As some of you have noticed and mentioned on this blog, we’ve made some changes to our Pay As You Go pricing that will be effective as of April.

This year at 3 we want to make sure that we give our PAYG customers a solid all round deal that’s the best value for using the internet on your phone, as well as bringing our tariffs more in-line with the market.

Here’s a quick summary of the changes:

From now:
• Completely free Twitter for all of our customers, without you even needing to top-up

From April 2nd:
• Market leading international rates for 12 countries – prices to be confirmed shortly
• Completely free 0.facebook.com for all our customers, again without needing to top-up

From April 22nd:
• Voicemail – 15p per minute
• Calls to other mobiles and landlines for 3Pay – 25p per minute
• Picture messages – 30p
• International calling bands – increase of 5p per band
• Whilst in the EU making a call within Band1 – 38p
• Answering a call in band 1 – 99p, and in Band 2 – £1.25
• 084/087 numbers – 20p per min/call or both depending on the number

Some of above might feel like we’re taking things away and charging for things that were previously free or cheaper, I won’t argue with you there. But in making our pricing more competitive through these changes, we can offer value in other areas.

As part of that extra value, and to balance the increases, we’ve introduced completely free and unlimited Twitter for all customers. And from early April, 0.facebook.com will also be free, without the need to ever top-up. You also get Skype and WLM without even topping up, which I’m sure many of you already know about.

That’s what many of you are telling us you want.

As well as this, we’re still the only network that gives you free 3-3 minutes, texts and internet with every top-up, not just a combination of one or two of those like some of our competitors.

You’ll get those rewards as soon as you top-up too, you won’t have to wait a month like some networks.

And we’re still the only network where your rewards last for 90 days, even when you’ve run out of credit. The market standard is 30 days.

You can take a look at the below to see how we stack up versus the competition:

If we could, we’d make it all free or best value – but in reality, that’s not always possible. Getting the mix of what the majority of our customers want, and balancing that with what we can do as a business will always be a challenge. Having said that, we think our Pay As You Go package is still strong overall.

We’re doing the best we can to give you competitive and good value pricing on the things you want, in the way that we can best afford to.