Advice on mobile phone package for DS first phone please!

[Fillybuster]

Ds starts year 7 in September and we have bought him a (cheap!) smartphone for his birthday next week. Most of his friends already have phones, and the secondary school he will be attending has told us that almost all the boys have phones.

I thought pay as you go might be the easiest way to start, but I have no idea of the options...can anyone help please?

Dh and I both have work-funded mobile phones so don't can't link him to our packages or anything like that, and I don't want to take out a contract for the time being, especially as I've bought a handset.

All advice hugely appreciated. Thank you!

Giffgaff are by far the best.

Thanks - was just looking at their site now. Ideally I'd like to find a payg option that cuts off when it runs out of credit instead of racking up huge charges on the "standard" tariff.....I have no idea how much ds will actually use (probably not very much at all when not on wifi at home) but really don't fancy finding out the hard way!

Yes giffgaff - both my teens have been on giffgaff for several years with no problem. Choose the goody bag and choose how much top up he can have in a month. One of mine never exceeds her package. The other does occasionally - using data while she's travelling - and I allow her £10 top up and no more.

Just buy a giff gaff goody bag every month there are no extra charges it will just cut off apart from allowing incoming calls.

And incoming texts.

If you would consider a contract, Tesco Mobile are good.

You can set a safety buffer which means after you have maxed out ur allowance and buffer you can't rack up any further costs.

Me and my DS who is 13 have Tesco Mobile. £11 p/m and for that we get 1000mins, 5000 texts and 1GB of data.

They piggy back the O2 signal and I advertising never had any issue with reception in the 4yrs I've been with them

There are some good (cheap!) SIM only contracts if you'd consider that? That's what we did for dd, who recently got her first phone.

Do a search on cheap sim only deals - there are several comparison companies that do good summaries and some have exclusive deals.

I'm looking for the same for my ds who also starts y7 in September. I originally got him a payg sim from O2 which they said would last and I could top up as necessary but they gave me the wrong one so the minutes etc expire after a month and the minimum they will let you top up is £10 rather than the £5 a month I was told.

So I'm now looking again. Hence the comparison sites!

There seem to be several offers for about a fiver a month that have what should be more than enough mins and texts and data. They also highlight the deals where you can fix a cap. And there are some companies that are online only - some who knows who they are ! But others are subsidiaries of big companies like O2 or Carphone Warehouse so worth considering.

I also wasn't that keen on a contract but given you get more for your money if you do and realistically I'm not going to be changing it a lot, I think I'm going to go for one of the £4 or £5 a month ones for a year to see how it goes.

I'm also going to try to get one of the freedom pop (something like that anyhow!) sims to put in a little £5 Nokia phone I have as a back up. Apparently you pay for the sim and set up fee (£5? £10?) and you get something like 200 mins, 100 texts and 200mb data free each month. And the number isn't supposed to run out.

Figure it should be a good back up (long battery life!) - either if a phone gets lost or I want to confiscate smartphone but still want contact, or if battery runs out and so on.

I have Giffgaff for my son. He is on the £7.50 package which is recurring every month but can be cancelled at any time. You get a monthly usage email from them and the most recent one showed that he was using much less than the allowance so they actually suggest going down to £5 which can be done literally in a few clicks from the email. I like the transparancy in that if you are using a package that you do not need then they actually tell you and let you change, unlike the other companies.

Thanks all....we went with gif gaff and I'm v impressed so far :)