giffgaff

Thursday, Sep 22, 2011 · 500 words · approx 2 mins to read

I’ve been a long time customer of O2’s cellular network here in the UK, starting with Genie over a decade ago, then a few contracts with O2, and most recently spells with Tesco Mobile and giffgaff. The latter two are virtual cellular providers, layering on top of O2’s network to resell it, but at their own price points and with their own network-related services. Tesco was no-frills at a keen price (they were the only provider doing iPhone 4 contracts at £20pcm) and I’d have stayed with them if it weren’t for a friend of mine telling me about giffgaff.

giffgaff are a community-led provider, utilising that community in order to keep costs as low as possible and provide the best possible price. They seem to be unwilling to sacrifice the quality of the offering, too; for example they recently happily raised prices — after consultation with the community and customers first — to make sure the business can keep providing the right level of support for the customer base.

Customers can also promote giffgaff to others, receiving a bit of credit on their accounts for their help in recruiting new customers. They operate a pay-as-you-go model, rather than contract terms, and you basically just pay a flat amount for a bunch of free calls and data, and then add credit to it if you run out. It’s all done from a simple website, forums and some apps on popular smartphone OSes.

That payback for recruiting is the motivation for this blog post. Because I’ve had such a good experience with the network and giffgaff themselves seem to be a good provider on top of it, I’m happy to recommend them to anyone in the UK reading my blog. If you sign up using my referrer URL, I get £5, and you get £5 added to your account too. It’s pretty much that simple.

£10pcm gets you unlimited data and a reasonable amount of free calls, and if your usage pattern with a phone is like mine that’s invariably plenty. The prices and bundles go up in £5 steps after that, and there’s even a £5pcm bundle for those on a very tight budget. Get your regular callers on giffgaff too and they won’t pay to call you, or you them, because giffgaff-to-giffgaff calls are free.

Sales pitch over I think. If you like the sounds of it, and it really is no-frills and really cheap, check them out using my referrer link.