Most unlikely to be more than once a year.
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This is a bit of a shame if this is where things are headed. Iām happy to be grandfathered in but unfortunately this means I canāt no longer recommend Zevvle as opposed to the other providers - the entire selling point of āpay for what you use, no BSā is now gone - I we now have to talk bundles & pre-determined amounts of data that you have to micromanage so you donāt have to run out you might as well stick to an established carrier which will give you more GBs for your buck. Sure, the appeal of supporting a legitimate small business is still in my mind but why should it matter now that the business has decided to radically pivot and no longer fit its initial idea of how mobile networking should be done?
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One interesting idea could be to have the idea of a flexible bundle. You give people the option to change their bundle mid month for no penalty (I normally use 2GB but this month ends up more for some reason). Then youāre getting closer to the flexibility of PAYG.
Maybe the name bundle shouldnāt even be used 
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Iām not sure I quite get the point of bundles, if the problem is genuinely that you lose money on low-usage users then just enforce a minimum spend.
Iām one of these low-usage users (I use about 20MB per day) and am happy to pay more (Iāve assumed that Iām paying Ā£5/month due to the top-up, even if it means my balance is creeping up.
Perhaps the minimum spend should be constituted as a bundle (Ā£5/month for 2.5GB, same cost as now. Obviously I donāt actually know where your break-even per customer is) but I donāt see the need for additional bundles, just charge Ā£2/GB once you exceed the single bundle.
I donāt understand the concept of āPAYG stigmaā, people Iāve spoken to are always very pro-PAYG both as a concept and for mobile phones and I feel thereās instead a lot of stigma around pay-monthly contracts.
If I had to give some advice to the business it would be to focus on your USPs and keep everything else as simple/straight-forward as possible. That also means largely ignoring the demands of existing customers (myself included). It may well turn out that weāre simply not a good fit for what the eventual product turns out to be.
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What would it be like to simply pass on this pricing structure to us? (With your markup of course.)
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One interesting idea could be to have the idea of a flexible bundle. You give people the option to change their bundle mid month for no penalty (I normally use 2GB but this month ends up more for some reason). Then youāre getting closer to the flexibility of PAYG.
The problem is that the whole point of this move is that Zevvle wants to make up for the losses of the low-volume users by cashing in on people paying for bundles but not using them up fully (actually kudos to Nick for being up-front about it in his posts). However for this system to work it needs people to have some data that would expire; if theyāre able to adjust their bundle too easily and not end up with leftover data at the end of the month weāre back at square one and Zevvle is not making money. The problem of having to micromanage the thing still remains as well.
What would it be like to simply pass on this pricing structure to us? (With your markup of course.)
I was suggesting something equivalent, ie volume-based discounts (ideally per-account, but per-SIM works too if the enabler doesnāt want to play ball). So the first few GB would be more expensive to make up for the overheads of keeping the SIM alive, and after that (>=10GB?) the price drops off to the raw price to make it bearable for the high-volume users.
That seems straightforward, sustainable (Zevvle is no longer losing money on low-volume users), requires no management from the userās part, doesnāt have the risk nor anxiety of ārunning outā and doesnāt make the user feel theyāre āwastingā data if they donāt use up their full bundle allowance before it expires.
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Weād make running out of data a non-issue, and likely keep our current Ā£2/GB for anything over your allowance. Weāve found that people āmicromanageā in a different way by watching everything they useā¦
Using our current Ā£2/GB for additional data would hopefully take care of thatā¦ we donāt want to sting anyone with the typical Ā£100/GB. 
100%; Iāll have a think!
This is a better way to put it; the only change weād make is additional bundles for higher usage (we can do a lot better than 25 GB for Ā£50). The alternative being tiered data rates, which could possibly work, but makes it more complicated.
Stigma may have been the wrong word; I think it comes down to predictability & mental overhead. Those 2 things weāve heard a lot ā not knowing what a month will cost, and having to worry about the price of calls, running out of credit, etc. If thatās not your experience Iād love to know!
Simplicity is where this all stems from, but focusing on the multi-SIM aspect instead of PAYG; āHow can we make the experience for using multiple SIM cards excellent?ā
Currently itās not great, and we thought āX SIMs with Y GB for Ā£Zā would be the simplest way forward, instead of divvying it up with data, Ā£2 for extra SIMs and voice/sms bundles.
Wellā¦ we do some gymnastics on the backend, as weāve got both PAYG ārackā rates & bundled data (i.e., pre-buy some GBs for a SIM at a fixed cost), and we switch between them depending on usage patterns, so 2 SIMs both using 3 GB may cost different amounts to us.
If we created bundles ourselves this would be true, but theyāre available in our wholesale pricing. It makes no difference to us if you were to use 5% or 100% of the data in a bundle, so in the interest of not being a shitty network weād give you the best rate possible and automatically switch you to a lower plan.
As Iāve said above, this is about simplicity & price predictability, not stinging anyone whoās using less than they pay for or obscene out-of-bundle charges.
The feedback is really helpful, and weāre incredibly grateful for it. Some of the comments on the last thread sparked some internal changes which lead to the Ā£2/GB in the first place.
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I found the just running out of data on my previous pay monthly contract to be much more difficult, so ended up getting a way larger bundle than I needed which covered my peaks, but didnāt use around half of it most of the time.
The initial Zevvle pricing was quite high, thus more expensive, however now Iām paying less than I did before most months, and likely will do over the year. With the monthly top-up itās like a pay monthly plan. Iāve topped up a bit extra so that it covers some of the peaks and I donāt run out often. Thereās also the auto top-up to reduce the chance of running out of credit.
Iām thinking that Iād prefer the auto capping method like TfL contactless/Oyster or Lothian Buses travel transactions to having to plan in advance how much data Iām going to use. The low out of bundle pricing would help. You could effectively have no or a tiny bundle, but then use mostly out of bundle pricing if your usage is low.
The downside of this specific example is that I canāt use some of that bundle for calls or texts. A small bundle that includes calls, texts, and data for around or less than Ā£5 could work out well for some people. Howeverā¦
Iām thinking depending on pricing a bundle for base monthly usage, and then the peaks could be covered by the low out of bundle costs. The unlimited calls and texts would then be a significant bonus in not having to worry about those costs if I happen to end up on a few calls for a few hours, though thatās rare. The current unlimited bundle is too expensive as I donāt do enough calls or texts to make it worthwhile on a regular basis.
Iād only use mobile data outside the EU a few times per decade. Much less often now due to job, previously more often due to the jobs I had.
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