First off, we now support full monthly bill tracking. You can sign up and have the system automatically build your personalised assessment each month, instead of having to resubmit it manually. This is just a baby step towards something much more powerful that we are working on, but signing up now will start to build a much more accurate recommendation as you continue to use the service. The system will still use your last three monthly bills for the moment, but we will be crafting some powerful new algorithms to stitch them together and create a complete tapestry of your usage.

Coincidentally, if you are looking to get a new contract this Christmas, now is the perfect time to sign up with BillMonitor. By the time your contract ends you’ll have enough data to get a great forecast for your next purchase.

Secondly, we are currently running a trial of a new version of the homepage. If you are lucky enough to be picked at random by our testing software you will be presented with a slightly reorganized front page. Feel free to drop us an email to feedback at billmonitor.com with any comments on either design.

We’re having a little technical trouble at the moment, however, so we’ve had to temporarily remove mobiles.co.uk from our offerings. We’ll get them back in as soon as possible. Without them, we’re down a few options, but don’t panic: while we can’t offer you as many places to buy them, we still offer the same range of tariffs

Gift selection

When you find a plan that offers free gifts, you’ll see an option to choose between any that are available next to the buy button. We automatically pick the one that is likely to save you the most money on your bill by default. But if you’ve got your heart set on that PlayStation 3, you can search for it specifically using the filters at the top of the results page!

Gift Filter

Don’t forget, however, that buying into a contract because you want a Wii may not be the most efficient way to use your hard-earned cash! We don’t take the value of the extra into account when we rank each contract, so you can be sure that our results will not be tainted by these deals. We aim to get you the cheapest possible mobile phone contract first and foremost – that’s one thing that makes us different and we intend to keep at it.

These stores often offer free gifts with tariffs, and we’ve included those too. Currently we pick the gift for you based on which provides the highest straight-up monetary value. In our next update, we’ll be providing a choice of gifts, so if you’re set on that free Playstation 3, we’ll be able to help you out.

In addition to the new deals, we’ve sped up the site significantly. We hope that you’ll notice the difference! We’ve also been working hard under the hood to prepare the system for even more tariffs. The mobile market is an incredibly complicated place, and we’re just getting started!

At the time of writing, pay as you go tariffs are currently the number one request from users on our feedback page. We are listening, and we hope to get these in soon. It takes a little longer to add new plans to our system because of the level of detail in which we describe them, but we are working flat out to add in the plans and smaller operators that we currently do not support.

Over the next week or so we’re going to make improvements to the system, incorporating some feedback and points picked up by our eagle-eyed users. For example, we’re adding in Three’s SIM Only plans, and we’ve made sure that ITS is correctly given to all of O2’s iPhone plans for free.

We always try to recommend the best plan to our users, and we do take into account that your usage will change from month to month, but it’s not always clear how much room a plan gives you to make extra calls. Calling outside your allowance can end up very expensive, so we decided to mark out the safest plan.

We put the safest plan marker on whichever plan provides you with the most room in its allowances to make up for those extra calls that you can’t predict. It won’t always be the cheapest plan, but it might be the best choice.

This opens up a whole load of exciting new stuff for us, like searching by colour and offering the best prices from multiple retailers.  It’s a big step forward in our aim to map out the whole mobile market!

So, what does this mean?

Real mobile bills are now treated in exactly the same way as the statistically generated bills we use for our tariff calculator. You can now filter by handset, contract length, and operator as much as you like – the engine will always return a recommendation based on our very latest plans.

Unfortunately the drawback to this is that all our old stored recommendations are no longer available. If you have submitted a recommendation recently you will have to resubmit it. Your new recommendation will be valid forever, and will automatically update as we get new plans. That means that if you bookmark it you can come back at any time to see if there are any new deals that would work better for your usage.

Phew.