Monthly or a year up front: doing the sum properly
The longer plan is cheaper per month. That is not the whole calculation. Here is the risk you take on with it, and who should take it.
The obvious half of the sum
A longer plan costs less per month. Our pricing page shows the per-month figure next to each plan precisely so you are not doing that arithmetic yourself, and the saving on the longest plans is large enough to be worth a moment of thought rather than a shrug.
That saving is real and it is not a trick. Administering one payment instead of twelve genuinely costs less, and the discount is that cost passed along. But it is only half of the calculation and it is the half every seller shows you.
The half nobody puts on the page
Paying a year up front converts a monthly decision into a single bet on a supplier. For twelve months you are not a customer who can leave next week, you are a customer who has already paid. Every incentive that keeps a monthly service sharp is weaker for somebody who has settled up in advance.
That is not an argument against annual plans. It is an argument for earning the annual plan on the second purchase rather than the first, which is the opposite of what the checkout page of most services encourages.
Who should pay monthly
Anybody buying for the first time from any provider, including this one. The premium you pay for a short plan is the cost of finding out, and it is cheap compared with a year of something that turns out not to suit your household.
Also anybody whose viewing is seasonal. If the reason you are here is one competition that runs for a few months, buy the months you need. Paying for a year to cover a season is a discount on time you were never going to use.
Who should pay for a year
Somebody who has already run a short plan through a full evening cycle, on their own devices, and knows what they are getting. At that point the risk that made the monthly plan sensible has largely gone, and taking the lower per-month price is simply the better trade.
Households with several devices are a stronger case still, because the saving scales with the number of slots. If you are running three or four screens, the difference between the shortest and the longest plan stops being small change.
The middle route most people should take
Buy the shortest plan. Use it hard for a week, in the evenings, on every device you intend to set up. If it holds up, renew straight into a long plan from your account, which keeps the same login details so nothing needs reconfiguring and adds the new time to what is left.
You will have paid slightly more overall than if you had gambled correctly on day one. You will also have paid a great deal less than if you had gambled wrongly, and you will know which of those you were about to do.
One thing to check whichever you pick
Confirm there is nothing automatic at the end. A plan that quietly renews itself removes the entire benefit of choosing a short term, because the decision you thought you were keeping open gets made for you by a stored card.
Nothing renews here. There is no card on file and no scheduled charge, so when the term ends the line stops and the next move is yours. Check that the same is true anywhere else you are considering, because it very often is not.
Question this did not answer?
Ask it before you order rather than after. That is genuinely the cheaper moment for both of us, and a person reads every message.