They only found you a discount when you tried to leave

You ring up to cancel. Suddenly the person on the phone is very helpful. There’s a discount they can do after all. A “loyalty rate” they can just apply. A deal that, funnily enough, was never mentioned in all the years you were quietly paying full price. Feel flattered? Don’t. You’ve just been shown the proof you were being overcharged the whole time.

The discount is the confession

Think about what a retention offer actually admits. If they can drop your price the instant you threaten to leave, then that lower price was always possible. They simply chose not to give it to you while you were loyal, because they didn’t have to. The retention discount isn’t generosity. It’s the moment the markup becomes visible — the gap between what you were paying and what they were always willing to accept.

It has a name: the loyalty penalty

This isn’t a hunch — it’s a documented feature of the market. Citizens Advice has studied what it calls the loyalty penalty: the way long-standing customers are quietly moved onto worse deals than new ones for the identical service. Its findings on broadband were stark:

• An average loyalty penalty of around £113 a year once the initial contract period ended — roughly a 43% increase on the initial price.
• 96% of people considered the penalty unfair.
• The post-contract price was “rarely included in advertising and often hard to locate”, so most customers never saw it coming.
• Older and lower-income customers were more likely to be stuck paying it — the people least able to absorb it, hit hardest.

Citizens Advice estimated overall consumer detriment in telecoms at around £4.2 billion a year— the highest of any consumer market it examined. The loyalty penalty isn’t an accident at the edges of the industry. It’s a core part of how the money is made.

Why staying quiet costs you

The model rewards exactly the wrong behaviour. The customer who never complains, never shops around, never threatens to leave — the good customer, by any human measure — is the one who pays the most. The reward for loyalty is a higher bill. The only way to get a fair price is to stop being loyal and start being a flight risk. That should tell you everything about whose interests the system is built around, and it’s the same logic that drives the silent mid-contract price rises and the long lock-ins.

One price. The same one. For everyone.

We don’t run new-customer-only deals, so there’s no loyalty penalty here to escape. Membershipis a flat £149/month — the same price whether you joined yesterday or five years ago. There’s no secret cheaper rate held back for people who threaten to leave, because there’s no margin hidden in your bill to discount in the first place.

And if you do decide to go, you won’t get a sudden miracle offer to talk you round — you’ll get your numbers ported out for free and a genuine question about what we could have done better. We pass calls through at the wholesale rate BT charges (a regulated rate agreed by Ofcom), published on our call-rates page. The price you see is the price everyone pays. That’s the whole idea.