UKH

Hi,

Looking to change from my current mobile tariff to something cheaper and Lyca Mobile seem to come up as the cheapest SIM-only deal, but can't help thinking there may be a catch somewhere?

I'm already with O2 (and happy enough with the coverage), and can halve my bill with them with a bit of haggling, but LM are half as much again (and piggy-back O2's network).

Obviously, I want to keep my phone number and I'm quite happy with my handset.

TIA

Check out Lebara, they use the Vodafone network and for low data usage were the cheapest provider I could find - £5/month, unlimited calls/texts, 3GB data and EU roaming.

Yep, it seems insane. All the mvnos are cheaper than the networks they're running on. And with better extras like roaming. Does not make any sense.

Have a look on mse. They usually have an even better click-through deal going. (I also found Lebara won with £1.99 for 12Gb for 6 months but it will be a different leaderboard now. Edit: currently looks like Lyca. Hard to beat 5p a month.)

Yup - that's where I'm looking

Another thumbs up for Lebara

If you message me I can send you a referral code for lebara which gives you six months half price. Worth double checking though as deals through uSwitch might work out better value.

Smarty has a 6Gb deal for £6 a month. If you have more than one handset you can setup a group plan which gives 10% off meaning £5.40 for 6Gb of data. This is a Black Friday deal, you normally get 4Gb of data for that price.

https://smarty.co.uk/plans/4gb-data

That's.... a crap deal. 

The OP is looking at 6Gb for 85p a month. There are plenty others better than £6/6Gb.

With a eu data cap of 1Gb and not unlimited call minutes, and no texts included in that. Depends what you are after. 

I mean...... 

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cheap-mobile-finder/sim-only/

That top one is ridiculously cheap.

Indeed - that's why I'm wondering if there's catch...!

I'm a very occasional data user, as I mainly use WiFi at home - average is usually <1Gb, maybe up to 2Gb/month.

Looks like it's just a one month contract, I'd he tempted to give it a go and if they are rubbish just move onto someone else. After the initial period they are comparable to the lebara deal I'm on.

Don't get sucked into paying for more data than you need. Handy to have a bit extra, but even if it's cheap total waste to pay for 6GB if you only ever use 2.

Yep, what Jenny C says. Unless I've missed something it's only a 1 month commitment so you've very little to lose. If it's awful you move to someone else and it cost you 5p to find out.

After the sweetener period runs out you can move to another ridiculously cheap deal, or sometimes even just sign up again with a different email address.

I had similar thoughts when I was in almost exactly the same position looking at Lebara at the top of that list, but it's worked out great.

If things are too good to be true on MSE they normally seem to get some sort of warning banner.

I use lyca. I'm happy with it, the catch is that there’s no customer assistance, but if you set it up to auto renew a 3-month package, it works well. Just prepare to cry and smash the phone in anger if you try to change something. I always have the best reception of everyone.