A few months ago, I wrote about Giffgaff – and I’m still very happy with paying less for a mobile service on the O2 network than I would from O2 (and earning credit for referrals, answering questions, etc. in the process). Unfortunately I fell foul of a little complexity in the service this week and I think it’s worth mentioning.
After getting cut off a call mid flow, I logged into the Giffgaff website, under My giffgaff, looked for the My account panel, and saw that my credit had reduced from around £5 to just 16p. The reason was that my “Goodybag” (a bundle of calls, text and data) had expired and that the “Auto Top-up” only applies to my “credit” balance (a separate pay as you go balance for chargable services that are not included in the Goodybag, like 0845 numbers).
It is possible to buy your next Goodybag to pick up where an expired one has left off (as you can see, I’ve done this now) – but that’s not the same as Auto Top-up. (Quite why my Auto Top-up didn’t trigger is anyone’s guess but I’m kind of happy it didn’t as I would have carried on chatting and surfing, thinking I was using my included minutes/megabytes, but actually spending money…)
As I recommended Giffgaff to readers of this blog (indeed, I still do recommend them), I thought I should highlight this potential source of confusion, in case anyone else trips up like I did!
[Update 18 June 2012: Giffgaff have announced that they will launch recurring Goodybag topups on 20 June 2012)
I fell foul of the same thing too. After raising a support ticket they advised the Auto Top Up is only triggered by chargeable calls/texts that drop your credit balance below £3. And not by charging your balance the cost of a goody bag.
They said they aim to change this in future so that if your balance drops below the threshold for any reason, the auto top up will be triggered.