Plan Tally: what your phone plan really costs.

The problem

Phone plans are priced to look cheap. A plan with a low price for the first few months isn't really that cheap if it costs much more after, and a 28-day plan isn't a monthly one: it's charged 14 times a year, not 12. A simple table of monthly prices often doesn't show what you'll actually pay over the time you'll actually stay.

Built in about 15 hours

Every one of the first 90 commits falls between 11:05 pm on 14 October and 2:30 pm on 15 October 2026, Melbourne time. In that window, 38 changes were merged and the site went from an empty repository to 115 plans from 26 providers, with a page for each one.

The sums, done properly

The cost engine works in whole cents, so nothing is lost to rounding, and it follows each plan's actual rules:

• 28-day plans are charged 14 times in a year.
• A promotion applies only for the number of renewals it lasts, only before its end date, and only to new customers when the deal says so.
• Plans are compared on the data you'll have after any bonus data runs out.

From there it works out the month-by-month total, the month a cheap start stops paying off against a steadier plan, and the cheapest route if you're happy to switch plans as promotions end.

Every price has a source and a date

A validation script refuses any plan whose source isn't on the provider's own website, or that has no check time. A promotional price has to actually be cheaper than the standard one. Plans more than 30 days past their last check are hidden automatically, so an old price can't stay up indefinitely.

A weekly job is set up to re-read the providers' plan pages and update only the price, data and check time. It never publishes by itself: it re-runs the tests and opens a change for a person to review and merge.

Pages for every question people search

Every plan, provider and network gets its own page, as do head-to-head comparisons and "best for" pages by data size: 172 pages in the sitemap. Comparisons are only between operators, and between each reseller and its own network's operator, so adding providers doesn't explode the page count. A test builds the whole site with 100 made-up resellers to prove it.

The pages work without JavaScript, and the charts are drawn as inline graphics rather than with a charting library.

Fast, with nothing to install

There are no dependencies at all: no framework, no packages, and no build step when it deploys. On 15 October, Google's PageSpeed Insights scored the mobile home page 98 for performance, 97 for accessibility and 100 for best practices.

What's next

Vodafone itself, then the larger resellers on each network. Sign-ups for reminders before a promotion ends are already being collected, and sending them is next.