Orange and the highly profitable lazy customer

Regular readers of this blog will know how much pleasure I derive from saving the occassional pound or two, not as a penny-wise pound-foolish Scrooge McDuc, but more as a savvy customer with a keen eye to value. Well, I have a confession to make: it is that I have been on one of Orange's worst contracts for several months, paying £18 a month on average for unlimited texts and just 100 minutes of talk time. Ruinous I say, absolutely ruinous. How did I sleep at night? Not well, not well at all.

After calling Orange, asking for my PAC code and threatening to leave for better deals elsewhere, they kindly offered the following for £15.50 a month:

- A new Orange smart phone called the Monte Carlo
- 600 minutes
- Unlimited texts
- 500MB data
- Continued home broadband.

What makes this a cracking deal is that I am not keen on smart phones as yet, largely due to their weakling battery lives, and so the newly received smart slab that is the Monte Carlo has been sold on E-bay for around £100. This will reduce my effective bill (over it's 24 month life) to £11.33. Then there is the free home broadband legacy deal which is worth a minimum of £6.50 a month, so that really leaves me paying £4.83 a month which is pretty darn good. And so it is that I remain with Orange. It just sucks that you have to threaten to leave on contract expiry to squeeze a decent deal out of them.

The next challenge is on the camera front. I am planning on upgrading to a bridge camera in the near future but I don't want to dent my budget and so am looking to score about £250 from other avenues to pay for this treat! Plans are afoot!