giffgaff gives the goss (on pricing)

giffgaff, the people-powered network to whom we gave (what we thought was) a fair preview of, has released a teensy bit of news about their pricing. Well, that’s not strictly true, but we’ll come back to that part shortly….

giffgaff love you
giffgaff loves you

The ‘news’, coming in the form of a blog post from marketing chief, Kylie (no – not that one), explains that based on the feedback they’ve received so far, they’re now not really sure what kind of tariffs to launch with. While this may seem odd and somewhat indecisive on the part of the not-yet-launched MVNO, giffgaff have opened the question out to the blog readers:

“…we need your help. How do you think we should charge? Per minute / per text? Or bundles? Or something else?”

This is pretty much unheard of in the carrier space and we can only applaud giffgaff for sticking to their ‘people-powered’ principles.

While this isn’t actually news about the pricing (it’s more along the lines of ‘um.. we don’t know yet’) what the post does go on to say is that data on giffgaff will be totally and utterly free*.

Yes, that’s right… FREE*.

But not the kind of free* that you’re used to, not the kind of free* that comes along with a ‘fair use policy’, no, no. This is free* until we build the billing system!

“When we launch, data will be free. Honestly, that’s because we won’t have had time to build the bit of our backend system to charge for it, and yet we don’t want to launch without data – so we thought we’d just let you have it.

All we ask is that you don’t take the mickey, and that you do give something back by topping up, making calls, answering some questions, doing some marketing etc.”

That’s not too bad is it? Free data for the period of time it takes us to build the billing system. That’s certainly honest guys. Good work.

So the news from giffgaff:

We (still) don’t know our tariffs and data will be free until we know how to charge for it.

Honesty is the best policy but – with respect – this is still looking vague guys. Admittedly we haven’t come to visit yet, (we really are hideously busy day job wise), but it is on our to do list.

PS. Give us something a little more convincing and we might be convinced 😉

Hat tip to contributor Ricky Chotai for spotting this one.