Why is it always a five-year contract? (It was never for you)

Have you ever noticed it’s never a one-year deal? It’s three years. Five years. Sometimes seven. The salesperson is always oddly keen on the longest option, usually framed as helping you — “lock in your price”, “protect yourself from increases”. There’s a reason for that keenness, and it has nothing to do with protecting you.

The salesperson was paid the day you signed

In the telecoms channel, commission is commonly paid upfront, calculated against the full value of the contract. Ofcom’s own work on mis-selling describes exactly this mechanism: commission paid to the seller in advance, with a “clawback” clause that only bites if you leave early. So a longer contract isn’t a longer commitment from them. It’s a bigger cheque, collected on the day you sign — not earned over the years you stay.

Once you see that, the whole interaction makes sense. Their enthusiasm for the five-year term wasn’t about your price. It was about the size of their advance. And here’s the sting in the tail: because they’ve already been paid, there’s no financial reason left to look after you for the next five years. The money’s banked. You weren’t a customer they’d be tending. You were a signature they’d already cashed.

“Solely to maximise finance revenue”

You don’t have to take our word for the motive. A BBC News investigation in 2025 into small-business telecoms contracts asked independent experts to review the deals. One expert’s verdict on the long terms was blunt: some seven-year contracts appeared designed “solely to maximise finance revenue rather than meet a legitimate business need”.

The same investigation heard from more than 160 owners and found people paying eye-watering sums — in one case £54,432 to rent five phones — precisely because the long finance term, not the equipment, was the product being sold. The longer the term, the more there was to finance, and the more everyone in the chain made.

Follow the term, find the beneficiary

A long contract pays three different people, and none of them is you:

• The salesperson— bigger upfront commission against the full term.
• The finance company— more total value to charge interest on across more years.
• The provider itself— a customer locked in for five years is a guaranteed future margin, which makes the whole business worth more when it’s sold on to a larger group. A churnable, month-to-month customer is worth far less to a buyer than one who can’t leave.

The contract length, in other words, is an asset — theirs. The longer they can tie you in, the more valuable you are to sell. The term was never a feature for you. It was the product.

What month-to-month actually feels like

We don’t pay commission, we don’t run a sales team, and we don’t do long contracts. Membershipis a flat £149/month, month to month — stay because it works, not because you’re trapped. If you want to leave, leave; we port your numbers out for free, no exit fee, no notice period.

When nobody earns a bigger commission for locking you in longer, the length of the relationship goes back to being decided by the only thing that should ever have decided it: whether we’re doing a good enough job to keep you. Calls are passed through at the wholesale rate BT charges (a regulated rate agreed by Ofcom, about 0.31p a minute to a UK landline), and you can read the full deal on the Membership page.