BillMonitor

Obviously the drop in UK VAT from 17.5% to 15% is going to affect the mobile market, but it seems that no-one’s rounded up how that affects the industry yet, so here’s the low-down.

Vodafone, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Three have all passed the cut on to customers, although they’ve chosen to keep their advertised prices on tariffs and calls the same.  When the VAT is applied to your actual bill, it’ll be 15% and your calls will be cheaper than the published rates.  Handsets, however, have had their advertised prices cut, with the exception of Three, who’ve chosen to just apply the cut when they charge you.

In addition, anyone on Pay As You Go will receive between 18p and 25p extra per £10 of top-up.

This begs the question, should price comparison sites report the actual prices with the new VAT rate considered or should they stick to the advertised rates?  At present, BillMonitor continues to reflect the advertised rates on the network websites, but perhaps we’ll change this depending on what our users want to see.

Oh, wow, BillMonitor is public!  It’s been busy here at the Optimor offices but I’m proud to announce that our public beta is now ready for your consumption.

We’ve got plenty of exciting features for you to check out:

• Automatic bill monitoring – we’ll analyse your phone bill and show you exactly how you could save.
• Self assessment – estimate your own usage and we’ll tell you which mobile tariff is best for you.
• Graphs help you to understand exactly how you use your phone.
• Over 48 thousand combinations of tariffs and bundles available.

Of course, if you were one of the lucky ones who saw the alpha, none of that will be new to you. Here’s the new bits that’ll blow you away:

• Select from over 200 handsets and jump straight through to the operator websites to purchase the tariff of your choice.
• Personalised results pages give you the information that matters.
• SIM only plans – more plans for us means better results for you.
• Region support – travel around Europe a lot?  That’s cool, we can handle that.
• Uservoice – an awesome feedback system so you can tell us what you want to see on the site.
• For the tech-heads among you, we are now running our maths in the Amazon Cloud.

So what are you waiting for?  Get stuck in and grab a recommendation from BillMonitor now.  Keep an eye on this blog too, we’ve got plenty more cool stuff coming up.

Three have recently announced that they plan to offer unlimited on-network calls and texts for just £15. Moving away from the cross-network minutes/texts template is pretty interesting, and while a lot of people won’t benefit from this (and, as such, I expect most price comparison sites will overlook it) some people will find that this plan is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.