A blog about saving money that now sells £4.15-a-month telly
BigBlog started as an argument about cancelling subscriptions you had forgotten about. Seven years later it runs one. This page exists because pretending the contradiction away would be worse than explaining it.
Before it was a television service, it was a blog about not paying for television
In 2019, bigblog.org.uk was one of those sites that existed because writing was cheaper than therapy. The premise was simple: take ordinary British household costs and attack them with spreadsheets, phone calls and stubbornness. Energy tariffs. Mobile contracts. Insurance renewals. The £5.50 sandwich. The subscriptions that renew silently for four years because nobody wanted to sit on hold for forty minutes.
The best-performing series was called Cancelled in Ten Minutes, in which we rang companies and cancelled things on camera — or rather on a screen recording, with timestamps. Gym memberships. Old cloud storage. Two different film services the household had stopped opening. It was petty, satisfying, and it grew faster than anything else on the site.
Then, in 2020, everyone stayed inside and asked a different question: what do we watch tonight, and how little can we pay for it? We answered with the same method we had used on energy bills — write down every option, price it honestly, then test the thing for a month and report what actually happened.
One post from that period, awkwardly titled We Watched Football for a Season Without a TV Package. Here Is Every Bill., refuses to die. It still gets traffic today. It is also the reason this page exists, because everything that follows was the consequence of that article doing far better than it deserved to.
What our own numbers said in 2022
We published reader statistics every January, which in retrospect was the bravest and stupidest editorial decision we ever made.
7 in 10
Visits in 2022 landed on a streaming or broadband page. The money-saving archive, the reason the blog existed, took the rest.
1,900
Emails in eighteen months asking the same thing, phrased slightly differently: "Which service are you actually using?"
£0
Revenue from seven years of subscription-cancelling posts. Affiliate links paid for hosting and nothing else.
The line we eventually crossed
For two years we told readers we would not sell anything, because a blog that sells the thing it reviews is compromised. Then we did the sums: the only way to keep publishing honest testing was to run the service being tested. That is not a noble story. It is just what happened.
Seven years, in order, from the archive
Everything below has a dated original post behind it, including the parts that look naive now.
BigBlog goes live with a phone bill
First post: a 1,400-word account of cutting a mobile contract from £42 to £11 by leaving at the right moment. Two readers. One was the author's mother.
"Cancelled in Ten Minutes" becomes a series
Screen-recorded cancellations with timestamps. The gym episode — 38 minutes of hold music — is still the most-shared post on the site's old archive.
Everyone is indoors, streaming is the subject
Lockdown turns a niche interest into the main one. We start tracking which services buffered during the 8pm peak, with a stopwatch rather than opinions.
The football season experiment
No TV package for a whole season, every match logged, every bill photographed. It becomes the most-read article on the site within a month and stays there for two years.
The year of router testing
Seven routers, three ISPs, 200+ peak-time matches, all of it written up with tables. Readers start sending us their own measurements, which is the moment the blog stops being a monologue.
The favour that became a product
Fifty readers ask to be added to a trial list. We buy a few connections, hand out logins, and take no money. By summer it is 400 people and a support rota on WhatsApp.
Charging for it, badly at first
First paid plan: £9 a month, invoiced by hand from a spreadsheet. Two things came out of that mess and never changed — a free trial with no card, and a published price that includes every fee.
The blog becomes the business
Editorial moves to daylight hours, the affiliate links come down, and BigBlog TV goes live as an actual service with a real server contract and an actual engineer who understood routing.
Sport, not everything
Support tickets say the same thing over and over: it is fine all week, then it dies at 8pm on a Tuesday. Capacity across three European cities follows within six months.
The £4.15 experiment
Two years of committed revenue in exchange for a genuinely low price. £99.60 once, 24 months, no renewal. It is a discount with an expiry date, published next to the standard £13.49 rate, and it is still running.
Same two writers, bigger server bill
40,000+ channels, 80,000 films and series, a full 2026-27 sports calendar and 24 free hours for anyone who wants to check the claims. The money-saving archive still sits on the domain, unedited, arguing with us.
Four habits we refused to drop
Publish the numbers
Then: phone bills and hold times. Now: server cities, honest Mbps requirements and the exact total of the deal.
Say the awkward part
£4.15 is a 24-month promotional rate, not a permanent one. The 3pm blackout is real. Fake 4K sellers exist. All three are printed on the site.
Let readers test it
The blog's original method was "try it for a month and report". The 24-hour cardless trial is the same idea with a shorter clock.
Answer the phone
Seven years of telling people to ring their provider and cancel things means we cannot hide behind a ticket queue now.
Four people, two jobs each
The writer
Started the money blog, still writes every page, still keeps the spreadsheet that began as a household budget in 2019. Responsible for the phrase "publish the numbers", and for the volume of tables on this site.
The engineer
Owns the routing between London, Frankfurt and Amsterdam, watches the graphs on derby weekends, and once rewrote a whole playlist because one viewer in Aberdeen had a bad evening.
The support rota
British hours, WhatsApp, minutes not days. Two of them work from home around school runs, which is why the reply times look suspiciously good before 3pm.
Questions this page tends to provoke
What was BigBlog before it sold IPTV?
A general-interest blog. From 2019 we published money-saving experiments, gadget reviews, cheap weekend itineraries and a long-running series about cancelling subscriptions people had forgotten they owned. Nothing about it was planned to become a television business.
When did the pivot actually happen?
Not in one afternoon. The streaming and broadband posts grew through 2021 and 2022, our inbox filled with "which one do you actually use?", we started selling access in 2023 as a favour to readers, and in 2024 the site became an IPTV service properly. The timeline below has the dates.
Is the original blog content still online?
The archive is intact and unedited, including the posts where we argued that paying for television was a waste of money. We keep them because they explain our current standard: publish the numbers, admit the awkward part, let the reader check.
Who runs it now?
Two writers, one server engineer and a small WhatsApp support rota. No sales team, no call centre, no affiliate network. If you email asking to be sold something, you will be disappointed.
Judge the contradiction for yourself
A blog about not paying for things now sells television. The only fair test is the same one we have always used: take the free 24 hours, then decide.
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