Two deals, both real, both on this site as I write.
- Community Fibre, 1 Gbps: £0/month for three months, then £25, 24-month contract, free installation.
- YouFibre, 200 Mbps: £20/month, 24-month contract, free installation.
The second one has the lower advertised price. The first one is cheaper over a year — £225 against £240 — and it is five times faster.
That is not a trick or an edge case. It is what happens whenever you compare monthly prices across deals that have different intro periods, different setup fees and different contract lengths. The advertised figure answers a question nobody is really asking.
The three things the headline price hides
Setup fees
On a 24-month contract, a £30 activation fee is £1.25 a month. Nobody notices, and arguably nobody should.
On a one-month rolling contract, that same £30 can exceed the monthly rental. WightFibre’s rolling 100 Mbps tariff is £19.95 a month; if it carried a £30 setup, your first month would cost £49.95 — 150% of the advertised price.
Setup fees therefore matter in inverse proportion to contract length, which is exactly backwards from how prominently they are displayed. They are footnotes on short contracts, where they are decisive, and footnotes on long ones, where they are trivial.
The people most likely to choose a rolling monthly deal are students, people in short lets, people who cannot pass a credit check for a long contract, and people on low incomes who cannot commit two years. A hidden setup fee lands hardest on exactly that group.
Intro offers
“Three months free, then £25” and “£25 a month” are advertised almost identically. Over the first year they differ by £75.
Intro pricing also inverts speed tiers. Because providers usually discount the same number of months across a range rather than the same percentage, a faster package on offer can undercut a slower one that is not. When Community Fibre gives three months free on every tier, the 1 Gbps tariff at £25 after the offer costs £225 in year one — less than a competitor’s 200 Mbps at a flat £20.
If a site only shows you one package per provider, usually the cheapest, this is invisible. You never see that the faster one was better value.
Contract length
This is the subtle one, and it is where most comparison tables quietly mislead.
Rank by total contract cost and short contracts win automatically — not because they are cheaper, but because they end sooner. An 18-month deal at £19 totals £342. A 24-month deal at £19 totals £456. Identical monthly price, identical service; the shorter one looks 25% cheaper because you are comparing 18 months of broadband against 24 months of broadband.
That is not a comparison. It is a units error.
The fix: pick a window and hold it constant
Cost per month is the obvious answer and it is not quite right either, because it discards setup fees and washes out intro offers.
What works is costing every deal over the same fixed window, including everything you actually pay:
> First-year cost = setup fee + 12 months at whatever rates apply during those 12 months.
Everything becomes comparable. A 36-month contract and a rolling monthly deal are both measured over the same twelve months. An intro offer counts for exactly as long as it lasts. A setup fee counts once, in full. Nobody wins for having a shorter term, and nobody loses for having a longer one.
Applied to the two deals at the top:
| Advertised | Setup | Months 1-3 | Months 4-12 | First year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouFibre 200 Mbps | £20/mo | £0 | £60 | £180 | £240 |
| Community Fibre 1 Gbps | £25/mo | £0 | £0 | £225 | £225 |
The slower, cheaper-looking deal costs £15 more.
This is the default ranking on broadband.click, and every row also shows the total over the full contract, because first-year cost has a blind spot of its own — see below.
Where first-year cost is the wrong answer
It is a good default. It is not the only number that matters, and any site telling you otherwise is overselling.
It cannot see past month twelve. A 24-month deal with a cheap first year and an expensive second year looks better than it is. That is why the contract total belongs on the row too.
It flatters long contracts with big intro offers. Six months free on a 24-month deal is genuinely good value, but you are committing to eighteen months at full price to get it. If there is a realistic chance you will move house, a cheaper first year can be an expensive mistake — early termination charges are usually the remaining months in full.
It ignores what you actually get. A gigabit line and a 30 Mbps line are not the same product. Cost comparisons only make sense within the range of speeds that would genuinely work for your household.
It says nothing about mid-contract rises. Most contracts now state a fixed annual increase in pounds and pence. That increase usually lands in month 13 or so — just outside the window.
The four questions worth asking, in order
1. What do I actually need? Filter by speed first, price second. A cheap connection that is too slow is not a saving.
2. How long am I prepared to commit? If there is any chance of moving within the term, price the exit charge before you sign. Sometimes a more expensive rolling deal is the cheaper decision.
3. What does the first year cost, all in? Setup plus twelve months. This is the number that makes deals comparable.
4. What happens after that? The post-promo price, the contract total, and the stated annual increase. Deal three is often better than deal one over 24 months even when it loses over 12.
Why comparison sites do not usually show you this
Partly inertia — monthly price is what providers advertise, so it is what gets tabulated.
Partly because it is more work. Costing a window properly means storing setup fees, promo lengths and post-promo prices for every package, not just a headline number. It is much easier to display what the provider’s feed sends you.
And partly incentives. Sites are typically paid a commission per sale, and the deals that convert best are the ones with the lowest visible number. There is no commercial pressure to point out that the £19 deal costs more than the £25 one.
We rank on first-year cost by default, show the contract total on every row, and let you re-sort by total cost, average monthly cost or speed. The “Lowest…” label always names whichever metric the list is actually sorted by — a superlative that does not say what it is measuring is not information.
Sources
- ofcom.org.uk — Ofcom — Pricing transparency and contract information requirements
- ofcom.org.uk — Ofcom — rules requiring in-contract price rises to be stated in pounds and pence
- asa.org.uk — Advertising Standards Authority — CAP Code guidance on price claims and introductory offers