Quick question: what does your broadband actually cost?
Not what you pay. What it costs. Because in this industry those are two different numbers, and the gap between them depends entirely on how recently you joined, how loudly you complain, and whether you've mastered the ancient art of Threatening To Leave.
Broadband pricing in this country isn't a price. It's a casino. And the house always wins - unless you're willing to spend your lunch break gambling on the phone.
The haggling ritual: a national embarrassment
You know the drill, because at this point it's basically folklore. Your deal ends. Your bill jumps. So you phone up, sit through the painful hold music, and perform the sacred dance:
"I'm thinking of leaving."
Click. You're transferred to the mysterious retentions team - a department that exists purely because the normal price is a work of fiction. And lo, a discount materialises. A discount that absolutely did not exist ninety seconds ago when you were talking to normal support. A discount that was in a drawer the whole time, waiting to see if you'd ask.
Stop and actually think about what that means. The good price existed all along. They were simply withholding it to see if you'd blink first. Your ISP is running a pricing model where the best rates go to whoever's most willing to bluff, and everyone else - the busy, the trusting, your nan who's been with them since the modem made noises - subsidises the whole operation.
That's not a loyalty programme. That's a poker game where one side can see your cards and the other side is your nan.
The loyalty penalty: congratulations, you're the sucker
Because here's the grim engine underneath it all: in broadband, loyalty is a tax.
Stay for years. Pay every bill on time. Never cause a fuss. Your reward? You quietly roll onto an out-of-contract rate that's often double what the new customers pay, while the person who signed up yesterday gets the discount, the red carpet, and probably a free doorbell camera (Hi Sky).
The customers who've paid the most, for the longest, get treated the worst. Somewhere in a head office there's a spreadsheet of customers who haven't checked their bills lately, and that spreadsheet is load-bearing. The entire model is a bet that you're too busy living your life to notice you're being farmed.
The intro-price bait, or: the £24.99* experience
And how does everyone get lured into the casino in the first place? The big glowing "£24.99 a month!" - with an asterisk doing more heavy lifting than a fat guy driving a forklift.
£24.99 for six months. Then £36. Plus the setup fee. Plus the "activation" fee, which is a fee for the concept of beginning. Plus the router delivery. By the time you've read all the footnotes, the advertised price has roughly the same relationship to your bill as a movie poster has to the actual film. Unless its Project Hail Mary! Amaze Amaze Amaze.
The bit where we're honest about the awkward thing
Right. Cards on the table, because we're not going to write a whole post about pricing games and then dodge this bullet.
Yes, Olilo offers contracts. And yes, if you read ours, there's a clause in there about prices potentially rising. Practically every ISP has one, including us, because running a network in the real world means our own costs - backhaul, power, kit - can move in ways nobody controls (Hi Telehouse).
Here's the difference, and it's the whole point of this post: that clause is a seatbelt, not a business model.
The big players treat the annual price rise as a guaranteed revenue event - pencilled into the forecast before the year's even started, applied to everyone, every April, like clockwork. For us it's a break-glass-in-emergency thing. We're not planning to use it, we don't budget around using it, and if we ever genuinely had to, you'd hear it from us straight - plain English, actual reasons, no burying it in paragraph 47 of an email titled "Some exciting updates to your plan! 🎉"
We'd rather tell you the uncomfortable truth in a blog post than hide it in the footnotes. That's the deal. Well and an email of course.
The boring alternative
So here's Olilo's entire pricing strategy, and fair warning, it's painfully dull:
The price is the price. The rate on the website is the rate you pay - no intro-rate bait, and on our contracts, no activation fee for the privilege of existing. (Rolling monthly does have an activation fee, and we'll tell you exactly why: installing you costs real money, and we can't foot that bill for someone who dips on day 30. That's not a pricing game - that's maths. It's on the website in normal-sized font, like fees should be.) There's no retentions team, because there's no secret second price for them to guard. And there's no loyalty penalty, because the deal doesn't get worse just because you've been around a while. Staying with us shouldn't be a mistake you're punished for. Heck didn't we reduce all our openreach products? Even for those in contracts? Yup, that's us.
No poker. No drawer full of secret discounts. No spreadsheet of people who haven't noticed yet.
Boring? Extremely. But you know what's genuinely exciting? Never having to spend 40 minutes on hold negotiating the price of the internet like you're haggling for a rug.
The casino's fun until you realise you're not the player. You're the chips.....
Olilo - We legit are broadband without the bullshit.
