where it did not. And one hour of the day is not one price — readings for the cheapest hour spread over a band wider than the average gap between off-peak and peak. Weekends sat a little under weekdays, but by a small fraction of the day-to-night gap, and not enough to schedule around.
Why the day has that shape
Only as far as it can be defended. The boundaries are ours, and they move for a stated reason: the last recut, on 17 August 2026, took the stretch from 20:00 UTC to midnight — the hours where the vendors we fall back on sit in their own dearest bands — out of standard and into peak. That is a supply cost measured on our side, not a theory about who is awake where. What a zone costs is a separate mechanism from when it runs: the schedule answers when, and the price inside it is recomputed against the market every few minutes.
The silhouette is not ours alone, for what that is worth. Of the vendors we watch, one publishes a price curve rather than a single number, and when it was read on 3 September 2026 its cheapest band sat in the early morning UTC and its dearest ran from late afternoon to midnight — the same shape, arrived at by somebody else. Beyond that we cannot source a cause, so we do not assert one.
What a payout desk does with it
Move what can wait. An order's price is fixed at the moment the order is created, so the thing worth scheduling is that moment. Payroll, settlements, supplier runs and sweeps — anything with a deadline in hours rather than seconds — are the candidates, and up to 500 transfers go in as one order at one price.
Do not try to schedule a hot wallet. If a wallet sends all day there is nothing to shift, and an Auto-refill rule tops it back up after every transfer instead. One thing to know before trying: the top-up rate is not a zone price. It is a separate product with a price of its own and it does not follow the schedule at all, so moving a wallet's traffic into the morning does nothing whatever to what its top-ups cost.
Draw your own map. Everything above came out of two public requests with no key. range takes 24h, 7d or 30d, and it alone fixes the size of the answer — 24, 168 or 720 points, always.
curl -s 'https://api.nrg.market/v1/tariff/history?range=30d' # 720 hourly points: t, zone, price_sun, maintenance_price_trx
Your own traffic is not our average, and a month of your own hours is a better map than this one.
Watch the boundary, not the clock. next_change_at is when the running segment ends, and it is the field to wake on. A job pinned to a hard-coded hour goes wrong quietly the day the cut changes — the schedule is reference, and it can change without a version of the API changing with it.
What this page does not say
What energy costs here right now. That number moves every few minutes, and a figure typed into a post is stale before the post is read, so no page on this site publishes one. The live price, the zone running now and the history chart are on the pricing page; where our price stands against what other vendors publish for themselves is on the market page, each row stamped with the moment it was read. The other side of the comparison does not move: the network burns 100 sun for every unit of energy an account cannot supply, about 65,000 units for a transfer to an address that already holds USDT, which is 6.5 TRX — and that is the yardstick every ratio above is measured against.