Giffgaff goodybags good for indecisive money saver?

NotVeryTechie

Thank you JJ.

I had a chuckle about this:

JJ_Egan wrote: »

You will find moaners about every company under the sun on here .

diamonds

Short term and so you can evaluate data/SA usage, Giff Gaff seems to be the way forward. Once you know usage, it will be easier to nail down a better deal.

cookie365

Giffgaff goodybags are easy to change, so get one that has a bit more than you need, see how you go for a couple of months to get a feel on how your requirements have changed with your move to the world of smartphones.

Then you can shop around for the best deal.

For contacting SA see if you can persuade your family to go onto Skype/something similar so you can use your inclusive data rather than making international calls/sms messages.

ivinsp

giffgaff offer contract like bundles (goodybags) that you can change/cancel from month to month, you could always start with the £5 Hokey Cokey goodybag which has 100 minutes, 300 texts and 100 MB of data and increase your goodybag if needed. (You can start another goodybag early if you have less than 5 minutes or 5 MB of data remaining).

Calls to South Africa are 3ppm to landlines, 8ppm to mobiles and 8p per text.

You could always see if the people that you are contacting have instant messaging/whatsapp on their phones to save on text/mms costs.

Paul

Im_just_careful

I would say, if you make calls and send texts most, giffgaff is worth a look.

For very light use at low cost, a good data experience but less good rural call coverage I suggest 3 on their PAYG 3 2 1 offer.

satori

Hi,
I bought alone a stand-alone tablet (without a contract) and as I do not have wifi during the day or during my commute, I have been using a Giff Gaff goody bag since August (£5 initially then £7.50). They're good, however there was a glitch 10 days ago: I had run out of credit on the 21st and was unable to log in to purchase credit on that evening, and on the morning of the 22nd. They were supposed to work on their system between 7:30am and 8am on the 22nd but the website was down for much longer than that, starting on the 21st.
I will try and renew tomorrow morning before I leave for work, but I am not very happy and may end up looking for another PAYG provider, just in case. Sod's law, this happened to me just on the day when I needed to have internet access during the day at work to make some payments/chase bills!
I was with Vodafone for a while and their customer service was dreadful.

mije1983

You can set an auto top-up for situations just like that.

d123

NotVeryTechie wrote: »

I am a light phone user, but would use some Apps and I send a lot of texts to my family in South Africa. It would be nice to be able to call them too on occasion.

Whatsapp seems extremely popular in SA, have you tried to get your family out there to use it? You could have free calls and texts to and from them via Whatsapp.

I also suggest giving Giffgaff a go, the way the goody bags work makes it extremely flexible and anyone not on Whatsapp can be called relatively cheaply with them.

NotVeryTechie

Thank you all! The advice here has been really good. I was wondering, people suggest Skype, and I do use that on my computer, but it slows down the system something awful. Have you got experience of using it on a mobile? How much of your space and resource does it gobble? Also, the connection to South Africa is terrible.

diamonds

NotVeryTechie wrote: »

Thank you all! The advice here has been really good. I was wondering, people suggest Skype, and I do use that on my computer, but it slows down the system something awful. Have you got experience of using it on a mobile? How much of your space and resource does it gobble? Also, the connection to South Africa is terrible.

Skype mob is quite sleek. Had it working great on Android, a cheap nasty one at that. Is your broadband speed at home slow ?