Zevvle going forward

Updates
#1

Hey all,

I hope you’re well, all things considered… :mask:

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately from our side. Below is why, what’s going on and where we’re headed. This is going to piss some of you off — I understand, and I’m sorry in advance.

Some backstory

For the last year our supplier urged us to do data bundles, and I ignored them. “We’re going to make this damn PAYG thing work,” I’d say. Well, we haven’t, and we can’t continue banging on that wall. Along with an incredible customer base, we’re lucky to have a supplier that genuinely wants us to succeed (yes, they make more money if we do well, but when the words match the incentives you know it’s legit).

In other words, we’re going to up-end our business model and join the rest of the industry with data bundles. “Sell outs!” I hear… yep. Existing customers won’t be affected (you can read more below), and if you’ve had enough and would like to leave, you can get your code by texting “PAC” to 65075, or send us a message in-app.

So… just another MVNO?

One of the thoughts that crossed my mind was “Without Zevvle, which network would I use?” It wasn’t obvious…

Between dystopian marketing, overloaded networks that change their pricing 5x more than us and independent operators that don’t walk their talk, I wouldn’t know who to pick. Requiring a law degree to interpret their Ts&Cs doesn’t help, and “the mobile network run by you” is great until it’s actually run by a corporate behemoth who earned €49 billion in 2018. The mobile industry is still far from its potential, and I don’t know who else is trying to push things forward.

I’m obviously super biased, but you get the gist.

So no, we’re not just another MVNO; we seem to be the only ones that give a damn about privacy, have real mobile apps and give you complete access to all your data. We’re certainly not perfect (here, here and a lot hypocrisy I haven’t found), and new developments haven’t been as quick as we aspire to recently. For that, I’m sorry. We’re going to do better.

What’s the plan?

We’ve got a bit of work to do behind the scenes to make this happen (re-configure our billing engine, make some big-ish changes to the mobile app, etc.), so this won’t be live for a few weeks. We’ll work as quickly as we can.

The reason we haven’t asked for feedback is that there’s not much to work through. Our supplier has 5 different bundles we can offer — 1, 3, 10, 30 and 60GB — and we’re going to price them as low as we can. They’ll be easy to switch between and going over your allowance won’t be a sting either. It’s one less thing to understand about Zevvle — everyone already knows what a data allowance is. They’ll be per-SIM for the moment; we’ll look into account-wide plans in the future.

With that released, we’ll bring some much-needed updates to multi-SIM functionality, usage reporting and our API. Let us know if you want us to work on anything else as well.

That and marketing. I’ve been terrible at the marketing side, but that has to change. Maybe we’ll get TikTok? :man_shrugging: Probably not. Maybe.

What about PAYG?

For all our current customers, nothing will change — as always, you’re welcome to stick with the plan you’re on. As for new customers, PAYG won’t be public on our website or in-app, but if anyone asks we can switch them over, like a hidden feature… kind of.

Again, I know this is backwards to what we spoke about last year, and I’m sorry about the back and forth. This is something we have to do for the future of the company — a bit less Zevvle is better than no Zevvle…

Thank you,

:v:

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Zevvle Telegram Group
Undles of bundles
#2

Thanks for the update, Nick.

Really, the selling point for me for Zevvle has been the multi-sim easiness. The people I’ve got on Zevvle sims (all my family apart from me) aren’t power users so as long as the pricing is still competitive I’m not fussed. Keen to see what the account-wide plans look like when you get there :+1:

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#3

Thanks for the update.

Agreed with the point on cross SIM allowances - this would be great.

As you only mention data above, should we assume all new bundles would come with unlimited calls and texts ?

I understand your rationale for this and understand you need to make money. I’m sure you’re all over this but my one hope would be that your product and service can scale appropriately with the increase in user base. I don’t go with zevvle because they are cheapest, I go with them because they offer quality and relative value in terms of product and service. For instance, I was previously with another MVNO (who share their name with a well known candy) and the service and product couldn’t have been more polar opposite.

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#4

Thank you, it will be :slight_smile: Equal to or better than the current pricing.

Both :slight_smile: There’ll technically be 10 different ones; data-only and ones with calls & texts.

