Vodafone Smartstep Pay As You Go

Vodafone Smartstep is one of two Pay as You Go price plans available to Vodafone users.

The main costs of interest are:

Calls to land-line/other Vodafone - 30p per min for the first 3 mins each day; 5p per min after that.

Calls to other mobile networks - 35p per min

Text messages (SMS) - 12p for the first 3 texts each day; 9p after that.

This was the price plan that I was on initially, and it seems very good if you make a lot, or long phone calls, and/or if you send a lot of text messages.

HOWEVER, I then discovered text packs. These are add-ons that you can but for Pay as You Go phones. A £5 text pack gets you 4 free texts per day. This works out at about 17p a day - if you only send 2 texts you are making a saving already.
If you are text message mad, then you can get a £10 pack which gets you 10 free texts a day.

Because I now use text packs, I have moved onto the Smart Plus tariff, which has low off-peak call rates.

So I would recommend Smartstep to someone who uses their phone a lot to make calls during the day, but not enough for a contract phone to be worthwhile. But if you send a lot of text messages, and only make a few or short calls each day, I would recommend the SmartPlus plan with a text pack added on.