We watch that closely! :slight_smile:

Thank you, that means the world to hear! :relaxed: It took me embarrassingly long to click… I believe the network — although seemingly-cheap — is over-congested. In theory data is data, but network quality matters…

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#5

Thanks for the update. Interested to hear what the pricing will end up being, and how it compares to the same data usage on the PAYG model. Also wondering how plan switching and going over the limit will work. If you go over will you be on some PAYG data rate, or will you be automatically switched to the next plan up?

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#6

Thanks for the update Nick.

The main selling point of Zevvle for me has been for my variable usage, I don’t need to worry about being on the right package. I’ve had occasions in the past before Zevvle where it’s been quite expensive to go over the bundle on the last few days of the month. Sometimes I’ve been able to predict the usage ahead, however it’s then been a special offer, so moving down would mean that I loose that special offer for when I next need to move back up a tier, and need to hope there’s a similar special offer.

I don’t see me using the multi-sim just now, however the data sharing across them in the future I could see it being useful as the kids get older. When I had an iPad it would have been useful instead of having a separate sim.

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#7

If you’re able to, can you expand a bit more on how you decided / realised it’s not working?

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#8

Unfortunately, for me, until this functionality is available, the main draw of Zevvle has been lost for me which is a shame.

If the costs of the bundles aren’t at least comparable to giffgaff then I’m going to struggle to persuade the people I’d almost convinced to switch based on their average bills being lower on PAYG.

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#9

We’re going to try temporary add-ons to start with, then making it easy (or even automatic…) to switch between plans month-to-month. Would you prefer to be switched to a different plan instead? Problem is, say you’re on 3 GB and need 2 extra GBs with 3 days left in the month, with prorated data you’d need to switch to the 30 GB to get enough data (10 GB * 3 / 30 days is only 1 GB). It’s just a bit more complicated and more to consider…

Thanks Shaun, we’re going to make plan switching really fluid to not lose too much of that benefit, and we won’t do offers or anything so there’ll be none of the “Do I have the best deal?”.

Talking with people; it’s the main drawback/criticism we hear, that it’s either weird, expensive or they like bundles (or all 3). The comparison isn’t straightforward (actual usage vs allowance), and we’re making it harder than it needs to be.

Understood, thank you for the input Dan. We will do this, but want to get the basics right first. PAYG will still be available to anyone who asks.

:slight_smile:

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#10

Does a user have to select those? What happens if I go over without selecting an add on?

I didn’t realise data would be prorated. In that case switching in the middle of a month doesn’t help much. Well it would work, but as you said more complicated to understand

#11

You can do it manually, and there’ll also be a setting for you to choose what happens automatically — the default will be to disconnect like a bill cap (required by law anyway), but you could set it to use an add-on. For rare cases there will be a low out-of-bundle charge, but we want to avoid that where possible.

Yes, it’s the way our wholesale works. Otherwise we would’ve gone that route, but add-ons will be a better experience.

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#12

Giffgaff has a way to start the next months bundle early thus getting around this issue.

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#13

I would be happy to volunteer to monitor zevvles social media profiles like Twitter etc.
I’ve got a creative mind and I’ve always wanted to be a customer service person :sweat_smile:

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#14

Cool. Sucks but you gave it a solid shot :blush: Hope you and Tim are doing well. :orange_heart:

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#15

Thank you, and you :relaxed:

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#16

How is the backend work progressing? Will we have an update on the actual pricing soon?

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#18

That’s the good part at the moment! A few things came up with the app development over the weekend which has delayed things; was originally aiming for a release this week but that’s unlikely. On the plus side, we removed a bunch of redundant code and made a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements to the app and build process (i.e., submitting it to the Apple/Google app stores).

No reason we can’t talk about it now! With unlimited calls & texts:

GBs £
1 £10
3 £13
10 £15
30 £23
60 £35

The equivalent data-only SIMs will be £5 less.

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#19

Will the data only SIMs/bundles have post as you go minutes same texts, or will the minutes and texts be blocked?

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#20

The latter I’m afraid — we’re putting PAYG in the background for now; the only aspect where you’ll need a balance is for international calls or roaming. We’d like to do account-wide plans in the future to make this even easier!

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#21

image

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